ACROSS AMERICA — After all that 2020 and 2021 have dealt us, we wouldn't put this out in the universe if it wasn't already there. A huge rocket launcher that weighs around 21 metric tons and is approximately the size of a 10-story building is tumbling toward Earth and could land almost anywhere any day now.
It's called the Long March 5B heavy-lift booster, a name that implies the enormity of this thing. As enticing as drinking games or the betting over-under on when or where it might fall are, this is serious business.
Measuring 100 feet long and 16 feet wide, it lifted and successfully launched China's Tianhe into orbit, pointing the module toward the space station that China plans to build over a series of 11 launches by the end of 2022.
That all worked like clockwork.
The trouble began when the booster — 1,600 square feet of stainless steel, titanium and other heat-resistant materials — inadvertently went into low Earth orbit. Keep in mind, this thing is about seven times bigger than the Falcon 9 booster that re-entered Earth's atmosphere over Seattle a few weeks ago — that was a malfunction, too — and dumped a pressure tank that gouged a 4-inch hole in farm ground in central Washington.
As closely as experts can predict — and that's not closely at all — the uncontrolled rocket launcher re-entry is likely to occur in the next few days somewhere "a little farther north than New York, Madrid and Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand," journalist Andrew Jones reported for SpaceNews.
In other words, that could include almost any one of us — although experts do point out the most likely scenario is one in which debris surviving the intense heat of a re-entry falls into oceans or uninhibited areas.
Not only is Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who tracks objects orbiting Earth, not comforted by that, he said China has failed to make improvements to the core stage — the backbone of a rocket, supporting its payload, upper stage and crew vehicle — to control where it re-enters our planet's atmosphere.
Last May, the core stage of the Long March 5B rocket that China launched fell into our planet's low orbit and dropped into the Atlantic Ocean, potentially threatening some villages in West Africa, according to Gizmodo. No casualties were reported.
McDowell thinks the design of the core stage booster is intentional and that it "tarnishes China's great achievement in launching Tianhe."
"Both CZ-5B launches have left their core stage in orbit for uncontrolled re-entry," he told Gizmodo in an email. "They are over 20 [metric tons]. It has been standard practice for 30 years for the rest of the world not to leave objects this big — or even half this big — in orbit without controlled deorbit."
The launcher hurtling from Earth's low orbit would be the biggest space object ever to fall on our planet.
"I think by current standards it's unacceptable to let it re-enter uncontrolled," McDowell told Jones for the SpaceNews story. "Since 1990 nothing over 10 tons has been deliberately left in orbit to re-enter uncontrolled."
But let's be clear:
Junk has fallen from space fairly consistently since the Soviets sent Sputnik into space on Oct. 4, 1957, the dawn of the space age. By 2016, more than 41,500 metric tons had been hurtled into the orbital paths of the Earth, the sun and other planets in 5,197 space events, according to the European Space Agency. During the same October 1957 to January 2016 period, more than 23,600 human-made objects have entered Earth's atmosphere, amounting to about 33,200 metric tons of space debris.
About 100 metric tons of space junk re-enter Earth's atmosphere uncontrolled every year. Pressure vessels, like the one that fell in the Pacific Northwest earlier this spring, are "particularly abundant," the European Space Agency said, and debris objects have fallen in about 80 inhabited parts of the world.
In 2018, an early prototype of China's space station fell to Earth and disintegrated into the atmosphere over the South Pacific Ocean. Scientific American described it as about the size of a school bus, but said it wasn't the largest spacecraft ever to fall at least partially uncontrolled from the sky.
That distinction belongs to the NASA's 100-U.S. ton Columbia space shuttle, which killed all seven astronauts on board when it broke apart during its Feb. 1, 2003, descent back to Earth after a 16-day mission. The shuttle was damaged more than two weeks earlier during the launch, when a piece of foam insulation from the external fuel tank broke off, punching a hole in the heat shield on Columbia's left wing.
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May 04, 2021 at 02:41AM
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Rocket Launcher As Big As 10-Story Building Could Crash To Earth - Patch.com
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