China’s ‘Heavenly Palace’ Nears Earthly End

China’s first space station, Tiangong 1, will fall to Earth this weekend, nearly five years after ground crew lost contact with the currently unmanned 8.5-ton spacecraft.

Tiangong 1, which means “Heavenly Palace 1,” is expected to re-enter the atmosphere between Saturday and Monday China time, China’s Manned Space Engineering Office announced Thursday.

As of Thursday, the nonfunctioning spacecraft was orbiting the Earth at an average altitude of 196.4 kilometers (122 miles).

Most of the spacecraft will burn up or disintegrate during its re-entry, and “the probability of damage to aviation activities and human life and facilities on Earth is extremely low,” China said in a document it submitted in May to the United Nations’ Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space.

“There is no need for people to worry about its re-entry into the atmosphere. It won’t crash to the Earth fiercely, as in sci-fi movie scenarios, but will look more like a shower of meteors,” the space engineering office said recently, according to state publication Xinhua.

The remains of Tiangong 1 are expected to hit the surface of the Earth between the latitudes of 43 degrees north and 43 degrees south, although it is impossible to predict a precise landing location, according to the European Space Agency. The expected crash site could be anywhere north of Wellington, New Zealand, and south of Boston, Massachusetts.

China launched Tiangong 1, unmanned, in September 2011. The orbiting laboratory has been at the center of many milestones for the country’s space program.

In November 2011, the unmanned spaceship Shenzhou 8 completed China’s first-ever successful space rendezvous and docking mission with Tiangong 1. Then, in June 2012, Shenzhou 9 accomplished the same feat, this time with a crew of three astronauts — including China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang — on board.

Tiangong 1 was last manned in June 2013, during a 15-day mission by three astronauts who lived on board the station in China’s longest-ever manned foray into space at the time. At the end of the mission, the crew put the space station into “sleep mode,” leaving it to continue passively collecting data before re-entering the atmosphere some time in 2013, around the end of its expected life span.

However, Tiangong 1 stayed in orbit for years after it was last manned. In March 2016, China announced that the spacecraft had ceased functioning, and that its data service had been terminated — essentially, personnel on Earth were no longer able to communicate with it.

By the time it went offline, the Tiangong 1 had “comprehensively fulfilled its historical mission,” Wu Ping, deputy director of China’s Manned Space Agency, said in 2016. In late 2016, successor space station Tiangong 2 was launched. It is still in orbit.

Contact reporter Teng Jing Xuan (jingxuanteng@caixin.com)