CHINA has reportedly lost contact with its space station amid concerns its space hardware could hurtle back down towards Earth in a fiery ball of hot metal.

China’s Tiangong-1 space station, its first ever foray into space, was launched in 2011 and was expected to return to Earth in a controlled crash into the ocean.

But fears are held for the station, dubbed a “space lab”, due to Tinagong-1’s overwhelming size and scope for damage once it hits Earth. Without China’s control, it could devastate communities in inhabited areas thanks to the extreme heat produced from re-entry, and the eight tonnes of metal that comes along with it.

Most pieces of space junk burn up before they reach Earth, but due to Tiangong-1’s size, there’s a high possibility it will reach Earth before it melts away.

One amateur astronomer, who has been tracking the space station’s movements using telescopes, binoculars and video cameras, believes Tiangong-1 is on a crash course towards Earth, and China isn’t doing anything to stop it.

It is expected to make its return to ground late 2017, but China has remained tight-lipped about when — and where — it might happen.

“If I am right, China will wait until the last minute to let the world know it has a problem with their space station,” Amatuer satellite tracker Thomas Dorman told Space.com from his home in El Paso, Texas.

“It could be a real bad day if pieces of this came down in a populated area, but odds are it will land in the ocean or in an unpopulated area.

“But remember — sometimes, the odds just do not work out, so this may bear watching.”

Despite China’s initial end of life plans, it has been quiet over the recent claims and is yet to confirm exactly what’s happening in the clouds above, and its future space plans.

Tiangong-1, which translates to “Heavenly Place” — was China’s first launch into space and was expected to be the launching pad towards a larger space station that would have been fully operational by 2020.

It marked successful docking exercises between 2011 to 2013 but ever since it has been floating in an in-orbit “operation management phase”.

According to the China Manned Space Engineering (CMSE) office, between 2011 to 2014, Tiangong-1 “has obtained a great deal of application and science data, which is valuable in mineral resources investigation, ocean and forest application, hydrologic and ecological environment monitoring, land use, urban thermal environment monitoring and emergency disaster control.”

But earlier this year, China’s state-run xinhuanet.com reported, “After an operational orbit of 1630 days, China’s first space lab Tiangong-1 terminated its data service.

“The flight orbit of the space lab, which will descend gradually in the coming months, is under continued and close monitoring, according to the office, which said the orbiter will burn up in the atmosphere eventually.”

But Mr Dorman refutes China’s claims the station will “burn up in the atmosphere” and even CMSE officials claimed the “telemetry link” to Tiangong-1 had failed, leaving Space.com to prophesise this had “doomed the vehicle to an uncontrolled fiery fall in the future”.

“That would seem to suggest that it’s not being deorbited under control,” Dean Cheng, a senior research fellow at the Asian Studies Center at the Heritage Foundation, told Space.com.

“That’s the implication.”

“When you deorbit somewhat larger items, you would have a ‘best practices’ policy of making a controlled re-entry,” Cheng said.

“In fact, this will be an interesting test of whether or not China is going to be more open about its space program.”

But other experts believe it’s all unnecessary hype, with T.S. Kelso, a senior research astrodynamicist at the Center for Space Standards & Innovation, describing the theory as “much ado about nothing”.

Mr Kelso told Space.com he didn’t have “any direct way to measure” the lab’s stability in space, “but we might expect to see the rate of decrease in altitude — the slope between reboosts — increase if it was tumbling, since the station would have higher drag.

“Instead, we see the slowest decrease in altitude in recent years — consistent with the lower drag at a higher altitude.”

He said by his standards, Toiangong-1 was “dormant but stable”.

“So that might be why the Chinese aren’t responding … they probably don’t understand why they would need to,” Kelso said. “I guess I would want to see some very specific data, notionally covering a period where Tiangong-1 was supposed to be stable, to show that it is now uncontrolled, before reading too much more into this.”

He expected Tiangong-1 to re-enter Earth’s orbit by the end of 2017.

“The suggestion has been made the reason China hasn’t done a re-entry of Tiangong-1 is, the space station is low on fuel, and China is waiting on a natural decay to a much lower orbit before they can do a burn to bring the station down.”

Tiangong-1’s successor, Tiangong-2, is scheduled to launch this September.