An uncontrolled Chinese rocket booster will fall to Earth this weekend - The Verge

Another uncontrollable Chinese rocket booster will fall to Earth sometime around July 30th, and it’s so massive that parts of it may survive reentry.

Sometime this weekend, a massive booster from a Chinese rocket will begin an uncontrolled fall back to Earth from space — and because of its considerable size and weight, parts of it may survive the descent through our planet’s atmosphere and hit the ground. The chances of the rocket hitting anyone and killing them are exceedingly rare, but a similar falling Chinese rocket last year sparked major concern worldwide, which means this rocket will probably do the same.

The booster is part of a Long March 5B rocket, which launched on July 24th, sending a new module into orbit for China’s growing Tiangong space station. After the giant rocket reaches space, it sheds a fairly massive part of itself: its core booster. This booster sticks around in orbit, lapping the planet before eventually falling back to Earth. Since the rocket part is more than 100 feet long and more than 22 tons in weight, it’s possible that up to 9 tons’ worth of material could survive the fall.

Space trackers are doing their best to predict exactly when and where the Long March 5B booster will come down. The situation closely mimics that of last year’s global scare over an uncontrolled Chinese rocket that fell back to Earth, as well as a similar uncontrolled reentry in 2020. Both of those instances also involved a core booster from China’s Long March 5B, which does not have the capability of disposing of itself in a controlled manner. Fortunately, last year, the rocket came down in the sparsely populated Indian Ocean, but in 2020, that falling rocket did dump debris off of the Ivory Coast, sending metal pipes and other objects into villages without causing any injuries.

Still, the risk to the average human from this year’s rocket is so low that it should not keep anyone up at night. In fact, for any one person on Earth, there are six chances in 10 trillion that a part of this rocket will hit you and cause some kind of casualty or injury, according to the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit that does space research and development, as well as provide technical guidance on spaceflight. But, the fact that space trackers have to continue to deal with this kind of issue without knowing when and where the rocket will come down is frustrating.

“Why are we worried? Well, it did cause property damage the last time, and people are having to do preparation as a result,” Ted Muelhaupt, a space traffic expert and consultant with the Aerospace Corporations’ corporate chief engineer’s office, said during a presser about the rocket. “Furthermore, this is not needed. We have the technology to not have this problem.”

https://www.theverge.com/2022/7/28/23280497/china-long-march-5b-uncontrolled-rocket-reentry

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