Chinese Satellite Crashes Into House

toggleflipflop writes "In China, a returning satellite crashed into a house. No one was hurt. More details in this article. Apparently inhabited by an eternal optimist: 'The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year,' the tenant of the wrecked apartment was quoted as saying by the newspaper. According to the People's Daily's article on the subject nothing seems to have gone wrong."

Comments

First Image

[Anonymous Coward]

Here's a picture.

Re:First Image

[Dachannien]

Good point. Like the pictures of abused prisoners in Iraq. They've been around the rest of the world for a year before they finally surfaced in the US. Compared to that, a two day cover up in china isn't scary.

Unless you're talking about the abuses perpetrated by Saddam Hussein at Abu Ghraib before the US occupation, you're manufacturing facts.

The prison abuse scandal broke in late April 2004 when CBS 60 Minutes II aired several photos showing abuse against US-held prisoners at Abu Ghraib. One year before that, April 2003, US forces were still in the process of securing the bulk of Iraq from whatever parts of the Baathist regime were still fighting at the time. Abu Ghraib and the other prison camps were not fully in place until late 2003, and the reports of prisoner abuse spanned the period from October to December 2003.

Amnesty International did request that an independent investigation be put in place as early as June 2003. They objected to the general conditions of the prison camps, but did not make accusations of violent torture at that time. However, even Cooperative Research notes that photos and other evidence of the abuses at Abu Ghraib were not leaked to the military until January 2004 and to the media in April 2004.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abu_Ghraib_prisoner_a buse

There is also no reason to believe that CBS would wait for months to break this story, as just a few months later they hastily broke another anti-Administration story that turned out to be false.

Misleading summary (surprise surprise)

[psoriac]

In case anyone else interpreted the summary as saying that nothing went wrong with the deorbiting of the satellite, I'd like to point out that the second article only says that nothing went wrong during the mission. It makes no mention of the crash.

Regardless, China probably figures that deorbiting satellites into sparsely populated areas is perfectly safe because really, if it takes out a family or two, well, there's more where they came from. (Note to angry reactionists: I'm Chinese.)

Re:Misleading summary (surprise surprise)

[Detritus]

On 1996-02-15, a failed launch dropped a Long March 3B rocket on villages surrounding the Xichang space center. Unofficial reports put the damage and death toll much higher than figures (6 dead, 57 injured) reported by government news agencies. The concept of range safety seems to have been foreign to the Chinese space agency.

Re:it could get worse...

[Naito]

you mean this?

http://mm.iit.uni-miskolc.hu/Data/Winx/stories/a cc id23.html

Re:it could get worse...

[IWK]

...who ordered the whore?...

Learn more in JSR's space report

[Lord Satri]

This page is one place to learn more. It's Jonathan's Space Report, a reference monthly newsletter from a guy working at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

It tells us FSW 20 - The FSW recoverable satellite launched by China on Sep 27 returned to Earth at 0248 UTC on Oct 15, falling through the roof of a house in the village of Penglai, Sichuan province

Re:No thanks.

[jelle]

Not so much 'good luck', but in the spirit of karma, yin/yang, or for engineers 'laws of constant misery', getting hit like that tips the scale such toward the bad-luck extreme that after that you are due a lot of luck to get back to 'normal'.

Re:The roof is on fire!

[jrockway]

This is slashdot. Saying "fuck" is okay here.