Maybe you’ve noticed that I don’t spend much time discussing China. It’s a difficult subject and I’m far from an expert. I also find it hard to get news about China that I trust. I’m not much interested in joining a choir of critics when I have nothing novel to add, and I definitely don’t want to be an apologist for a regime I find repugnant. For all these reasons, I don’t often offer an opinion on Chinese matters.
However, I am not pleased with their decision to launch things into space that will come crashing back to Earth. It’s not so much that they do this at all, but that they don’t take any care to control where things will land. The whole world just spent days wondering where a 22-ton remnant of their Long March 5B rocket would land. As it turns out, it landed in the Indian Ocean, somewhere southwest of the Maldives. That’s fortunate because it did no damage, but it’s also pure luck.
At around 100 feet tall and weighing about 22 metric tons, the rocket stage is one of the largest objects to ever reenter the Earth’s atmosphere on an uncontrolled trajectory.
When they a did a test run of the Long March 5B rocket in 2020, the debris landed in Côte d’Ivoire. Had the rocket reentered the atmosphere 30 minutes earlier, the debris would have scattered over the United States. The probability of someone being hurt is very low, although NASA killed a cow in Cuba with falling space debris in 1960.
My bottom line is that if you have the technical know-how to put a space station in orbit, then you’re just cutting corners if you don’t take precautions by controlling where the debris comes down on Earth.
There are bigger things to complain about, like China’s treatment of their Uyghur population, but this still bothers me enough to warrant comment.
IIRC, China plans on launching 22 more of these rockets in order to complete their space station. The odds that at least three of them hit land when they fall back to Earth is about 100%. (Assuming each rocket comes down randomly — there is a 29% chance, with each launch, that the booster stage will hit land. (The Earth’s surface is 71% water.)
Of course, you can increase or decrease those odds to a certain extent depending on the flight path chosen.
I am having a hard time trying to figure out why China opted to go with the uncontrolled re-entry. It does not make any sense to me.
Nor me. The only thing that comes close to an explanation is the extra costs required to assure a controlled re-entry. Even that is pretty silly. They are very likely to avoid a catastrophic return even with 22 more launches, but I don’t think they can avoid a catastrophic hit to their reputation around the world if this continues to happen over 22 more launches.
If I had to bet right now, I’d guess that the system designed to return the rocket safely has failed twice in a row. That seems more likely to me than the Chinese accepting this sort of risk to their standing in the world to save a relatively small amount of money..
Things will get very ugly very fast if one of these things hits a densely populated area. The era of just hoping for the best is OVER!
Just read a story today that they’ve built an entire illegal colony in Bhutan and are working on more. It’s like they’re on a mission to piss off the entire world.