This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something. It's YOUR space agency. Get involved. Take it back. Make it work - for YOU.
China

Tiangong-1 Has Re-entered

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
April 1, 2018
Filed under ,

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

6 responses to “Tiangong-1 Has Re-entered”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
    0
    0

    In the future when the BFR is flying it will probably make economic sense to recover payloads like this.

    • fcrary says:
      0
      0

      I don’t see the economic value. Tiangong was a engineering test along the path to a more advanced space station. I can see some scientific and technical value in recovering and inspecting it, had that been possible, but not much economic value (other than selling it off as a museum piece.) It isn’t the sort of thing you’d want to recover, repair and re-fly. That might be a sensible thing for some future station (or station module), but so might repair and refurbishing on orbit.

    • Shaw_Bob says:
      0
      0

      No, recovering a large, tumbling, defunct spacecraft containing numerous gas bottles, rocket fuel and batteries will always be at the edge of possible. Not to mention the potential for razor-sharp edges on solar panels etc! Going near such a dangerous object with your nice new BFS isn’t going to happen.

      • Steve Pemberton says:
        0
        0

        Practically speaking it’s doable but only if the satellite was designed for recovery, and even then only really practical if it was designed for recovery by a particular existing spacecraft. Not counting captured free-flyers, probably our only real commercial example of this that I can recall was Westar 6 and Palapa B-2, which were both launched by Shuttle. Both wound up in improper orbits due to issues with their kick motors, and both were captured nine months later by another Shuttle and brought back to Earth. Both satellites were refurbished and flown again (but not on Shuttle). Of course all of this was pre-Challenger, but that doesn’t mean it couldn’t be done on future vehicles like BFS.

        However even though reusability is now starting to be seen as a requirement, or at least a highly desirable goal, the economics seems different with a satellite than with a booster or a space vehicle. The latter are designed for repeated, relatively short term flights by nearly identical copies. Therefore being able to recover and reuse a booster or space vehicle has an economic incentive since you don’t have to build as many copies. Whereas a satellite (or space station) is intended for long term missions of a decade or more, at the end of which you probably don’t want it back, at least not for the purpose of reflying it, since by then it will likely be worn out and also out of date.

        However it could make sense in a deployment problem situation, as in the case of Westar 6 and Palapa B-2, where your shiny new satellite or station module winds up in the wrong orbit, or has a failure of a component that renders it useless. In that case it would be nice to get it back. But that’s more of an insurance type of situation. I don’t mean just monetarily, but also insurance against the time needed to build a replacement. Maybe for some satellites, space stations, or even pieces of a space station it might make economic sense to make them recoverable by a spacecraft with that type of capability, like the Shuttle had, and which in theory BFS could also, at perhaps even higher orbits than Shuttle could reach. Although that would mean modifying BFS Cargo for these types of missions, with the satellite recovery performed remotely from the ground. Either that or build a fourth version of BFS, a manned satellite recovery version. I don’t see that happening, too much money for something with unpredictable usage. I’m not sure it would even be worth Musk’s while to build recovery capability into BFS Cargo, when it would only be needed in the occasional off-nominal satellite deployment situations.

  2. billinpasadena says:
    0
    0

    Pretty amazing that the Washington Post called the reentry “successful,” as if the Chinese had planned it that way.

  3. Steve Pemberton says:
    0
    0

    JFSCC is located at Vandenberg so it’s natural that they would use their local time in a press release. But yeah you would think that whoever wrote the press release would have remembered that we’re in daylight savings time since it’s already been three weeks.