First they loose a pandemic on us, and now the Chinese may be about to drop a used rocket on us.
2 thoughts on “Look Out Below”
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First they loose a pandemic on us, and now the Chinese may be about to drop a used rocket on us.
Comments are closed.
We’ll get our chance with the ISS…
It won’t be random entry with ISS. The last I heard from the working group at JSC, they are planning to get all but two Russians off the station to prep it for entry. They’ll use Progress modules to lower the perigee to about 110 km, with the station in a low drag orientation. During the next half orbit, they’ll bail in a Soyuz. The Progress modules will then fire the final entry burn, and probably orient the station for higher drag.
It’s a pretty well established rule of thumb that about 40% of the mass of any decayed spacecraft makes it to the ground intact. That means 400,000 pounds of ISS will hit somewhere. They are shooting for the Pacific broad ocean area, but the debris track is going to be about 11,000 km long. So a miss will be pretty consequential.
Around 16,000 pounds of LM-5B will make it to the ground. We should just hope for the best.