China rocket crash12/30/2023 ![]() ![]() "That would be the responsible thing to do." "What really should have happened is, there should have been some fuel left on board for this to be a controlled reentry," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said Thursday (July 28) during a Long March 5B reentry discussion that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter. But the fact that the crash occurred at all does not reflect well on China and its spaceflight program, experts say. We'll have to wait a while to see exactly where the rocket debris came down. That location is over open ocean, just off the coast of Palawan Island, which is part of the Philippines. It's "unlikely but not impossible" that one or more chunks hit a population center, he added in another tweet.Ĭhinese space officials, for their part, said the rocket body reentered at 119.0 degrees east longitude and 9.1 degrees north latitude. ![]() "The video from Kuching implies it was high in the atmosphere at that time - any debris would land hundreds of km further along track, near Sibu, Bintulu or even Brunei," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said via Twitter today. One observer appeared to capture the rocket's breakup from Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, posting video of the dramatic event on Twitter. William Harwood and Sophie Lewis contributed to this report.Indeed, 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of the Long March 5B likely survived all the way to the ground today, experts with The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies have estimated.Īnd it's possible that falling rocket chunks caused some injuries or infrastructure damage today, given where the Long March 5B reentered. Similarly, when Skylab re-entered in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported. ![]() When 200,000 pounds of spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris hit the ground, but there were no injuries. The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. "The possibility of causing damage to aviation activities or on the ground is extremely low." "It is understood that this type of rocket adopts a special technical design that most of the components will be burnt up and destroyed during the reentry process," Zhao said. "Since the development stage of the space engineering program, China has taken into consideration the debris mitigation and return from orbit into atmosphere of missions involving rocket carriers and satellite sent into orbit," Zhao said at a daily briefing Wednesday. In 2020, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.Ĭhina also drew heavy criticism after using a missile to destroy one of its defunct weather satellites in 2007, creating a massive debris field.įoreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian rejected such concerns. ![]() In 2018, Tiangong 1, China's defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A Long March-5B Y3 rocket carrying China's space station lab module Wentian blasts off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on July 24, 2022, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China. Only small parts of the Tianzhou-3 ship survived to fall safely Wednesday into a predetermined area of the South Pacific, the China Manned Space Agency said. While China is not alone in such practices, the size of the Long March rocket stage has drawn particular scrutiny.Ĭhina has allowed rocket stages to fall back to Earth on their own at least twice before, and was accused by NASA last year of "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris" after parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean.Įarlier this week, a Chinese cargo spacecraft that serviced the country's permanent orbiting space station largely burned up on reentering the atmosphere. ![]()
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