China has reportedly deorbited its second space station the Tiangong-2. On Friday it entered the Earth’s atmosphere and burned up over the South Pacific ocean.
According to the reports China deliberately brought the Tiangong-2 down to Earth in a controlled manner over the Pacific, where there wasn’t any risk of it hitting people.
Now even when the Tiangong-2 is no longer in orbit, it has been proved to be a useful project for China, which has been steadily working to gain a better foothold in space in the last decade.
Along with the Tiangong-1, the two stations provided the Chinese space program with valuable experience in orbit. They demonstrated not only that they could launch and sustain hardware in space, but also dock crewed and uncrewed vehicles to them vital lessons for any human spaceflight program. China had proposed a third station, the Tiangong-3, but it was never constructed or launched.
China is recently planning on constructing another station in orbit, with the first section, the Tianhe-1 module, scheduled for launch in 2020.
