The wreckage of China’s Long March 5B Remote 2 rocket is expected to make an uncontrolled re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere this weekend. It is unclear exactly when and where the rocket wreckage will crash to the surface.
The 10-story-tall, 23-ton wreckage is the core stage booster of China’s largest rocket to date.
The core stage booster also reached orbital velocity after the Long March 5B Yaoji rocket lifted off from Hainan on April 29, carrying parts of China’s new space station, the Tiangong, into space without crashing as it usually does.
The wreckage, which is currently in an uncontrolled tumble around the Earth, is about to enter the lower atmosphere and is expected to return to Earth in a “runaway” fashion sometime Saturday or Sunday.
The wreckage has an orbital inclination of 41.5 degrees, meaning that areas of the planet as far north as Chicago, New York, Rome and Beijing, and as far south as New Zealand and Chile are in the rocket’s path back to Earth.
While scientists expect most of the wreckage to burn up and be destroyed as it enters the atmosphere, a portion will land in various places on Earth, including some unburned metal and glass.
Some scientists say it would be irresponsible for China to allow the spacecraft wreckage to reenter Earth unchecked.
Paulo Lozano is the director of the Space Propulsion Lab at MIT. They (China) certainly bear responsibility for not providing enough information or not doing enough in their design to prevent the uncontrolled re-entry of the spacecraft to Earth,” he told Voice of America. I think that’s important. The cleanup may not work at all, especially if the pieces fall into the ocean, where they are likely to be lost forever. Hopefully they don’t fall on land, especially not in public places, which would be a very bad outcome.”
Lozano said a second stage is required in nearly all U.S. rocket launches, in which the engines start up again to guide the rocket back to Earth in a designated unoccupied area. He said, “You never hear in the news that a (U.S.) rocket is flying uncontrolled and will return to an inexact location on Earth. That’s because usually they stay in orbit for a while and then the engines kick in and guide them to the right location at the right time.”
But the Long March 5B Yao-2 rocket does not include a design for this.
Jonathan Black, director of Virginia Tech’s Aerospace and Ocean Systems Laboratory, said this technology has only been applied within the last decade. Although the Long March 5B Yaoji rocket only launched late last month, it’s possible the technology is decades old.
“The rocket is probably quite old. You know the Russians still launch on Soyuz and although they’ve started to update it, it’s still the same basic design from the 60s or earlier.” Black said.
In addition, scientists speculate that the high price tag may also be the reason China has not adopted the new technology.
The U.S. Defense Department said Thursday it is closely watching the path of the Long March 5 wreckage, but has no current plans to shoot it down.
Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said, “We want it to land in a place where it’s not going to hurt anybody. Hopefully in the ocean, or somewhere like that.”
White House Press Secretary Sachs said Wednesday, “The United States is committed to addressing the growing risk of congestion caused by increased space debris and space activities, and we want to work with the international community to promote leadership and responsible behavior in space. It is in the common interest of all nations to act responsibly to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities.”
Democratic U.S. Rep. Jim Cooper, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee’s Strategic Forces Subcommittee, which oversees the U.S. space program, said Thursday that China should be responsible for warning and protecting people in the orbit of a falling rocket.
In an e-mailed statement to Bloomberg, Cooper said, “The Chinese Communist Party has repeatedly and blatantly disregarded space safety, this time by not even predicting where the Long March 5 rocket would land, let alone helping the people down there.”
Over the past two days, Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Wang Wenbin, who has been pressed by the media on a succession of questions about the Long March 5, dodged a question on Thursday about what measures China would take to ensure that rocket debris would not fall into residential areas.
On Friday, when asked about the possible damage caused by the rocket’s fall, Wang Wenbin said, “It is a common international practice for the upper stage of a rocket to re-enter the atmosphere and be destroyed by ablation. China is highly concerned about the re-entry of the upper stage of the rocket into the atmosphere. As far as I understand, the rocket’s upper stage has been treated with passivation technology, and the vast majority of its components will be destroyed by ablation during re-entry, with a very low probability of causing harm to aviation activities and the ground. The relevant authorities will keep the public informed of the situation.”
Even so, Virginia Tech’s Black said the wreckage burn and the crash of the parts that failed to burn completely would still produce toxic contamination.
Black also noted that there are many other examples of China’s irresponsible behavior in space. One major example is the anti-satellite missile test conducted by China in 2007. “They shot down the satellite at a very high altitude, much higher than the space station and many other satellites in low Earth orbit. That’s a problem because all this wreckage collects there for a long time, and all the wreckage has to come down from low Earth orbit before it can burn off, if they can all burn in the atmosphere. So the danger in this example is that it causes a chain reaction of additional collisions and so on.” Black said.
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, told the New York Times that only China has allowed the wreckage of multi-stage rockets to fall back to Earth at will in the past 30 years.
The wreckage of another Chinese Long March 5B rocket also returned to Earth in an uncontrolled manner in May 2020, and there are indications that some debris crashed on the Ivory Coast of West Africa, destroying villages there.
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