In May 2021, pieces of another Long March rocket landed in the Indian Ocean, prompting concern that the Chinese space agency had lost control of it. “Due to the uncontrolled nature of its descent, there is a non-zero probability of the surviving debris landing in a populated area - over 88% of the world’s population lives under the reentry’s potential debris footprint,” Aerospace said Tuesday.
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The descent of the booster, which weighs 23 metric tons (25.4 tons), would be part of what critics say is a series of uncontrolled crashes that highlights the risks of China’s escalating space race with the US. “The US and Western media deliberately exaggerate and exaggerate the ‘loss-of-control’ of the Chinese rocket debris and the probability of personal injury caused by the rocket debris, obviously with bad intentions,” Shanghai-based news site Guancha.cn said Tuesday. “The US is running out of ways to stop China’s development in the aerospace sector, so smears and defamation became the only things left for it,” the Global Times newspaper reported, citing Song Zhongping, a television commentator who closely follows China’s space program. Follow him on Twitter Follow us on Twitter or Facebook.The possible debris field includes much of the US, as well as Africa, Australia, Brazil, India and Southeast Asia, according to Aerospace’s predictions.Īlso read: Indian-origin prof is 1st Canadian to win global award for pathbreaking researchĬoncern over the reentry and the impact it could have is being dismissed by China, however, with state-backed media saying the warnings are just “sour grapes” from people resentful of the country’s development as a space power. Mike Wall is the author of " Out There " (Grand Central Publishing, 2018 illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. "It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security and long-term sustainability of outer space activities." "It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris," he added. "Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations," Nelson wrote in a statement posted before the rocket came down.
One such reproval came on Saturday from new NASA chief Bill Nelson. Many people in the space community have criticized China over the Long March 5B incidents, accusing the nation's space program of behaving carelessly, if not recklessly. (Sadly, the space shuttle Columbia could also be considered here the 117-ton orbiter broke apart during its reentry in February 2003, killing all seven astronauts aboard.) Those three are the 83-ton Skylab space station, which crashed over Australia in July 1979 the 50-ton upper stage of the Saturn V rocket that launched Skylab, which came down over the Atlantic Ocean west of Madeira in January 1975 and the Soviet Union's Salyut 7 space station and attached Kosmos-1686 module, which together weighed about 43 tons and re-entered over Argentina in February 1991. Only three human-made objects heavier than those two Long March 5B cores have ever fallen uncontrolled from space, according to astronomer and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who's based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. The 8-ton craft fell to Earth uncontrolled in April 2018, burning up over the Pacific Ocean. In addition, China's first prototype space lab, Tiangong 1, which was designed to help pave the way for the new space station, had its own space-junk phase after completing its mission. Some large pieces of debris from that reentry apparently made it to the ground in the nation of Ivory Coast, though no injuries were reported.
The same thing happened last year with a different Long March 5B core, which fell uncontrolled over the Atlantic Ocean off the West African coast. Instead of ditching safely into the ocean when its work was done, however, the rocket's first stage reached orbit, becoming a piece of space junk just waiting to crash down on its home planet after feeling enough atmospheric drag.Īnd this was not an isolated incident. The Long March 5B launched the core module for China's new space station on April 28.
For example, stated on Twitter Saturday night that the Long March "fell into the Indian Ocean north of the Maldives," an idyllic island chain off India's southwest coast. But some analysts have identified a watery grave for any rocket hunks that managed to survive the intense heat of re-entry.
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