Chinese rocket debris

According to the Centre for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies (CORDS) "over 88% of the world's population lives under the re-entry's potential debris footprint ...

Experts at CORDS from the Aerospace Corporation have warned that as a "general rule of thumb... In a Q&A on Aerospace Corporation's blog, the company said that the booster is one of the largest objects to re-enter Earth after reaching orbit. Chinese state media has dismissed the concerns as "sour grapes" and claimed to have a "flawless safety record" despite some analysis suggesting a previous re-entry damaged buildings in the Ivory Coast.

A big Chinese rocket body will crash back to Earth tomorrow (July 30), but nobody knows exactly when or where.

Mike Wall is the author of " Out There (opens in new tab)" (Grand Central Publishing, 2018; illustrated by Karl Tate), a book about the search for alien life. We saw such falls after the Long March 5B's two previous missions, which launched in May 2020 and April 2021. And even a fall over terra firma is unlikely to result in injuries or infrastructure damage, given that most people live in big metropolitan areas that are separated by many miles of open space. The Long March 5B core, by contrast, reaches orbit along with its payload and stays aloft until atmospheric drag brings it down in an uncontrolled fashion. But it's tough at the moment to say much more than that, given the imprecision of the reentry window. The rocket body appears to be "tumbling in some fashion, meaning that there's a constantly sort of varying amount of drag that's put on it," Matthew Shouppe, senior director for commercial space at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said during yesterday's discussion.

The core stage of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth next week, in a reentry that China is tracking closely and ...

"The warnings are there for all users of space; the question is whether they will take action now to deal with them." But Muelhaupt said the odds of this debris harming someone range from 1 in 1,000 to 1 in 230 and the risk to a single individual is much lower — around 1 in 6 trillion to 1 in 10 trillion. For instance, in March 2021, debris from a falling SpaceX rocket smashed into a farm in Washington state, an event she claims Western news outlets covered positively and with the use of "romantic words." "Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of reentries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations," NASA Administrator Bill Nelson wrote in a statement (opens in new tab) after the 2021 Long March 5B crash landing. "The large tanks and the skin of this core stage are likely to come apart. This is the third time in two years that China has disposed of its rockets in an uncontrolled manner.