“But the only ones who know what’s onboard Tiangong-1, or even what it’s made of, are the Chinese space agency.”As a prototype space station, Tiangong-1 is far smaller than the ISS. “When people hear ‘space station’ they tend to think of the International Space Station or the Mir space station, but this is a lot smaller than those,” Lemmens said. Though bijou by space station standards, Tiangong-1 hosted several taikonauts, including China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, in 2012. It is not known whether the Chinese space agency performed such a risk assessment. And while pieces of space debris fall to Earth every day, only one person is known to have been hit by space junk, and she was not injured.

Source: The Guardian March 09, 2018 06:22 UTC