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This article is over 9 months old 
  
 Tributes on Weibo as officials say craft, which had been out of control since 2016, mostly burnt up on re-entry 
  
 As China’s Tiangong-1 space station hurtled toward Earth on Monday, burning up as it entered the atmosphere, Chinese residents wished the spacecraft a final farewell. 
  
 “Goodbye Tiangong-1. You are our hero,” one user wrote on the Chinese microblog Weibo, under the hashtag “Goodbye Tiangong”. Chinese news outlets posted photos and tributes to the 10.4-metre-long space station as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the south Pacific. 
  
 “Let’s take this moment to applaud and cheer her. This time it’s really goodbye,” wrote the Beijing-based Toutiao News. 
  
 Tiangong-1, or Heavenly Palace 1, was a symbol of China’s rise when it launched in 2011 and key part of the country’s ambitious space programme, which aims to place a permanent station in orbit by 2023. 
  
 It was originally planned to be decommissioned in 2013 but its mission was repeatedly extended. It became apparent in 2016 that China had lost control of the craft, which had stopped functioning and was no longer responding to ground control. 
  
 In December 2017, China alerted the United Nations that Tiangong-1 would come down by late March 2018 but could not predict exactly when or where. On Monday, the country’s space agency confirmed it had crashed into the Pacific Ocean. 
  
 The China Manned Space Engineering Office said: “Through monitoring and analysis by Beijing Aerospace Control Centre and related agencies, Tiangong-1 re-entered the atmosphere at about 8.15am, 2 April, Beijing time (0115 GMT). The re-entry falling area is located in the central region of the south Pacific. 
  
 “Most of the devices were ablated during the re-entry process.” Ablated, in spacecraft terms, means burned up through atmospheric friction. 
  
 Some in China dismissed the agency’s characterisation of the out-of-control satellite. “Re-entry? Everyone knows it’s a crash,” one Weibo user wrote. 
  
  
  
 The Chinese tabloid Global Times said on Monday that similar descriptions of the spacecraft in international media reflected overseas “envy” of China’s space industry. 
  
  
  
 “It’s normal for spacecraft to re-enter the atmosphere, yet Tiangong-1 received so much attention partly because some western countries are trying to hype and sling mud at China’s fast-growing aerospace industry,” the paper said. 
  
 Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) NW of Tahiti - it managed to miss the 'spacecraft graveyard' which is further south! pic.twitter.com/Sj4e42O7Dc 
  
 The US military’s Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC) confirmed the craft’s re-entry “through coordination with counterparts in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea and the United Kingdom”. 
  
 The European Space Agency had indicated earlier that Tiangong-1 was likely to break up over water, which covers most of the planet’s surface. 
  
 It described the probability of someone being hit by a piece of debris from Tiangong-1 as “10 million times smaller than the yearly chance of being hit by lightning”. 
  
 18 SPCS (@18SPCS) UPDATE: #JFSCC confirmed #Tiangong1 reentered the atmosphere over the southern Pacific Ocean at ~5:16 p.m. (PST) April 1. For details see https://t.co/OzZXgaEX0W @US_Stratcom @usairforce @AFSpaceCC @30thSpaceWing @PeteAFB @SpaceTrackOrg pic.twitter.com/KVljDALqzi 
  
 Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at the Australian National University, said Tiangong-1’s re-entry was “mostly successful” though it would have been better if the space station had not been spinning toward Earth. “It could have been better obviously, if it wasn’t tumbling, but it landed in the southern Pacific Ocean and that’s kind of where you hope it would land,” Tucker said. 
  
 “It’s been tumbling and spinning for a while, which means that when it really starts to come down it’s less predictable about what happens to it,” Tucker said. 
  
 Play Video 0:34 Watch the 2011 launch of crashed Chinese space station Tiangong-1 – video 
  
 “The biggest takeaway from this is that as we put more things into space, all countries, we have to be aware that we do have to plan for these sorts of issues that are happening.” 
  
