"The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth," Nelson said. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson voiced similar sentiments, calling out China in a statement issued today shortly after the reentry. "That would be the responsible thing to do."
"What really should have happened is, there should have been some fuel left on board for this to be a controlled reentry," Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the California-based tracking company LeoLabs, said Thursday (July 28) during a Long March 5B reentry discussion that The Aerospace Corporation livestreamed on Twitter. But the fact that the crash occurred at all does not reflect well on China and its spaceflight program, experts say. We'll have to wait a while to see exactly where the rocket debris came down. That location is over open ocean, just off the coast of Palawan Island, which is part of the Philippines. It's "unlikely but not impossible" that one or more chunks hit a population center, he added in another tweet.Ĭhinese space officials, for their part, said the rocket body reentered at 119.0 degrees east longitude and 9.1 degrees north latitude. "The video from Kuching implies it was high in the atmosphere at that time - any debris would land hundreds of km further along track, near Sibu, Bintulu or even Brunei," astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said via Twitter today. One observer appeared to capture the rocket's breakup from Kuching, in the Malaysian state of Sarawak, for example, posting video of the dramatic event on Twitter. Indeed, 5.5 tons to 9.9 tons (5 to 9 metric tons) of the Long March 5B likely survived all the way to the ground today, experts with The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies have estimated.Īnd it's possible that falling rocket chunks caused some injuries or infrastructure damage today, given where the Long March 5B reentered.
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