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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."
China's spy satellites still use film. They deorbit them in order to retrieve the images.
And how that is different from the american media reporting what the WhiteHouse tells them?
they probably just reported what the government said, before finding out that something else had happened
According to sources mentioned above, the capsule is a re-entry vehicle and it stayed completely intact. Actually it came down via parachute.
That satellite from which this capsule was dropped off has been up there for only last 18 days. My guess is that it hasn't got anything to do with science and very much with military intelligence.
For good part of the cold war both US and USSR used capsules to relay back intel images as radio and camera technology was not yet enough mature to do the job right. The chinese might still be (atleast partially) using robust methods which are proven to work - same with their manned missions.
People managing their space program are definately calculating re-entry trajectories carefully so they know atleast approximately where the retrieval point is. No way they would drop a capsule by accident to populated areas.
I'd say it was a hastened retrieval of latest intelligence, someone needed those images very badly and was ready to take the risk.
Just my two cents.