 A second Chinese space station, Tiangong-2, remains in orbit. Launched in 2016, after Tiangong-1 went offline, its aim is to test capabilities for long-term human presence in space, in anticipation of China’s permanent space station. 
  
 Tiangong-1 crash: everything you need to know Read more 
  
 China’s ambitions in space stand in contrast to the US, where policymakers are considering defunding the International Space Station (ISS) by 2024. If the ISS is retired, China could be the only country keeping people in orbit. 
  
 “It is possible that China’s space station will be the only working station after 2024 when the ISS is expected to retire and China will take a dominant position in conducting space experiments,” Jiao Weixin, a space science professor at Peking University, told the Global Times. 
  
 Reuters, AFP and PA contributed to this report 
  
  ||||| An artist's concept of China's Tiangong-1 space station prototype burning up in Earth's atmosphere during its fiery fall back to Earth overnight on April 1-2, 2018. 
  
 Tiangong-1 is no more. 
  
 China's prototype space station, whose name translates as "Heavenly Palace 1," met a fiery end in Earth's atmosphere today (April 1), breaking apart and burning up in the skies over the southern Pacific Ocean at about 8:16 p.m. EDT (0016 April 2 GMT), according to the U.S. Strategic Command's Joint Force Space Component Command (JFSCC). 
  
 "The JFSCC used the Space Surveillance Network sensors and their orbital analysis system to confirm Tiangong-1's re-entry," U.S. Air Force officials wrote in a statement. [Tiangong-1: China's Falling Space Station in Pictures] 
  
 Some pieces of the school-bus-size Tiangong-1 almost certainly survived the fall, but the odds that they caused any damage or injury are extremely small: You had a less than 1-in-1-trillion chance of getting hit by a flaming chunk of the heavenly palace, according to experts with the Aerospace Corporation. 
  
 By the way, if you do manage to find such a chunk of Tiangong-1, don't pick it up or breathe in any fumes emanating from it. The space junk may be contaminated with hydrazine, a toxic rocket fuel, experts have said. 
  
 Tiangong-1 was about 34 feet long by 11 feet wide (10.4 by 3.4 meters), and it weighed more than 9 tons (8 metric tons). The space lab consisted of two main parts: an "experimental module" that housed visiting astronauts and a "resource module" that accommodated Tiangong-1's solar-energy and propulsion systems. 
  
 The docking of two robotic spacecraft, the Tiangong 1 space station and Shenzhou 8 capsule, provided a preview of larger Chinese space complexes planned for the future. Credit: Karl Tate, SPACE.com Contributor 
  
 The craft launched without anyone aboard on Sept. 29, 2011, to an orbit about 217 miles (350 kilometers) above Earth. That's slightly lower than the orbit of the much larger International Space Station, whose average altitude is 250 miles (400 km). Tiangong-1's main mission was to help China master the technologies required to assemble and operate a bona-fide space station in Earth orbit, a goal the nation aims to achieve by the early 2020s, the country has said. 
  
 On Nov. 2, 2011, the robotic Shenzhou-8 spacecraft visited Tiangong-1, executing China's first-ever orbital docking. Another big milestone came in June 2012, when a crew of three spaceflyers linked their Shenzhou-9 vehicle to the heavenly palace and came aboard for a spell. 
  
 Three more "taikonauts," or Chinese astronauts, visited in June 2013, traveling on the Shenzhou-10 spacecraft. Each of these crewed missions lasted about two weeks. 
  
 Tiangong-1's design lifetime was just two years, and the space lab's work was mostly done after Shenzhou-10 departed. The empty space lab continued to do some Earth-observation work, however, and researchers and engineers kept in touch with it until March 2016, when data transmission between Tiangong-1 and its handlers stopped, for reasons that China never explicitly specified. At that point, an uncontrolled atmospheric re-entry was apparently inevitable. 
  
