Another day, another Chinese rocket body falling out of control from space.
The US Space Command is warning that debris from the massive Chinese rocket that was launched into space last Sunday is likely to fall to Earth soon, possibly as early as July 31.
The 10-story, 21-ton rocket was part of the Wentian space station module and docked with the country’s Tiangong space station this week.
Read more: Huge Chinese missile core falls ‘out of control’ back to Earth
The unmanned craft was launched into space by a Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Launch Center on China’s Hainan Island.
The big problem, though, is that experts aren’t sure how much of the rocket will survive, and most worryingly, they don’t know where it’s expected to crash.
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“It is always difficult to estimate the amount of surviving mass and the number of fragments without knowing the design of the object, but a reasonable ‘rule of thumb’ is about 20 to 40 percent of the original dry mass,” Holger Krag, head of the Program for space safety at the European Space Agency, told SpaceNews.
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This is the third time China has decided not to control the disposal of the missile casing, again putting the country under scrutiny. In both 2020 and 2021, China was responsible for similar uncontrolled falls.
Many experts believe that China is taking an unnecessary risk by not tracking or controlling the fall of the massive debris.
According to Space.com, the danger to human life from a falling rocket is quite small, but the sheer size of the Long March 5B rocket makes it a greater threat.
The last time this happened in 2021, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said China was “not meeting responsible standards regarding its space debris.”
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Last year, debris from a rocket splashed harmlessly into the Indian Ocean, with most of its components destroyed on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
However, after the rocket’s first flight in May 2020, pieces of space junk fell on Côte d’Ivoire, causing no injuries but damaging several buildings.
Reports of a 12 meter long object crashing in the village of Mahunu in Côte d’Ivoire. It is located directly on the CZ-5B re-entry track, 2100 km down from the Space-Track re-entry site. Part of the scene may have broken through the atmosphere so far (photo: Aminata24) pic.twitter.com/yMuyMFLfsv
— Jonathan McDowell (@planet4589) May 12, 2020
In the past, China has been defensive about its decision to allow an uncontrolled fall of the missile body. According to the New York Times, Hua Chunying, a senior spokesperson for China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs, accused the United States of “noise.”
“The United States and several other countries have taken notice of the landing of debris from Chinese missiles in the past few days,” Ms Hua said.
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“To date, no damage has been reported from the debris on landing. I have seen reports that since the launch of the first man-made satellite over 60 years ago, there has not been a single incident of a piece of debris hitting anyone. American experts put the odds of that at less than one in a billion,” she told the publication last year.
The flight path of the rocket body is difficult to predict due to fluctuations in the atmosphere caused by changes in solar activity.
Experts say this time several tons of metal could fall anywhere along the booster’s orbital path, which travels north to 41.5 degrees north latitude and south to 41.5 degrees south latitude.
In other words, major cities such as New York, Los Angeles, Cairo, and Sydney, Australia, are all in the missile’s potential path of descent.
According to a map shared on Twitter by The Aerospace Corporation, a non-profit organization largely funded by the US government, many cities in eastern Canada, such as Toronto, Montreal and Halifax, appear to fall within the expected touchdown zone, although it’s too early to say if they could be at risk.
Hello #spaceTwitter. We track the re-entry of the CZ-5B missile body. Our latest prediction is:🚀 Jul 31, 2022 11:07 UTC ± 24 hours Re-entry will be via one of the ground paths shown here. It is too early to determine the debris trail. Updates: pic.twitter.com/R2QOtdb1zD
— The Aerospace Corporation (@AerospaceCorp) July 26, 2022
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Ted Muehlhaupt, a debris expert at the Aerospace Corporation, told the NYT that the U.S. and other countries would typically control the re-entry of their space debris “if the chances of harming someone on the ground are higher than 1 in 10,000.”
He added that he was “very confident that this is over the threshold. Way over the threshold.”
To date, there are no known cases of bodily injury caused by falling man-made space junk.
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