A tiny piece of debris triggered the most serious mishap at China’s Tiangong space station since it became operational three years ago.
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Earlier this month, a crack discovered on the Shenzhou-20 spacecraft’s window forced three Chinese astronauts to remain on board Tiangong for nine extra days and eventually borrow their newly arrived colleagues’ ship to return to Earth.
The event underscores the growing threat posed by Earth’s ever-expanding cloud of orbital junk – a scare that could push China, as well as other countries including the United States, to speed up their debris tracking and removal capabilities.
Many of these systems are inherently dual-use: the same tools that can safely deorbit defunct satellites could also be repurposed to disable enemy spacecraft.
Still, some experts see a sliver of hope that this incident could serve as a much-needed wake-up call to catalyse risk-reduction measures between Beijing and Washington, and become a turning point for cooperation between the world’s two leading space powers.
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While China rushes to ready the next spacecraft, Shenzhou-22, to be launched next week as the station’s new lifeboat, the country had already begun “working more seriously on space-debris issues” before the episode, said Harvard astronomer and space historian Jonathan McDowell.