Remnants of a large Chinese missile are expected to pass through the atmosphere this weekend in an uncontrolled re-entry that Beijing says it is closely monitoring but poses little risk to anyone on Earth. The Long March 5B rocket blasted off on Sunday to deliver a laboratory module to China’s new space station under construction into orbit, marking the third flight of China’s most powerful rocket since its maiden launch in 2020. As was the case during its first two flights, the rocket’s entire core stage — which is 100 feet (30 meters) long and weighs 22 tons (48,500 pounds) — has already reached a low orbit and is expected to fall back toward Earth when atmospheric friction drags it down, according to American experts. Eventually, the rocket’s body will disintegrate as it sinks into the atmosphere, but it is large enough that many pieces will likely survive a fiery reentry to rain debris in an area about 2,000 km (1,240 mi) long and about 70 km (44 mi) width , independent US-based analysts said on Wednesday. The likely location of the debris field is impossible to determine in advance, although experts will be able to narrow down the potential impact zone closer to re-entry in the coming days. Re-entry of the latest available tracking data projects will happen at about 00:24 GMT Sunday, plus or minus 16 hours, according to Aerospace Corp, a nonprofit government-funded research center near Los Angeles.
“Fairly low” risk
The overall risk to people and property on the ground is quite low, given that 75 percent of Earth’s surface in the likely path of the debris is water, desert or jungle, aerospace analyst Ted Muelhaupt told reporters at a news briefing . However, there is the possibility of pieces of the missile falling over a residential area, as happened in May 2020 when fragments of another Chinese Long March 5B landed in Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings in the West African nation, although no injuries were reported, Muelhaupt said. Instead, he said, the United States and most spacefaring nations generally pay the extra cost of designing their rockets to avoid long, uncontrolled re-entries — something that has been largely seen since large chunks of NASA’s Skylab space station fell off orbit in 1979 and landed in Australia. Overall, the odds of someone being injured or killed this weekend by falling rocket fragments range from one in 1,000 to one in 230, well above the internationally accepted casualty risk limit of one in 10,000, he told reporters. But the risk to any individual is much lower, on the order of six chances in 10 trillion. By comparison, he said, the odds of being struck by lightning are about 80,000 times greater. Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesman Zhao Lijian said the chance of debris causing damage to aviation or people and property on the ground was very small. He said most of the rocket’s components would be destroyed on re-entry. Last year, NASA and others accused China of being opaque after the Beijing government remained silent on the estimated debris trajectory, or re-entry window, of the last Long March rocket flight in May 2021. Debris from that flight ended up landing safely in the Indian Ocean. Hours after Zhao spoke on Wednesday, the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) gave the approximate location of its latest rocket in a rare public statement. As of 4:00 p.m. (08:00 GMT), the agency said the rocket circled the globe in an elliptical orbit that was 263.2 km (163.5 miles) high at its furthest point and 176.6 km ( 109.7 miles) to the nearest. No estimated re-entry details were provided by CMSA on Wednesday.
