So much for experts - heavenly palace.

[jetboy]

it seems as all the experts cannot decide if this is coming down,or if,where?

and a link here,

http://sputniknews.com/asia/20160611/1041158105/heavenly-palace-fall.html

cheers

don

[johnny_7713]

It's not 'all the experts', it's three people, one of whom is a policy think-tank researcher. That might make him an expert on Chinese politics, but it doesn't point to many credentials when it comes to astrodynamics. He seems to be mainly going off the fact that the Chinese government isn't saying what's going on.

The amateur satellite tracker appears to have been quote mined (notice how he's only quoted as stating what could happen, not as what is happening). A 'state of controlled free fall' (note that was not a direct quote) could be applied to any object in orbit around the Earth which is under control, since all orbiting objects are in a state of free fall. While tracking a satellite as an amateur is 'easy' (just need a powerful enough telescope), to predict if and where it will come down you need access to computing power, and sufficiently detailed knowledge of the satellite's aerodynamic properties. Both of those are hard to get your hands on as an amateur, and even as a professional (especially the second would require co-operation from the Chinese space agency).

The article seems to be a summary of the much better article here: http://www.space.com/33140-china-tiangong-1-space-lab-falling-to-earth.html

Note that the summary of that article is: 'Unless China tells us what's going on we have insufficient data, so here are some guesses'