After the launch of the third and final piece from China's Tiangong space station, the 23-tonne rocket, responsible for transporting the material, will return to Earth and land somewhere on the planet this weekend. Unlike most modern rocket bodies, which are designed to land in a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, Long March 5B's body broke away during its own orbit around the Earth and is about to make its re-entry into the atmosphere.
Basically, no one knows exactly where the rocket's body will land, and no one is controlling its path. The risk of collision with other space debris is extremely unlikely. For now, experts are only able to estimate when the rocket's body, which is about the size of a 10-story building, will hit Earth. Much of it will burn up on the return trip, but because it's such a large object, it won't completely disintegrate.
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Aerospace Corporation contributors told Insider that approximately 20% to 40% of a large object's mass will survive the fall through the atmosphere. However, it is still too early to pinpoint the landing site. The Aerospace Corporation has kept the rocket's stage on radar and is calculating possible paths that could take it back to Earth.
Fortunately, according to the experts' calculation, most of the area where the wreckage can fall is in the open sea or on uninhabited land. That's good news for humans. Still, space industry leaders have criticized China's practice of not controlling the re-entry of its rockets, a situation that poses "unnecessary risks to human life and property".
As the days go by, the rocket's landing site will be defined.
The trend is that, as the days go by, the estimates become more accurate and scientists are able to more confidently predict the location of the drop. This is not the first time that remnants of a Chinese rocket have threatened people and property. Recently, the Technology Refugee reported the fall of a piece of rocket on a farm in Gansu, China.
“Rockets launch all the time, and very rarely is there any concern about re-entry,” John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, told Inside in May 2021, as the world waited for the rocket body to fall. "So yeah, I'm a little confused as to why this is happening."
A study published in Nature calculated that there is approximately a 10% chance of debris hitting one or more people within a 10-year period. The survey included unknown satellites and pieces of debris, which regularly go out of orbit, as well as runaway rockets. This is a situation that deserves a lot of attention so as not to cause accidents.
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