For the fourth time, an uncontrolled Long March 5B rocket has entered the atmosphere, prompting Spain to close its airspace. It is the second time this year that such a rocket has re-entered the atmosphere in an uncontrolled fashion. Confirmed by US Space Command, pieces of the rocket that carried the third and final piece of China’s Tiangong space station to orbit had re-entered the planet’s atmosphere over the south-central Pacific Ocean.
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According to The New York Times, the debris eventually plunged into the body of water, leaving no one harmed. Unlike many of its modern counterparts, including the SpaceX Falcon 9, the Long March 5B can’t reignite its engine to complete a predictable descent back to Earth.
It also doesn’t seem like China is interested in creating rockets that can be controlled in the future. Every time they launch a Long March 5B into space, astronomers and onlookers have anxiously followed its path back to the surface, worrying it might land somewhere people live. Spain briefly closed a portion of its airspace as the air control was unclear about where this rocket would come back to Earth, and it led to hundreds of flights being delayed.
Space debris landing on Earth isn’t a problem unique to China. In August, for instance, a farmer in rural Australia found a piece of a SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft that landed on his farm. However, many experts stress that those incidents differ from the one that occured on Friday. “The thing I want to point out about this is that we, the world, don’t deliberately launch things this big intending them to fall wherever,” Ted Muelhaupt, an Aerospace Corporation consultant, told The Times. “We haven’t done that for 50 years.” China will launch another Long March 5B rocket next year when it attempts to put its Xuntian space telescope into orbit.