Chinese Space Lab May Fall to Earth This Month

So the space lab is a nuclear bomb that goes off above France that acts as an EMP and takes out all communication. China has subs outside of France and announces WW3 by sending out messages that say China #1. Meanwhile America is too busy debating if we should help France cause they have white privilege. Then Russia sends nukes cause Putin doesn't fuck around. Then we have nukes flying everywhere.

 
rgMekanic said:
Well, seeing as we can put damn near anything we want into space with an incredible degree of accuracy, as well as precisely hit a satellite moving at 18,000 MPH with a missle launched nearly 250 miles away, I think a little shorter than nearly a month window should be attainable.
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Atmospheric drag is very unpredictable in low Earth orbit. The upper atmosphere expands and contracts substantially daily with solar activity. You can predict where something should be a few days out but beyond that it's a crapshoot.

NASA originally thought Skylab would stay in orbit well into the 1980s for use by the Shuttle. It burned up in 1979.
 
rgMekanic said:
Well, seeing as we can put damn near anything we want into space with an incredible degree of accuracy, as well as precisely hit a satellite moving at 18,000 MPH with a missle launched nearly 250 miles away, I think a little shorter than nearly a month window should be attainable.
Click to expand...
You get accuracy by correcting for errors now and then along the way.
With no corrections you don't get that accuracy.

EODetroit said:
If you don't know when, you don't know where. So to say Spain / France is bullshit, unless they know when to better than a day's precision.
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It's possible to say where if the orbit is oval with orbit time and periapsis (lowest point of the orbit) such that any re-entry within the time frame will end up in France or Spain.
Knowing exactly which lap the retardation will be sufficient to de-orbit is difficult.

CaptNumbNutz said:
I'm betting the other part of the problem is this object is going fast enough and losing altitude at a slow enough rate that there's a chance it may skip along the atmosphere...
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Bouncing off the atmosphere is possible with proper aerodynamics. (Nazi Germany was developing a flying wing type suborbital bomber to use this effect.)

A space station isn't that aerodynamic.

(Gotta love Kerbal Space Program!)
 
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