A 23-Ton Chunk of Dead Space Rocket Is About to Fall Out of The Sky

The third and final piece of China's new space station will return to Earth this weekend.

The Long March 5B rocket was used to launch the Mengtian module. After climbing into space, the rocket's core stage gave the space-station module one last push into Earth's orbit.

Unlike most modern rocket bodies, which are designed to push themselves into a remote part of the Pacific Ocean, the Long March 5B body fell into its own sphere of influence.

There is a chance that it will fall to Earth on Friday or the morning of Saturday in the eastern time zone.

Nobody is in control of the rocket body. It's not likely that any debris from space will hit you.

Forecast: It's going to rain rocket parts

The size of the Long March rocket body can only be estimated by experts. The rocket body is too large to be completely destroyed, but some of it will burn up.

20 percent to 40 percent of a large object's mass will survive its fall through the atmosphere according to experts at theAerospace Corporation.

Most likely, the core stage will fall in pieces. The rocket stage is being tracked by theAerospace Corporation to see if it will return to Earth.

Almost all of the human population can be found in the area where debris could fall. In a few places, the population is very small. Most of the area is open ocean or land.

China's practice of uncontrolled reentering poses an unnecessary risk to human life and property, according to space- industry leaders.

The estimates will get better as the rocket body gets closer to reentering the atmosphere.

China's rocket debris keeps crashing back to Earth

This is the fourth time that a remnant from China's Long March 5B rocket has posed a threat. Pieces of the rocket fell back to Earth three times.

Property damage was caused by debris from one of the rockets that was found in May 2020. According to The New York Times, China claimed that the rocket's remnants landed in the Indian Ocean.

In July, parts of the rocket's booster crashed back to Earth, with pieces found on both the Malaysian and Indonesian sides of the island of Borneo.

After delivering their cargo to space, most rocket stages bring themselves down by steering themselves away from populated areas and into the ocean. The Long March 5B did not have a rocket booster for controlled reentry.

John Logsdon, the founder of George Washington University's Space Policy Institute, told Insider in May 2021, that "very seldom is there concern about reentering." I'm not sure why this is happening.

Is it just carelessness with the guidelines? It wasn't designed so it could do a controlled reentry. Logsdon said it was unfortunate that it put a lot of people at risk.

Space junk could kill someone this decade

Researchers calculated a 10 percent chance that debris will hit one or more people within a decade. Chinese rocket bodies aren't the only ones. Satellites fall out of the sky.

Someone will get lucky if you roll the dice too many times.

Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant who works on the Aerospace Corporation's reentry database, previously told Insider that an object with a weight of at least 1 ton can fall from the sky.

The Long March 5B boosters are one of the biggest objects to fall back to Earth. The Skylab space station descended quickly in 1979. Controled reentry is standard practice today.

The original article was published by Business Insider.