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On Friday, a 23-ton center Chinese rocket stage tumbled back to Earth in the Pacific Ocean, the United States Space Command reported in a tweet on Friday morning.
That was a large piece of the Long March 5B rocket that launched a third and final module to complete its Tiangong space station.
And once again, that created some nervous sky-watching around the world as China’s rocket designers left it to chance where exactly the rocket stage would re-enter, scattering tons of metal pieces across the surface.
“Here we go again,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that performs research and analysis, said in a news conference on Wednesday.
The Long March 5B booster is not the only human-made object, or even the largest, to ever fall from space. And pieces of spacecraft from other countries, including the United States, have also fallen back to Earth recently — including a small piece of a SpaceX vehicle that turned up on an Australian sheep farm in August.
www.nytimes.com
That was a large piece of the Long March 5B rocket that launched a third and final module to complete its Tiangong space station.
And once again, that created some nervous sky-watching around the world as China’s rocket designers left it to chance where exactly the rocket stage would re-enter, scattering tons of metal pieces across the surface.
“Here we go again,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant for the Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit group largely financed by the U.S. government that performs research and analysis, said in a news conference on Wednesday.
The Long March 5B booster is not the only human-made object, or even the largest, to ever fall from space. And pieces of spacecraft from other countries, including the United States, have also fallen back to Earth recently — including a small piece of a SpaceX vehicle that turned up on an Australian sheep farm in August.
China Lucks Out Again as Out-of-Control Rocket Booster Falls in the Pacific
For the fourth time, the country’s space program used a 23-ton launcher that made an uncontrolled re-entry back to Earth, prompting nervous sky-watching and airspace closures in Europe.
