The uncontrolled crash of the Chinese Communist Party’s Long March 5B Yaoji launch vehicle into Earth has sparked public criticism for days. The Communist Party of China (CPC) was silent until the moment before the crash, when it predicted where and when the wreckage would re-enter the atmosphere, and although the predicted landing point was miles away from the actual landing point, the CPC media and the Internet still hailed the prediction as “really accurate” and China as “technologically advanced.
International public opinion has criticized the CCP’s irresponsibility in allowing a 20-ton rocket to fall to earth uncontrollably. Meanwhile, the military and research institutions in Europe and the United States have been tracking the rocket’s trajectory for days, constantly revising their predictions of where and when it would land, trying to avoid any possible damage. The Chinese government and official media were silent until the morning of May 9, when the Ministry of Foreign Affairs declared that the rocket’s wreckage had a “very low probability of causing harm to aviation activities and the ground”.
It was not until 7 a.m. Beijing time on May 9, about three hours before the rocket fell, that the Chinese Manned Space Program Office issued a forecast that the wreckage of the Long March 5B rocket would enter the atmosphere at about 10:12 a.m., with an error of 15 minutes, and that the center of the re-entry area would be located at 28.38°E, 34.43°N, meaning the eastern waters of the Greek island of Crete in the Mediterranean Sea.
In contrast to the official daily and weekly updates on the flight status of the Communist Party’s Tiangong-1 when it crashed, the first announcement on the status of the Long March 5B rocket was made just before its uncontrolled re-entry.
Just before the Chinese side predicted that the Long March 5B rocket would fall, the U.S. also updated its prediction that the rocket might re-enter the atmosphere around 10:11 a.m. on the 9th and fall in the area around the Mediterranean Sea in Greece. Previously, the U.S. side has revised its prediction several times, each time different.
Compared with the U.S. prediction, the Chinese data is not much different, but only slightly more “accurate. It is not known whether there is a connection between the two.
The Earth’s atmosphere is only 8-17 km thick, and a rocket that loses power will fall faster due to gravity after entering the atmosphere. As a result, the media reported at the time that both the U.S. and China predicted that the rocket wreckage would crash into the Mediterranean region.
However, only a few hours later, the China Manned Space Engineering Office released a news release stating that at 10:24 a.m. on May 9, the remnants of the upper stage of the Long March 5 rocket had re-entered the atmosphere and the landing area was located in the surrounding waters at 72.47°E and 2.65°N. The location is in the Indian Ocean, nearly 5,000 kilometers from the Mediterranean Sea location previously predicted by the Chinese side.
The final crash site of the rocket wreckage was approximately offshore to the southwest of the Maldives, only about 42 kilometers from the nearest inhabited island. While international public opinion expressed its gratitude, the Chinese Communist Party’s official media and the Internet began to speculate that China’s “prediction was accurate” and that “the smear campaign by the Western hostile forces was futile.
Party media, including the Global Times, touted the Chinese prediction of a “15-minute error around 10:12 a.m.” as more “accurate” than the U.S. prediction of a “one-hour error around 10:11 a.m. “However, the Chinese side’s prediction of “re-entry into the Mediterranean Sea” was not mentioned at all, but attributed to the “wrong prediction of the U.S. side”.
The party media also quoted experts as saying that because China has the precise parameters of the Long March 5B rocket, it “has an inherent advantage in estimating the landing point”. The Chinese Internet is also “rejoicing”, with the “five cents” touting that “China’s prediction is accurate”, “foreign media rumors have been dashed”, and “the world has seen a great show of Chinese technology”. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has been “in the know” for a long time.
In fact, before the rocket wreckage landed, the Chinese side had kept silent for many days, without releasing any information to give warning about the possible landing point and time. Experts analyzed that it was impossible to give an accurate prediction because the Chinese Communist Party allowed the rocket to fall uncontrollably.
The party media also implied that it is “internationally accepted practice” for rockets to fall uncontrollably when they run out. But Paulo Lozano, director of MIT’s Space Propulsion Lab, recently told the Voice of America that almost all U.S. rockets are designed with special engines to guide them back to a designated unoccupied area on Earth after completing their missions, and that one has never heard of a U.S. rocket returning uncontrolled to an inexact location on Earth. The location of the
Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics (CfA) in Cambridge, Massachusetts, says that in the past 30 years, only the Chinese Communist Party has allowed rocket debris to fall to Earth at will.
In May 2020, the wreckage of another Chinese Communist Party Long March 5B rocket also returned to Earth in an uncontrolled manner, with some wreckage destroying villages in the Ivory Coast of West Africa.
Recent Comments