 This is the view of outside researchers. But Chinese space officials dispute such terminology, said Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at The Heritage Foundation who's an expert on China's space program. [The Biggest Spacecraft to Fall Uncontrolled From Space] 
  
 "The Chinese insist that it is controlled," Cheng told Space.com. "They're very, very unhappy when you use this term 'uncontrolled.'" 
  
 Chinese officials have said that they know where Tiangong-1 is and can provide location updates at any time, Cheng added. But for other spacefaring nations, a "controlled" re-entry is one performed under the guidance of a spacecraft's handlers — for example, the intentional de-orbiting of the Soviet/Russian Mir space station over the Pacific Ocean in March 2001. 
  
 "We should be diplomatically, and in the space-policy world, pushing China to accept a definition of 'control' that is comparable to that of the rest of the rules-based world. You don't get your own definition," Cheng said. "To support that, there need to be some sticks here," he added, referring to consequences. 
  
 The re-entry of Tiangong-1 was tracked by the JFSCC, the U.S.-based analysis group Aerospace Corp., the European Space Agency and scientists around the world with the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee. 
  
 "The JFSCC works alongside government, industry and international partners to track and report reentries, to include today’s Tinagong-1 reentry, because the space domain is vital to our shared international security interests," JFSCC deputy commander Maj. Gen. Stephen Whiting, commander of the 14th Air Force, said in the JFSCC statement. "One of our missions, which we remain focused on, is to monitor space and the tens of thousands of pieces of debris that congest it, while at the same time working with allies and partners to enhance spaceflight safety and increase transparency in the space domain." 
  
 "All nations benefit from a safe, stable, sustainable, and secure space domain," Whiting said. "We're sharing information with space-faring nations to preserve the space domain for the future of mankind." 
  
 Tiangong-1's successor, Tiangong-2, launched to Earth orbit in September 2016 and hosted three visiting astrpnauts a month later. And a robotic vessel called Tianzhou-1 rendezvoused with Tiangong-2 a few months later, performing several automated docking and refueling operations from April 2017 to September 2017. 
  
 The success of these missions apparently has China poised to start building a permanent space station. The nation aims to begin construction and assembly operations next year, and the first crewed missions to the outpost could come in 2022, Chinese space officials have said. 
  
 Tiangong-1 is not the biggest spacecraft ever to fall from the sky. That distinction goes to the 140-ton (127 metric tons) Soviet/Russian space station Mir, which was guided to a controlled destruction over the Pacific Ocean in March 2001. 
  
 The largest craft ever to come down at least partially uncontrolled is NASA's 100-ton (91 metric tons) space shuttle Columbia, which broke apart as it was returning to Earth on Feb. 1, 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard. An investigation later pinned the cause of the disaster on a piece of foam insulation from Columbia's external fuel tank, which broke off and punched a hole in the heat shield on the orbiter's left wing during launch, two weeks before the tragedy. 
  
 Follow Mike Wall on Twitter @michaeldwall and Google+. Follow us @Spacedotcom, Facebook or Google+. Originally published on Space.com. |||||
China's plummeting space station crashed to Earth late Sunday without harming any Earthlings: The country's space agency says the Tiangong-1 burned up on re-entry and the remaining debris fell into the southern Pacific Ocean northwest of Tahiti. The US military's Joint Force Space Component Command confirmed the fate of the 34-foot space station, which was launched in 2011. "It did exactly what it was expected to do; the predictions, at least the past 24 hours' ones, were spot on; and as expected it fell somewhere empty and did no damage," Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tells CNN. China told the United Nations in 2017 that the space lab had "ceased functioning." Space experts in other countries said it appeared an uncontrolled re-entry was inevitable, though China denied it had lost control of the spacecraft. "They insist that it is controlled," Heritage Foundation researcher Dean Cheng tells Space.com. "They're very, very unhappy when you use this term 'uncontrolled.'" Some social media users in China posting under the hashtag "Goodbye Tiangong" mocked the space agency's description of its return to Earth, the Guardian reports. "Re-entry? Everyone knows it’s a crash," wrote one. China launched Tiangong-2, its second space lab, in Sept. 2016.