‘Out of control’ Chinese space station to fall to Earth

PARIS: An uncontrolled Chinese space station weighing at least seven tonnes is set to break up as it hurtles to Earth on or around on April 1, the European Space Agency has forecast.

“It will mostly burn up due to the extreme heat generated by its high-speed passage through the atmosphere,” it said in a statement.

Some debris from the Tiangong-1 — or “Heavenly Palace” — spacelab will likely fall into the ocean or somewhere on land, but the chances of human injury are vanishingly small, said Stijn Lemmens, an ESA space debris expert based in Darmstadt, Germany. In a stricter tone, the Ministry of Manpower has cautioned companies and individuals against hiring of workers staying illegally in the Sultanate.

“It is illegal to hire a worker without proper documents from the authorities concerned,” said an official at the ministry.

Companies or individuals who are illegally bringing workers to Oman or providing them with jobs must be prepared to face strict action under the prevailing laws, he said.

“An employer is not allowed to enter into a contract with any person for the purpose of providing jobs to foreign employees unless he obtains a licence for the purpose,” said the official, quoting the Omani Labour Law.

Citing Article 20 of the Law, he said no person is allowed to practise the business of supplying foreign workers unless he obtains a licence in this regard.

According to the official, many companies are hiring ‘undocumented’ workers, while citizens and residents are providing odd jobs like domestic help, cleaning, gardening, etc.

While urging people to cooperate with the ministry, he said the ministry has been adopting several steps to stamp out illegal labour in the country.

“If there are not enough expatriate employees in the country, then appoint an Omani national,” advised the official.

Thousands of illegal workers are arrested and deported every year despite authorities’ warning to companies not to hire them.

“Many of these workers are either those who ran away from their sponsors or entered the country illegally,” he said.

There are thousands of workers hired by ‘fake’ companies.

“Over the past 60 years of space flight, we are nearing the mark of 6,000 uncontrolled reentries of large objects, mostly satellites and upper (rocket) stages,” he said.

More than 90 per cent of those bits of high-tech space junk weighed 100 kilos or more.

“Only one event actually produced a fragment which hit a person, and it did not result in injury.”

Lemmens calculated the odds of being struck by space debris at one in 1.2 trillion — 10 million times less likely than getting hit by lightning.

The China Manned Space programme, which put Tiangong-1 into orbit in September 2011, has been mostly mum on the fate of China’s first space station, designed to test technologies related to docking in orbit. Daily updates on its official website have tracked its gradual descent — average altitude as of Tuesday was 207.7 km — but not much else.

On Monday, China’s state-run news agency Xinhua cited the agency as saying the spacelab “should be fully burnt as it reenters the Earth’s atmosphere.” During its operational lifetime, Tiangong took part in two crewed missions, and an unmanned one.