Chinese space station mostly burns up as it re-enters atmosphere

BEIJING – China’s defunct Tiangong-1 space station was mostly burned up as it re-entered Earth’s atmosphere above the South Pacific, the country’s space agency said Monday.

The China Manned Space Engineering Office said it re-entered the atmosphere at around 8:15 a.m. Beijing time, or 5:15 p.m. PDT.

At 12 meters long and weighing 8.5 tons, Tiangong-1 was not as large as the International Space Station but larger than the other space debris that normally orbits Earth, according to the European Space Agency.

There had been no contact with Tiangong-1, which translates as “Heavenly Palace,” since 2016.

ESA expert Holger Krag said earlier he expected roughly 1.5 to 3.5 tons of the space station to survive re-entry into the atmosphere. Only parts made of titanium and stainless steel would withstand the heat, Krag said.

According to Krag, the danger to humans was small, with the likelihood of being hit by space debris lower than “being hit by lightning twice in the same year.”

China launched Tiangong-1 in September 2011. The space station completed six docking maneuvers with Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft, and the first two Chinese taikonauts had also been on board.

According to the ESA, a “controlled re-entry” was originally planned for the space station at the end of its operational life.

This maneuver would have caused it to largely burn up over an uninhabited area in the South Pacific, with the remaining pieces falling into the ocean, far from inhabited areas.

But the space station stopped working in March 2016, and ground teams apparently lost contact and were unable to remotely fire the engines as would have been necessary for controlled re-entry, the ESA said.