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Chinese rocket module “long March 5B” is hurtling back to earth after launch (Debris landed in the Indian Ocean)

Clefargle

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Chinese Rocket Launch stages expected to renter Earth's atmosphere this weekend

05-may_china-rocket.jpg


On 29 April, China launched the first module of its biggest space station yet atop a Long March 5B rocket. Now, part of that rocket is hurtling back towards Earth, and there is no way to predict exactly where or when it will land.

Most large rockets perform a controlled re-entry when they return from their missions in space, with operators often taking care to land them in the ocean and avoid any potentially inhabited areas. However, the China National Space Administration has a history of allowing its spacecraft to perform uncontrolled re-entries, sometimes even smashing down into populated towns.




Long March 5B is specially designed to launch heavy space station parts, so it is particularly large. It consists of four boosters surrounding a core that is 30 metres long and weighs about 20 tonnes. The boosters detached shortly after the launch as expected. The rocket's core is now tumbling wildly as it orbits at speeds exceeding 7.5 kilometres per second.

At that pace, it circles the planet about once every 90 minutes, which makes predicting where it will land extraordinarily difficult.
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Pretty terrifying story I hope it splashes down in the ocean but imagine if this hit a populated area!? Apparently this happened before to a town in Africa but I hadn't heard about it until now, maybe due to the fact that it happened to Africa and not some western power. Keep your eyes on the skies this weekend.

Drop me out of orbit if old
 
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Pankratous

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Oct 26, 2017
9,263
Wouldn't it just burn up on re-entry?

Also, the idea of travelling 7.5 kilometres a second is crazy haha.
 

mAcOdIn

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Oct 27, 2017
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China's crazy with that shit, I saw one where it landed back in China on someone's house.
 
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Clefargle

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Pankratous said:
Wouldn't it just burn up on re-entry?

Also, the idea of travelling 7.5 kilometres a second is crazy haha.
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From the article:

Some parts of the rocket will almost certainly burn up as it travels through the atmosphere, but it is so large that it won't disintegrate completely.

A previous launch of a Long March 5B rocket also had an uncontrolled re-entry, which was the fourth largest such crash ever. Most of the debris splashed down in the Atlantic Ocean, but if it had entered the atmosphere less than an hour earlier, it could have landed somewhere in the densely populated eastern US.
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Bregor

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Oct 27, 2017
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China still has a ways to go about making sure their boosters are disposed of responsibly. Most other nations figured this out decades ago.
 
Mivey

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Oct 25, 2017
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PS9 said:
I feel like this is the kind of thing that should be figured out BEFORE we start shooting rockets at the sky.
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China don't care.
Gotta go fast and break things. Beautiful seeing such proudly communist values at work, disregarding the safety of your fellow man to make profits.
 
PanickyFool

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Oct 25, 2017
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mAcOdIn said:
China's crazy with that shit, I saw one where it landed back in China on someone's house.
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This is pretty different. Typically when china crashes a booster in their population, the launch went as expected, the booster did not make orbit and it ballistically falls back down.

This is a style of launch we have not seen in decades where they launch the booster into orbit as a margin of safety for the launch

Monkey D. said:
I heard that some parts don't burn up.



I think the ISS could survive reentry and crash down for example
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This happened with MIR.
 
Onix555

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Apr 23, 2019
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This is some major fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
 
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MrKlaw

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Oct 25, 2017
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don't all boosters do this? And from lower altitudes so some won't fully burn up. Is the only difference the trajectory and controlling to make sure they hit the ocean?
 
Chopchop

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That's fucked up. They should really take more care to make sure their rockets wind up somewhere unpopulated.
 

Lishi

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Oct 27, 2017
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PanickyFool said:
This is pretty different. Typically when china crashes a booster in their population, the launch went as expected, the booster did not make orbit and it ballistically falls back down.

This is a style of launch we have not seen in decades where they launch the booster into orbit as a margin of safety for the launch



This happened with MIR.
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There was some cold era policy in China where all rocket (missile) facility have to be far inland. In that case cannot really avoid falling on ground if launch fail.
This rocket was launched in the new facility in hainan toward the sea.
 
Bregor

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Onix555 said:
This is some major white fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
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All upper modules re-enter, but most in a controlled way so that the chance of trouble is minimized. Sometimes this fails, and it comes down randomly like the recent SpaceX upper stage that dropped some debris in Washington.

But here China has simply chosen not to bother controlling it. Not a good look, whether or not it does harm.
 
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Clefargle

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Onix555 said:
This is some major white fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
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Whoa, hang on a sec that's not what this article says is expected. This won't likely break up on reentry.
 
mute

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Dekuman said:
Yes but China don't care. They're currently bulling the Philippines
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Ok but also from the perspective of why are the rocket parts not on some big screen in NORAD with a dotted line showing where they will fall? Has TV lied to me? What are we paying them for?
 
El_TigroX

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Oct 27, 2017
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Onix555 said:
This is some major white fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
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"White fear-bait," fuck that.

Good luck catching a lug nut in your fucking head when this breaks up.

