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

[I_Love_Pocky!]

As opposed to the corporate-run media in the US? You should never trust any media outlet completely.

Re:First Image

[Anonymous Coward]

Notice that it took that website 2 days after the "landing" to acknowledge that the thing hit a house. This is the news from 2 days ago from that same site:

Beijing, Oct. 15 (Xinhuanet) -- China has successfully retrieved its 20th recoverable satellite for scientific and technological experiments. The satellite's information capsule returned to earth Friday.

Link here.

Re:First Image

[Anonymous Coward]

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

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.

Nothing wrong?

[octal666]

Are they meaning the house-crashing was on schedule?

Re:Nothing wrong?

[gl4ss]

no, it's just chinaspeak for "our lives are ruined and the party won't pay us a dime".

next year

[morcheeba]

Boy, is that guy going to be disappointed next year when a satellite doesn't crash into his house. Bad luck all year!

No thanks.

[wankledot]

Someone once told me that being shit on by a bird was good luck to the Italians... I guess this is like that to the nth degree

Personally, I'd rather have bad luck and no bird shit on my head (or satellites in my house)

Re:No thanks.

[Zardus]

I don't particularly mind satellites, as long as they come in through the front door, whipe their feet on the welcome mat, and politely drink their tea. Its the kind that crash through your roof or window that I can't stand. They're just plain rude.

Re:No thanks.

[JasontheMason]

Personally, I'd rather have bad luck and no bird shit on my head (or satellites in my house)

So, what if the bad luck was something like, um, a satellite falling through your roof?

JtM

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:No thanks.

[glk572]

The real question is wether you would rather be shat on by a bird or have a satellite fall through your roof; I would prefer the satellite, It would be worth it just for the story, especially if you rent.

So..

[Anonymous Coward]

Do they get to keep the satellite ??

Finders Keepers..
Loosers Weepers..

Re:So..

[wicka_wicka]

I don't think that's communist policy. Losers keepers. Finders stabbed in the face.

I don't understand

[elid]

"The returning capsule only went through the roof and no one was injured or died. Experts who inspected the return capsule found it was not damaged at all," the report said, quoting local official Ai Yuqing.

"The landing technology of our country's satellites is very mature and the precision of the landing point is among the best in the world. Members of the public need not worry about this," it also said, quoting Chinese space experts.

Someone please explain this to me. Did they plan on crashing the thing into this guy's roof?

Re:I don't understand

[morcheeba]

No, of course they didn't plan on landing it on this guy's roof. Check out the picture -- they were obviously aiming for the courtyard, and, if you ask me, they did a really good job of getting pretty close.

Re:I don't understand

[morcheeba]

That does bring up an interesting question... why did the chinese satellite survive and Genesis was in pieces.

The main reason would that the Chinese parachute worked while the Genesis failed.

The other reason would be a weight budget -- the Genesis mission travelled much further, so the energy (and cost) to propel any additional weight would be much more than for the Chinese mission. Thus, it probably wasn't overbuilt.

The third reason is the mission. The Genesis mission had to open up to expose its collectors, while the chinese mission is a bit unknown. If it was a zero gravity research, its experiments probably didn't need exposure to space. If it produced a massive amount of data that couldn't be transmitted back, the data storage is usually easy to separate from the instruments (including film & camera). Anyone know what it was supposed to do?

Re:I don't understand

[afidel]

Wtf would the landing zone be ANYWHERE near an occupied area? They have this huge basically uninhabited area called the Gobi Desert to land big space probes in with a statistically zero chance of hitting anything. Instead they land it in the middle of one of the more populated parts of the country? That makes zero sense to me.

Re:I don't understand

[RALE007]

Someone please explain this to me. Did they plan on crashing the thing into this guy's roof?

Yes, that was the exact purpose of the mission. You see the guy had been evading taxes, and well, the Chinese can be known to go a bit overboard when making a point. It was a two part mission really, to show how precisely they can land their satellites, and to remind the population that they had better pay their f*&#ing taxes. Any other bright questions you need answers to?

Re:I don't understand

[rts008]

Don't blame them, I wouldn't want to go into the desert either. This way it's easy to locate!

it could get worse...

[selderrr]

in belgium, some 10 years ago, a russian Mig bonkered into a house after the pilot did an emergency jump out some 5000km away above russian territory... Imagine sitting at the table and all of a sudden a warhead plops on your plate. not to mention the secret service eating your guts out 20mins later.

I'm too lazy, otherwise I would google some info about it. No doubt soe karma whore will do it below

Re:it could get worse...

