The ‘beer-can’ approach to space exploration
‘CONSIDERED BAD PRACTICE TO THROW LARGE PIECES OF METAL FROM THE SKY’
On this date last year, China conducted the first launch of its Long March 5B rocket, a new version of the slightly troubled Long March 5 vehicle. The 5B is designed to carry voluminous payloads, and it was called into service to carry two important capsules to orbit. One was a prototype for a manned spacecraft to carry Chinese astronauts; the other was a “re-entry” capsule designed to be able to bring home cargoes from future Chinese space stations.
The “crewed” spacecraft, without human passengers, is said to have performed well and eventually landed safely in Inner Mongolia. The cargo boat malfunctioned coming home and was lost.
Relatively little heed was paid to the fate of the Long March 5B rocket itself, which caused alarm amongst U.S. military sky trackers when its orbit unexpectedly began to degrade, creating the possibility that debris might survive the heat of re-entry and land anyplace along the rocket’s ground track. That’s just what it seems to have done, raining bits of metal down on the Ivory Coast. There was no harm to persons or property damage. Despite the loss of one of the two payloads and the haphazard discarding of the booster, China declared the mission a success.
The second-ever Long March 5B mission lifted off on April 29 of this year, and it carried a much more precious cargo — Tianhe, an inhabitable module that is supposed to form the core of China’s third space station. The launch was broadcast live on Chinese television, and by all accounts the Tianhe module was placed in the correct orbit.
But once again the rocket it rode on has been chucked aside like a beer can, and once again skywatchers are trying to guess where and when it will come down. This is expected to happen on May 9 or 10, but the object is travelling at nearly 28,000 km/h and it is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when the atmosphere will latch onto it and snatch it earthward.
This being a watery world, the rocket is most likely to splash into the Pacific. (Its flight path, happily, hardly interacts with Canadian soil.) But it seems obvious that China doesn’t know or care. The other spacefaring countries took steps to make sure large objects didn’t reach the surface uncontrolled after Skylab, the original space station, fell helplessly upon the Australian outback in 1979. CBC News interviewed an astrophysicist yesterday who gave them a quote to make any reporter jealous: “It’s just considered bad practice to throw large pieces of metal from the sky.”
“Bad practice” might be another way of saying “defiance of one’s natural duty to his fellow man.” The Long March 5B problem illustrates some features of the Chinese progress that is supposed by some to be about to leave the Western world devastated. Broadly speaking, the Chinese space program is trying to replicate accomplishments that NASA had mastered 40 or 50 years ago; the followup joke “Can NASA still do those things?” may be very natural, but NASA is flying solar-powered helicopters around Mars right now.
The beer-can approach to rocketry seems like a sign that China is in a hurry to catch up, and its glam new space station might have military applications. It would be a surprise if it didn’t. The ethical norms being asserted against China were once ignored by the space-pioneering countries, or little thought of; the Chinese state, silent about its rocket refuse, might claim that it is entitled to act in a 1960s way in learning 1960s space flight. Then again, maybe it has simply had two unfortunate accidents with the two launches of this model of vehicle. Is Red China a backward country, or an incompetent one, or both?
There is a 1971 UN treaty to handle situations like this: its full name is the Convention on International Liability for Damage Caused by Space Objects. This treaty creates procedures allowing states to claim and recover money for such damages from other states. It’s only been invoked once, and the country that did it is Canada, which billed the Soviet Union $6 million when the nuclear reactor from the Kosmos 954 satellite fell on Great Slave Lake and the surrounding area in 1977.
I know that sentence about a Soviet reactor falling on the Territories, spalling the wilderness with lethal nuggets of radioactive material, will come as news to younger readers. (Unless they’re in, or from, the far north. Those folks know I haven’t misremembered a Cold War thriller as history.)
It was such a big news story at the time that there was an entire Saturday Night Live episode about mutant lobsters predicated on it.
Then, in a matter of months, it vanished into the oubliette into which the deep state somehow tosses these things. Canada ended up getting only $3 million from the Soviets, covering part of the cost of the joint U.s.-canada cleanup effort, but it was thought very worthwhile to establish the reality of the Space Liability Convention. Better dust it off just in case.
THE CHINESE SPACE PROGRAM IS TRYING TO REPLICATE ACCOMPLISHMENTS THAT NASA HAD MASTERED 40 OR 50 YEARS AGO.