"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 uncontrolled crashing of the huge Chinese rocket stage CZ-5B.
According to the latest calculations, the crash should have taken place at 6:16 p.m. However, deviations in both directions of up to 90 minutes are possible.
As Densing said, the likelihood of people being hit by debris is "very, very small". So far, no one has ever been injured by falling rocket parts. "In the final phase, the trajectory of the upper stage of the rocket is 83 percent over water and 17 percent over land," said Densing, who is also head of the European Space Operations Center ESOC in Darmstadt.
Space experts had followed the path of the 33 meter long and 20 ton rocket upper stage 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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