The most significant re-entry breakup over a populated area was the shuttle Columbia, which entered in February 2003. "The possibility of causing damage to aviation activities or on the ground is extremely low." "It is understood that this type of rocket adopts a special technical design that most of the components will be burnt up and destroyed during the reentry process," Zhao said. "Since the development stage of the space engineering program, China has taken into consideration the debris mitigation and return from orbit into atmosphere of missions involving rocket carriers and satellite sent into orbit," Zhao said at a daily briefing Wednesday. In 2020, another Long March-5B rocket fell into the atmosphere, ultimately landing near the west coast of Africa.Ĭhina also drew heavy criticism after using a missile to destroy one of its defunct weather satellites in 2007, creating a massive debris field.įoreign Ministry spokesperson Zhao Lijian rejected such concerns. In 2018, Tiangong 1, China's defunct space station, made an uncontrolled re-entry and landed somewhere in the Pacific Ocean. A Long March-5B Y3 rocket carrying China's space station lab module Wentian blasts off from Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on July 24, 2022, in Wenchang, Hainan Province of China. Only small parts of the Tianzhou-3 ship survived to fall safely Wednesday into a predetermined area of the South Pacific, the China Manned Space Agency said.
While China is not alone in such practices, the size of the Long March rocket stage has drawn particular scrutiny.Ĭhina has allowed rocket stages to fall back to Earth on their own at least twice before, and was accused by NASA last year of "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris" after parts of a Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean.Įarlier this week, a Chinese cargo spacecraft that serviced the country's permanent orbiting space station largely burned up on reentering the atmosphere.
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