There was no immediate report of any debris or damage caused by the missile’s uncontrolled return. #USSPACECOM can confirm that the People’s Republic of China (PRC) Long March 5B (CZ-5B) re-entered the Indian Ocean at 10:45am. MDT on 7/30. We refer you to #PRC for more details on the technical aspects of re-entry, such as possible debris dispersion + impact location. — US Space Command (@US_SpaceCom) July 30, 2022 Before its arrival, the Aerospace Corporation had said it was likely to burn up on return, but there was little risk of debris causing damage or casualties. The company also could not predict the exact point of re-entry or how much damage could be done. The booster, which China decided not to drive back into the atmosphere, caught the attention of the space community. It was part of the massive 23-tonne Long March 5B-Y3 rocket – China’s most powerful – that carried the Wentian module to the station, which currently houses three astronauts. According to researchers at The Aerospace Corporation, “there is a non-zero chance that surviving debris will land in a populated area—over 88 percent of the world’s population lives below the potential debris footprint of the inlet.” While China is not alone in such practices, the size of the Long March missile stage has attracted particular scrutiny. China 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 its space junk” after parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean. Earlier this week, a Chinese cargo spacecraft servicing the country’s permanent space station in orbit burned up heavily during re-entry. Only small parts of the Tianzhou-3 craft survived to land safely on Wednesday in a predetermined area of the South Pacific, the China Manned Space Agency said. A Long March-5B Y3 rocket carrying China’s Wentian Space Station Laboratory Module is launched from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on July 24, 2022, in Wenchang, Hainan Province, China. VCG/VCG via Getty Images In 2018, Tiangong 1, China’s defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. In 2020, another Long March-5B rocket fell through the atmosphere and eventually landed near the west coast of Africa. China also came under heavy criticism after it used a missile to destroy one of its weather satellites in 2007, creating a huge debris field. Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian dismissed such concerns. “Since the development stage of the space engineering program, China has taken into account the mitigation of debris and the de-orbital return to the atmosphere of missions involving launch vehicles and satellites sent into orbit,” Zhao said at a daily briefing on Wednesday. “It is understood that this type of rocket adopts a special technical design that most of the components will burn up and be destroyed during the re-entry process,” Zhao said. “The potential for damage to air operations or on the ground is extremely low.” The most significant re-entry breakup in a populated area was the space shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. When the 200,000-pound spacecraft broke up over Texas, a significant amount of debris fell to the ground, but there were no injuries. Similarly, when Skylab came back in 1978, debris fell over Western Australia, but no injuries were reported. William Harwood and Sophie Lewis contributed to this report. More
