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Names for the station will be taken until 25 July and a selection will be made by the end of September, China Daily reports. "It would be a tragedy, if, after all of his time, and all of this effort, we were to abandon low Earth orbit and cede that territory.". [82] It was the largest spacecraft to re-enter the atmosphere since Fobos-Grunt in January 2012. Our Chinese readers can pop in their ideas by email to kongjianzhan@vip.qq.com, or at the Manned Space Engineering Office website. [21][22][23] The crewed missions to Tiangong-1 were notable for including China's first female astronauts, Liu Yang and Wang Yaping. The station is named Tiangong, meaning Heavenly Palace, and in June Chinese state media announced it was partnering with 23 entities from 17 countries to carry out scientific experiments on board. [70] The IADC's final prediction before re-entry was that Tiangong-1 would re-enter at around 01:00 UTC on 2 April 2018, plus or minus 2 hours, falling somewhere on Earth between 42.8° North and 42.8° South latitudes,[75][76] with the most likely re-entry sites being at the north and south extremes of that range.
[58] In August 2012, Shenzhou 9's crew travelled to Hong Kong to discuss their mission with university students. Xinhua later stated that Tiangong-1 would be launched in late 2010, and declared that the renovation of ground equipment was in progress. [37] However, following the failed launch of a Long March 2C rocket in August 2011, the launch was postponed. [56] The first docking was entirely computer-controlled, without input from the three astronauts;[19] a second, crew-guided docking was successfully conducted on 24 June 2012 at 12:42 Beijing time. [4][5][14][15], The China National Space Administration (CNSA) designed Tiangong-1 as an 8,500 kilograms (18,700 lb) "space-laboratory module", capable of supporting the docking of crewed and autonomous spacecraft. [70], Independently, the non-profit Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital and Re-entry Debris Studies (CORDS) predicted that Tiangong-1 would most likely re-enter the atmosphere around 00:30 UTC on 2 April 2018, plus or minus 1.7 hours. [27] A couple of months later, amateur satellite trackers watching Tiangong-1 found that China's space agency had lost control of the station. In 2008, the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO) released a brief description of Tiangong-1, along with its larger successor modules, Tiangong-2 and Tiangong-3. [33], Tiangong-1 had a pressurised habitable volume of approximately 15 cubic metres (530 cu ft), and used passive APAS-type docking connectors. Tiangong-1 (Chinese: 天宫一号; pinyin: Tiāngōng yīhào; lit. To that end, NASA has requested $150 million for the 2021 fiscal year to help develop the commercialization of low Earth orbit, defined as 2,000 km (1,200 miles) or less from the planet's surface. Testing was also conducted on the Long March 2F carrier rocket on which Tiangong-1 would be launched.