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by olympus 2996 days ago
As signatories of the Outer Space Treaty they should give a heads up to the international community, and are liable for any damage that's caused by this event even if they provide warning (but could probably get out of it with enough political double talk).

What's interesting to me is that China haven't officially admitted to losing control of the station, they have only admitting to lost telemetry- so we must rely on external sensors to track it. I suspect (but don't have any real information on why) that they are doing this to avoid some sort of admission of guilt in the event that it ends up hitting a populated area. I'm not entirely sure but admitting you lost control of an orbiting school bus might be seen similarly to a kid that accidentally breaks your window with a baseball- it wasn't intentional, but that kid is still paying for the window. If your window gets hit by something, but the kid never admits that it was his ball ("gee mister, I lost my ball yesterday but I'm pretty sure it didn't go in your backyard"), then maybe he can get away without paying for it.
1 comments
Symbiote 2996 days ago
China notified the UN last year, and has kept them updated as required.

Here's one such notification: http://www.unoosa.org/oosa/en/oosadoc/data/documents/2017/aa...

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olympus 2996 days ago
Right, but what they've said is "we've lost TM and it's going to deorbit sometime in the future. We'll watch it and keep you posted." Which is all well and good until you realize what they haven't said, and they've had more than a year to say it:

What they haven't said is "the reason it's going to deorbit at an unspecified time instead of an exact time is because we've lost control so we can't do a controlled reentry burn to have it splash harmlessly in the Pacific. So if it puts a few redhot hunks of ceramic through an apartment building there's nothing we can do. Sorry."

Everyone knows they've lost control, and it's not the first time a country has lost control of a satellite. But maybe they get some legal benefit out of not admitting the loss of control. Because otherwise they should confess, it's not like this is the first time a country has lost control of a satellite.

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