[IWK]

...who ordered the whore?...

Re:it could get worse...

[Anonymous Coward]

Posted anon to avoid the karma:

"The strange accident of the MiG-23

04 July, 1989.

From the Soviet airbase near Kolobzreg at the seashore of the Baltic Sea in Poland a MiG-23 took off for a training flight. After the take off the pilot, Colonel Skurigin realised that the afterburner of his plane stopped and the power of the engine begun to fall. The altitude at this time was about 130-150 m and the pilot believed that the descending aircraft is unable to fly any longer. Without turning the engine off the pilot ejected and landed safely with his parachute. To the great astonishment of the ground crew the position of the plane fixed and it flew away to the West. The autopilot kept the last direction of the plane. The aircraft was not armed but the ammunition for the 23 mm machine gun was onboard. The phantom plane left the airspace of the former East Germany and violated the West German airspace where it was intercepted and escorted a pair of American F-15s. As the F-15s didn't get permission to fire they let the aircraft flew away. France also alerted its Mirage fighters being in readiness with permission to fire if the phantom plane was dangerous for French built-up areas. Eventually it was unnecessary because after some 900 km the MiG-23 ran out of fuel and crashed in the area of Kortrijk city in Belgium ( NW of Belgium ). A house was ruined due to the crash and a 18 years old young man was buried under the ruins and died."

Definitely insured

[travdaddy]

Apparently inhabited by an eternal optimist: 'The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year.'

Hmm, must have had good insurance... and a crappy house.

The roof is on fire!

[Kenshin]

We don't need no water, let the motherf***er burn!

Burn, motherf***er, burn!

I wonder...

[FiReaNGeL]

I wonder if China is deliberately crashing its satellites on its territory for secrecy reasons... maybe it was a spy satellite or something?

Seriously, given China size, they should have been able to find a decent landing spot... it isn't THAT densely populated is it?

Re:I wonder...

[pe1chl]

About 5 times more densely than the USA, and 15 times more densely than Russia.
Maybe that explains it?

The chinese sure are optimists

[kuzb]

Only in China would someone take a large hunk of metal destroying their home as a sign of good luck. The rest of us would probably be thinking that some higher power hates us.

In Communist China.....

[reality-bytes]

In Communist China the satellite lands on you!

.....oh wait

Subcontracted...

[Anonymous Coward]

Must of subcontracted to the same guys who outsourced parts for Genesis.

Chinese Contractor: Here! We have parts left over from american space craft!
Chinese Space Agency: Well, don't just stand there, send them to us!

[3 Years Later]

Genesis: The ground sure is coming up fast! I wonder why my chutes have gon.... GAK!

[2 Month Later]

Chinese Space Craft: The ground sure is coming up fast! I wonder why my chutes have gon.... GAK!

Of course it was a spy satellite!

[Anonymous Coward]

China's spy satellites still use film. They deorbit them in order to retrieve the images.

Eternal optimist? Nah.

[sssmashy]

'The satellite landed in our home. Maybe this means we'll have good luck this year.

Eternal optimist? I doubt it. I'm sure the villager bit his tongue, and wisely refrained from voicing his true opinion.

It's all relative. A broken roof is a minor inconvenience compared to ten years in prison for criticizing the government.

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

Loony Toons..

[Mastadex]

Are we sure this guy didnt have a really big high powered ACME magnet pointed straight up??

Now thats what I call DirecTV!

[XeXeN]

Is that their new dedicated subscription?

Obviously,

[quarkscat]

the crashing satellite improved his
home's Feng Shui. As a bonus, it
also drove out all the evil spirits.
Give the man a break, already.

Communist News Translation Service

[Anonymous Coward]

The satellite destroyed the building in Sichuan province, but officials say no-one was hurt.

Officials say that no one with families powerful enough to demand reperations from the government was hurt.

"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.

"The satellite landed in our neighbor's home. Since the government is making us say we lived there, maybe they'll make sure we have good luck this year to keep us from blabbing."

For the benefit of the humor-impaired and tinfoil-hat crowd... I'm joking.

House for sale.

[Eevee]

It's a fixer-upper, but it gets excellent satellite reception.

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-entry capsule: what's inside?

[aheikkinen]

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.

Astrology tradition

[Maljin Jolt]

According chinese traditional astrology, such event is considered very lucky, because of involvment of heaven element. So the guy's reasoning is very rational in paradigm of his culture. All those of you americans who are slashing and bashing chinese government propaganda in this thread, think at first about your own culture paradigms and government propaganda rooted in them, they are far more dangerous to anybody as well as to you yourself.