Just because people are concerned, and just because China absolutely fucked up, doesn't make this some race thing. This is about accountability, mistakes and how they handle it. Imagine shooting rockets over populated areas and then going "WELL ACTUALLY...It's the LESS dangerous super rocket"
 
Dekuman

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mute said:
Ok but also from the perspective of why are the rocket parts not on some big screen in NORAD with a dotted line showing where they will fall? Has TV lied to me? What are we paying them for?
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I think they are? There are expectations people launching clean up after themselves with controlled reentry and burn up at a pre defined safe location,probably over ocean.

This is news because the Chinese have lost control and people are scrambling to find out where it may land. The last uncontrolled booster reentry from China hit Africa
 
Jebusman

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Onix555 said:
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.
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But not all.

This isn't something any nation should be toying about with. We should not be allowing uncontrolled re-entries as the "planned" operation. You fire something up into space, you have a plan to properly bring it back down to earth, in a location where it's not going to do any damage (or design it in such a way that it completely disintegrates upon re-entry)
 
Yueezy

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Dec 12, 2020
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Hope it lands on Chinese government so that they learn they should consider other's life when doing shit.
 
XMonkey

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Oct 26, 2017
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Onix555 said:
This is some major white fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
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This is some major hand-wave.
 
Kinthey

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mute said:
Ok but also from the perspective of why are the rocket parts not on some big screen in NORAD with a dotted line showing where they will fall? Has TV lied to me? What are we paying them for?
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This article has a bit more details: https://gizmodo.com/100-foot-tall-booster-from-chinese-rocket-will-likely-m-1846797068

They're tracking it but the exact moment of reentry seems unclear. All the various elements during an atmospheric entry probably makes exact predictions harder as well.

It's currently impossible to know when the booster, which now weighs around 23 tons, will deorbit and where it might land. As SpaceNews reports, the object's "orbital inclination of 41.5 degrees means the rocket body passes a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, and could make its reentry at any point within this area."

The U.S. military is using radar to track the wayward object, now designated 2021-035B, and its altitude is oscillating between 106 and 231 miles (170 and 372 km) above the surface, according to SpaceNews. Traveling at more than 4.4 miles per second (7 km/s), the object is flashing periodically, which suggests it's tumbling and very much out of control.

McDowell suspects we'll get a prediction about the booster reentry in a day or two, but "it won't be useful in terms of location, just approximate time." As McDowell reminds us, "a one-hour error in the reentry time is an 18,000-mile error in the location."
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Guy Legend

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Sep 22, 2020
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Irresponsible China. Though remote, if this lands any place populated this turns into a big incident.
 
Crispy75

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mute said:
Ok but also from the perspective of why are the rocket parts not on some big screen in NORAD with a dotted line showing where they will fall? Has TV lied to me? What are we paying them for?
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Because it's tumbling, the aerodynamics are hard to predict. A little more or less drag today means a difference of 1000s of km in the eventual impact location.

Dekuman said:
This is news because the Chinese have lost control and people are scrambling to find out where it may land. The last uncontrolled booster reentry from China hit Africa
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They didn't lose control. The design is fundamentally uncontrollable. The main engine of the core stage cannot be relit, and there are no dedicated de-orbit motors.
 
Dekuman

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Crispy75 said:
Because it's tumbling, the aerodynamics are hard to predict. A little more or less drag today means a difference of 1000s of km in the eventual impact location.



They didn't lose control. The design is fundamentally uncontrollable. The main engine of the core stage cannot be relit, and there are no dedicated de-orbit motors.
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Ok let me rephrase. they have no control and the rocket wasn't designed for controlled reentry
 
Tacitus

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mute said:
Ok but also from the perspective of why are the rocket parts not on some big screen in NORAD with a dotted line showing where they will fall? Has TV lied to me? What are we paying them for?
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They are tracking it. But when the damn thing orbits the planet every 90 minutes, they can't say where exactly it'll fall.
 
mute

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Crispy75 said:
Because it's tumbling, the aerodynamics are hard to predict. A little more or less drag today means a difference of 1000s of km in the eventual impact location.
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I guess I underestimated at what point aerodynamics come into play. I've watched too many rockets land on tiny boats :P

At least someone has eyes on it at least, hopefully there can be some warning if it is needed.
 

SRG01

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Mivey said:
China don't care.
Gotta go fast and break things. Beautiful seeing such proudly communist values at work, disregarding the safety of your fellow man to make profits.
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It's surprising how much China has in common with hyper-capitalist mindsets, like Silicon Valley. Iterate as fast as possible, and damn the consequences.
 
Gunny T Highway

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Syriel

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Onix555 said:
This is some major fear-bait.

All upper modules of rockets re-enter the atmosphere after short periods of time, this is no different. Its' size and weight are far below some of the cases brought up like Skylab or etc, as such it will disintergrate upon reentry.
I would also like to remind people that most of Earths surface is ocean.

Speaking of, I would like to make a distinction between LM3's launched from inland, and those such as LM7s and 5s launched from Hainan. People think they drop LM5 boosters over population, but they are actually confusing it with the former. Hainan is an island off the south coast, and orbital laubches go over the pacific.
People tend to think they all go over mainland.
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This post shows a serious misunderstanding of re-entry.

The Long March 5B is large. It is tumbling. It will not "disintegrate" upon re-entry.

It will likely break up upon re-entry.

The debris field from something like this has the potential to cover a decent amount of area if it does break up.

You don't usually hear about re-entry issues because most are controlled and end up in the ocean (which is a potential pollution issue, but not a "it might drop on a populated city center" issue).
 
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