Chinese Rocket Will Crash to Earth on November 5: Here’s What We Know

After delivering the third and final module to the space station, the core stage of the Long March 5B rocket is going to fall back to Earth.

The 25-ton rocket stage is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere at 11:51 pm on Saturday, November 5. Researchers at the Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies say it takes 14 hours.

The possible debris field includes the U.S., Central and South America, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia and Australia. Four times in the last two years, China has dumped its rockets in an uncoordinated manner. In the past, metallic objects rained down on villages in theIvory Coast, debris landed in the Indian Ocean near theMaldives, and rocket chunks crashed close to villages in Borneo.

The most powerful section of a rocket's first stage is the bulkiest and the least likely to burn up. There are ways to deal with this issue. Engineers try to aim the rockets so that they don't fall into the ocean. Some boosters are designed to fire a few extra bursts from their engines in order to get them back into a controlled reentry.

Once the Long March 5B booster engines stop, they can't restart, dooming the massive booster to spiral around Earth before it lands in an unpredictable location.

China insists that reentries are common and that there is no need to worry about potential damage. Western reporting of China's falling rockets was accused of bias by a Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairsspokesperson. In March 2021, debris from a falling SpaceX rocket smashed into a farm in Washington state, which was covered by Western news outlets. There was a second set of debris on a sheep farm in Australia.

The risk of a single person being harmed by a falling rocket is less than 1 in 10 trillion and less than 1 in 6 trillion. The rocket's debris path puts the odds of harm far above the internationally accepted casualty risk threshold of 1 in 10,000.

NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said after the Long March 5B crash landing that spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of reentries of space objects. It is clear that China isn't meeting the proper standards for their space debris.

The T-shaped space station, which is one-quarter the size of the International Space Station, is expected to remain in Earth's atmosphere for at least a decade. Experiments and tests of new technologies will be performed by the rotating crews of three astronauts.

China has been trying to catch up with the U.S. and Russia by landing a rover on the far side of the moon in 2019. China will establish a lunar research station by 2029.

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