Uncontrolled Chinese rocket: US monitors wreckage due to fall on Earth on Saturday
Launch of the 5B Long March rocket, linked to a new Chinese space station
The wreckage of a huge Chinese rocket launched last week is expected to plunge back into the atmosphere this weekend (May 8) in an uncontrolled reentry being monitored by the US Space Command.
According to the American military, the 5B Long March rocket took off from the Chinese island of Hainan on April 29 carrying the Tianhe module, which contains what will become the accommodation of three crew members on a permanent Chinese space station. The launch of Tianhe was the first of 11 missions necessary to complete the assembly of the station.
After its separation from the space station module, the rocket began to orbit the Earth on an irregular trajectory while slowly losing altitude, making any prediction about where it will enter the atmosphere or fall back to the ground almost impossible.
But the exact point of descent of the rocket into the Earth's atmosphere during the fall "cannot be determined until a few hours after it re-enters" into the atmosphere, something that should happen around 5/8, the United States says.
But previous episodes sparked fears that pieces of the rocket would land on the earth's surface, more specifically in an inhabited area. This occurred in May 2020, when pieces of another Chinese Long March rocket "rained" in Côte d'Ivoire, destroying several buildings. Nobody was hurt in the episode, recalls McDowell in an interview with Reuters news agency.
The 18th Space Control Squadron at Vandenberg Air Force Base, 257 km from Los Angeles (on the US east coast), tracks more than 27,000 man-made objects that are currently in space, most of them in low orbit. The group is monitoring the Chinese rocket and plotting possible scenarios as the equipment falls.
According to Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, it is still "too early" to know if any action, such as the destruction of space debris, can be taken if inhabited regions are threatened.
For official Chinese newspaper, fears about the rocket's fall are Western propaganda
The Global Times, a Chinese tabloid published by the official People's Daily, called news reports that the rocket was "out of control" and could cause damage. According to the vehicle, "there is no point in panicking" with the episode, and citing sources from China's aerospace industry.
"Most of the wreckage will burn during re-entry ... leaving only a small portion that could fall on land, potentially in areas far from human activities, or in the ocean," said Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of Aerospace Knowledge magazine, to the Chinese newspaper.
McDowell, a member of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said the core of the rocket's main component, which is estimated to weigh almost 21 tons, must spread like a small plane-like shower of debris and fall into a narrow area over almost 160 km.
Based on its current orbit, the debris trail is likely to fall somewhere in the north, such as New York, Madrid or Beijing, and in the south, to southern Chile and Wellington in New Zealand, McDowell said.
According to him, most countries have sought to design spacecraft in order to avoid major uncontrolled reenters, since large pieces of NASA's Skylab space station fell from orbit in July 1979 over Australia.
"This current episode makes Chinese rocket designers seem careless for not having resolved this," said he, who called the case "negligence".
It is not the first time that China has lost control of a spacecraft when it returns to Earth. The Tiangong-1 space laboratory disintegrated when it returned to the atmosphere in 2018, two years after it stopped working, although Chinese officials have denied losing control of the spacecraft.
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