China's giant rocket shatters on return over Southeast Asia

China's huge CZ-5B rocket stage, which crashed out of space, has landed in Southeast Asia, shattering into numerous pieces of debris.

China's giant rocket shatters on return over Southeast Asia

China's huge CZ-5B rocket stage, which crashed out of space, has landed in Southeast Asia, shattering into numerous pieces of debris. It is not yet known whether there was any damage on the ground.

US space surveillance said in a brief statement that the 33 meter long upper stage of the rocket, weighing an estimated 20 tons, entered the earth's atmosphere over the Indian Ocean. On Saturday evening, videos circulated on social networks that apparently showed burning debris from the rocket stage in the sky over Kuching in Malaysia. The Chinese media reported a crash into the sea, in the so-called Sulu Sea, south of the Philippine island of Palawan.

In the past few days there have been fears that the debris from the burned-out rocket stage could possibly hit cities with a population of more than one million. Early calculations say 88 percent of the world's population lives in the potential crash site. Due to the enormous speed of the rocket stage before re-entry, an exact forecast and warning for the endangered region is not possible.

"We expect a crash somewhere between Japan and California," said Rolf Densing, Mission Operations Director of the European Space Agency ESA, to WELT regarding the huge Chinese rocket stage CZ-5B crashing uncontrolled from space. According to calculations, the crash should have taken place at 6:16 p.m.

Space experts had followed the trajectory of the upper stage of the rocket with concern. With their help, Beijing's space station was further expanded on July 24 with the launch of China's largest rocket, the Long March 5B. However, China does not follow international customs and rules of conduct regarding the controlled re-entry of burned-out rocket stages. There is no legally binding regulation for this.

Experts have been trying to determine the crash zone for days using model calculations and radar data. The further the rocket stage descends, the more precisely it can predict entry into denser layers of the earth's atmosphere. Initially, an approximately 9000 km wide belt around the equator was named as a potential crash area, which would have included southern parts of Europe such as southern Spain and the Mediterranean region. More and more flight data and projections then showed that the flight corridor no longer leads through Europe.

Many experts now expected a crash into the sea and thus a scenario comparable to that in May 2021, when debris from a CZ-5B upper stage also hit the sea off the Maldives. In May 2020, however, houses were damaged by debris from an upper school in West African Ivory Coast.

ESA Director Densing regretted that China did not provide data on the rocket's upper stage to calculate the trajectory more precisely. "It would be nicer if we could get the orbit data directly from China." As with air travel, the world should come together in an agreement on the use of space, called "space traffic management," Densing said.

There should be more transparency. The rapidly increasing number of objects in space, whether satellites or space debris, is a global problem. "The usable orbits around the earth are a finite resource," says Densing. "We should leave something for our children."

Probably the greatest challenge when it comes to the disposal of space activities arises with the demise of the International Space Station ISS. Russia has just announced its exit from joint activities after 2024. Europeans want to stay until 2030. "The ISS will be dismantled again at the end of its service life and the individual parts will be brought down in a controlled manner," predicts Densing.

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