Relief as China’s rocket debris falls into ocean

PARTS from a Chinese Long March rocket fell into the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, China’s Manned Space Engineering Office reported at the weekend, ending days of international speculation over whether plummeting rocket debris might be scattered over a populated area.

There were no reports of damage from falling debris. Videos on social media showed the 22-ton Long March 5B, which had been drifting uncontrolled in low orbit for days, blazing a trail of light over the Arabian Peninsula as it burned up during descent.

The Chinese agency said it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere yesterrday before finally landing at 72.47 degrees east, 2.65 degrees, a location in the ocean south-west of the Maldivian capital, Malé.

“The vast majority of components was ablated and destroyed during re-entry into the atmosphere,” the Chinese agency said. The US Space Command’s Space Track Project said in a tweet: “Everyone else following the #Longmarch5b re-entry can relax. The rocket is down.”

At around 100 feet (30m) tall and weighing about 22 metric tons, the rocket stage is one of the largest objects to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere on an uncontrolled trajectory.

Yesterday, the Nasa administrator Bill Nelson criticised China for “failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris” and called on space-faring nations to minimise the risk to humans and properties with their space missions.

The European Space Agency had predicted a “risk zone” that encompassed much of the world, including nearly all of the Americas, all of Africa and Australia, parts of Asia and European countries such as Italy and Greece. China did not design the mission so the used booster would have a controlled re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere over a pre-determined remote area or ocean.

Astrophysicists described China’s decision as potentially hazardous corner-cutting. China’s state media, however, said its launch was being unfairly maligned. It slammed US media for covering China’s “out-of-control space junk”, in contrast with a recent Spacex rocket that also left parts falling into farmland in the western US.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Wang Wenbin defended China’s recent mission design as “standard international practice”.

The size of the Long March rocket made its re-entry more unpredictable than others. Most satellites and other man-made objects are small enough to burn up in the atmosphere. But the Long March booster is much larger, which raised concern that pieces could survive and hit the ground. The rocket’s tumbling motion as it passed through the mesosphere, an outer layer of the Earth’s atmosphere, has also made calculations of its speed tricky to project.

China is expected to run the only operational space station after the retirement of the International Space Station in the next four years. The countryhas completed a flurry of successful lunar and Mars missions in recent years.

But its burgeoning space program has contributed to the growing problem of space debris. During the first flight of the Long March 5B rocket last year, the booster passed over populated portions of Earth before pieces of debris landed in Africa. Jim Bridenstine, the Nasa administrator at the time, said the event “could have been extremely dangerous”.