China’s first space station lab — the Tiangong-1 or “Heavenly Palace” — will come crashing down to Earth in 2017, amid concerns that China has lost control of the 8.5-tonne module.

Last week, officials, speaking at a satellite launch centre in the Gobi desert, said the unmanned module had fulfilled its mission and was set to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere sometime in the second half of 2017, the Guardian reported.

“Based on our calculation and analysis, most parts of the space lab will burn up during falling,” the deputy director of China’s manned space engineering office, Wu Ping, was quoted as saying by official news agency Xinhua.

According to Space.com, the less than precise landing time indicates the operators had lost control of the unit. If they were still able to communicate with it, they could steer it to “a guided re-entry over an empty stretch of ocean at a specified time”.

Jonathan McDowell, Harvard astrophysicist, said the announcement suggested that China had lost control of the station and that it would re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere “naturally.”

If this is the case, it would be impossible to predict where the debris from the space station will land. While most of the eight tonnes of the space station would melt as it passes through the atmosphere, Mr McDowell said some parts, such as the rocket engines, were so dense that they wouldn’t burn up completely. “There will be lumps of about 100kg or so, still enough to give you a nasty wallop if it hit you,” he told the Guardian.

“There’s a chance it will do damage, it might take out someone’s car, there will be a rain of a few pieces of metal, it might go through someone’s roof, but it is not widespread damage.”

But according to Xinhua, Wu said the space station’s re-entry was “unlikely to affect aviation activities or cause damage to the ground”.

The Tiangong-1 was launched in 2011 as part of an ambitious scientific push to turn China into a space superpower.