China's loosely regulated rocket debris could be dangerous - and harmful to US industry
Fox News
Experts say the uncontrolled reentry of China’s Long March 5B rocket has only a small chance of hurting anyone on the ground – but Beijing’s blast-off subsidies may already be hurting the budding U.S. launch industry.
In the meantime, the 23-ton rocket core, which is about 100 feet long and 15 feet wide, is whizzing around the planet at about 18,000 mph, inching its way toward the surface as it builds friction against the atmosphere. It’s expected to break apart, leaving much of it to burn up in the upper atmosphere, but the object is large enough for chunks to survive reentry and reach the ground – which happened when parts of another Long March rocket slammed into West Africa last year. Experts can’t pinpoint when or where it’ll hit until it gets closer, and many more Long March launches are expected over the next two years. "A simple fix China could make is to do launches where they switch off the rocket a few seconds early, so it falls into the sea right away," the astronomer and space debris expert Dr. Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, told Fox News Friday. "Then they'd need extra engines on the thing the rocket is launching to get the last few miles-an-hour acceleration to its destination, and that is extra complication and expense - but worth it in my opinion."More Related News