China’s Long March 5B rocket debris crashes into Indian Ocean, state television reports

The Long March 5B, carrying a module for a Chinese space station, launched in April.(

AP: Xinhua/Ju Zenhua)

Remnants of China’s biggest rocket have crashed into the Indian Ocean, with the bulk of its components destroyed upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, according to Chinese state media.

Parts of the Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere and landed at a location with the coordinates longitude 72.47 degrees east and latitude 2.65 degrees north, Chinese state media cited the China Manned Space Engineering Office as saying.

The coordinates put the point of impact in the ocean, west of the Maldives archipelago.

Most of the debris was burnt up in the atmosphere, it said.

Debris from the Long March 5B has had some people looking warily skyward since shortly after it blasted off from China’s Hainan island on April 29.

The Long March launch last week was the second deployment of the 5B variant since its maiden flight in May 2020. Last year, pieces from the first Long March 5B fell on Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings. No injuries were reported.

With most of the Earth’s surface covered by water, the odds of a populated area on land being hit had been low, and the likelihood of injuries even lower, according to experts.

But uncertainty over the rocket’s orbital decay and China’s failure to issue stronger reassurances in the run-up to the re-entry fuelled anxiety.

During the rocket’s flight, Harvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell told Reuters the potential debris zone could have been as far north as New York, Madrid or Beijing, and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand.

Ever since large chunks of the NASA space station Skylab fell from orbit in July 1979 and landed in Australia, most countries have sought to avoid such uncontrolled re-entries through their spacecraft design, McDowell said.

The Global Times, a Chinese tabloid published by the official People’s Daily, dismissed as “Western hype” concerns the rocket was “out of control” and could cause damage.

One of the largest pieces of space debris to return to Earth

The Long March 5B — comprising one core stage and four boosters — lifted off from China’s Hainan island on April 29 with the unmanned Tianhe module, which contains what will become living quarters on a permanent Chinese space station. The rocket is set to be followed by 10 more missions to complete the station.

Long March 5 rockets have been integral to China’s near-term space ambitions — from the delivery of modules and crew of its planned space station to launches of exploratory probes to the Moon and even Mars.

The latest rocket is one of the largest pieces of space debris to return to Earth, with experts estimating its dry mass to be around 18 to 22 tonnes.

The core stage of the first Long March 5B that returned to Earth last year weighed nearly 20 tonnes, surpassed only by debris from the Columbia space shuttle in 2003, the Soviet Union’s Salyut 7 space station in 1991, and Skylab in 1979.

Reuters