Sunday, March 25, 2018

What happens if the Tiangong 1 lands in your back lot.

China's defunct Tiangong-1 space station is careening through low-Earth orbit right now, and probably catching it's first wisps of upper atmosphere.  The derelict Red Chinese pile of space junk is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere for real sometime between March 30 and April 2. 



Coming down to a neighborhood near you!


Most of the 9-ton space station will probably burn to bits in the atmosphere — but a few thousand chunks of hot, mangled debris are still likely to survive the trip and land on our planet's surface.

What should you do if a smoking bit of it rockets out of the sky and into your yard?  

Stay the heck away, that's what. Don't pick it up, don't poke it with a stick, keep the dog from trying to bury it.

"There are two reasons why you should not approach and touch a piece of space debris," Robert Z. Pearlman, a space historian and editor of collectSPACE.com, told Live Science. "The first is it is a health risk."  There's noxious chemicals that could have survived the fall, and maybe radioactivity at dangerous levels.

Plus, there might be a sharp edge or two - horrors!

Second, and this really is a reason for the trembling leafs out there to worry, it will still be the legal property of the Communist Chinese government.  They might want it back.

Well, if you drop a glob of molten space station in my yard, it is mine now.  Come and get me, you illegitimate commie bastards!   Just like those sand spits in the South China Sea, I'm occupying your hunk of space debris, and declaring it my sovereign property. Stay twelve miles away!   Hey, you Mao boys set the precedent, don't be complaining when what you started comes back and bites you in the hind end! 

6 comments:

  1. Maybe it will land on the Detroit City Hall while the city council is in session!!!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Fall on Detoilet?

      I'd prefer Washington D.C. while Trump's in Florida and then the swamp will be drained or at least minus a few reptiles.

      Delete
  2. Hit it with a 25% tariff . . .

    ReplyDelete
  3. Back in 1979, I was one of a bunch of people looking for pieces of Skylab, which fell in Western Australia. Some big chunks landed, and it was pretty exciting!

    The U.S. Gov't didn't insist that the debris still belonged to the USA, though.

    https://www.space.com/21122-skylab-space-station-remains-museum.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. Remembering a line from "It Fell Out of the Sky" by Creedence Clearwater Revival:

    "Jody said 'It's mine but you can have it for seventeen million.'"

    ReplyDelete