In 1979, NASA's Skylab space station rapidly descended, scattering debris over Australia. The Long March 5B boosters are among the largest objects to fall back to Earth, but uncontrolled reentry isn't unique to China. Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant who works on the Aerospace Corporation's reentry database, previously told Insider that an object weighting at least 1 ton falls from orbit and reenters the atmosphere on a weekly basis. 'If you roll the dice too many times, someone will get lucky,' Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astronomer who meticulously tracks objects in Earth's orbit, previously told Insider. Satellites and chunks of unknown debris fall out of orbit regularly. In a study published in the journal Nature in July, researchers calculated a roughly 10% chance that debris will strike one or more people within a 10-year period. Most of the area where debris could rain down is open ocean or uninhabited land.Ī Long March 5B Y2 rocket carrying the core module of China's space station, Tianhe, stands at the launching area of the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, on April 23, 2021. But that population is heavily condensed in a few places. The area where debris could fall covers about 88% of the human population, according to those analysts' calculations. CNN The charred remnants of a rocket booster plunged uncontrolled back to Earth Friday morning, an event decried in the West as an irresponsibly risky move by the China National Space. Chinese Rocket Will Crash to Earth on November 5: Here’s What We Know Yet another Chinese rocket is set to tumble uncontrollably back to Earth this week By Ben Turner, LiveScience on. But the Aerospace Corporation is tracking the rocket stage and predicting the possible paths it might take back to Earth. It's still too early to tell exactly where the core stage might fall - most likely in pieces. Some of it will likely burn up as it plows through the atmosphere, but the rocket body is too large to completely disintegrate.Ī rule of thumb is that 20% to 40% of a large object's mass will survive its fall through the atmosphere, experts at the Aerospace Corporation previously told Insider. The yellow icon marks the rocket body's location in the middle of the predicted window for reentry.Įxperts can only estimate how much of the Long March rocket body, which is roughly the size of a 10-story building, will slam into the Earth. The Long March 5B rocket body's projected path around Earth, represented by yellow and blue lines, during the time when it could fall, as of November 2, 2022. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders.

Rocket falling to earth