Great Job, China! A rocket chunk is careening back to Earth and no one's sure where it will land
Aux Features Environment
China managed two impressive feats last week: First, they successfully launched the first module of the nation’s new, badass-named Tiangong (“Celestial Palace”) space station aboard its Long March 5B rocket, marking a major milestone in human spacefaring for the country. Second, they accidentally sent a 30-meter-tall “massive core stage” of said Long March 5B rocket into a “chaotic reentry” towards Earth, and no one appears to have a goddamn clue exactly where it’s gonna land…
Okay, sorry, that’s irresponsibly alarmist and only somewhat accurate. To be more specific—experts have narrowed down the potential crash site for the 20-metric-ton hunk of flaming space debris to somewhere between the latitudes including New York state and New Zealand…
See? When you put it like that, it’s only marginally terrifying.
According to Andrew Jones of SpaceNews, the rocket’s core stage chunk is estimated to begin its reentry sometime around 9P.M. EST on May 9 (give or take, um, “41 hours” due to “many variables”), and will in all likelihood either burn up entirely, or plummet into one of humanity’s favorite refuse dumps: the ocean. If it makes you feel any better, China sent a core booster into a similar uncontrolled orbit almost exactly a year ago, with debris from that cock-up reportedly winding up strewn across villages in Cote d’Ivoire, thankfully with no injuries or deaths.
And before you get all haughty: we apparently do the same damn thing all the time. Only a few weeks ago, one of (sigh…upcoming SNL host) Elon Musk’s Falcon 9 rockets made an uncontrolled reentry that gifted a quaint farm in Washington State a giant heavy pressure tank. And, as noted by Motherboard, “The United States holds the record for the largest uncontrolled reentry ever, which occurred in 1979 when the 79-ton Skylab station scattered debris across the Indian Ocean and Western Australia.”
So, yeah. If there’s one thing that seemingly unites all of humanity, it’s our eternal yearning to reach beyond the stars. That, and flinging gigantic rocket carcasses back towards our once pristine planet.
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22 Comments
The only thing giving me hope now is that there’s a small chance it could land on my head and kill me.
I’m hoping it lands on Mar-a-Lago, just as a reminder of how many of us, China included, still hate him.
To borrow an idea from our MAGA friends, the fact that a hurricane hasn’t destroyed Mar-a-lago is proof god doesn’t exist.
If it doesn’t crash there, I’m hoping for my house (I have a replacement-cost policy).
“And before you get all haughty: we apparently do the same damn thing all the time.”
Well, this was definitely worthy of a racist article then, huh?
That rocket…
Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down. That’s not my department
Holy hell Kinja breaks my post every single time I make itAnyhow go read the China Strong article on the Onionhttps://www.theonion.com/china-strong-1819570898
I’m sure the very fine folks over at r/Sino would enjoy hearing this.
Probably extremely unlikely, but I always want one of these to someday hit a building. Hopefully empty, but if it takes out a significant commercial building and costs rich people $ maybe we’ll be forced to actually try not to do this.
I just want it to fall on a confederate statue, for the ensuing geopolitical and theological speculations.
That works too, the bigger the better. I would also be cool with Mt Rushmore.
Wow can’t believe that attacks against AAPI people are on the rise since the media started focusing on how bad China is.
China is the new Florida.
You know if that shit falls in your yard, you are gonna make a killing selling it on Ebay
Here’s a photo I took two years ago at the US Space and Rocket Center in Huntsville, Alabama, of a fragment of Skylab that landed in Australia, as a reminder that we’ve done the same thing in the past:
You still owe use $500 for that, you pricks.
The check’s in the mail, but we have a Postmaster General who’s intent on sabotaging the U.S. Postal Service out of existence, so who knows if it will ever get there.
It’ll be fine if it lands here. This country is dangerously underpopulated.
I was buds with a guy who had worked on various parts of orbital hardware. He told me his mother asked him about the risk that Skylab would come crashing down. He assured her that would not happen. A few years later, an uncomfortable conversation about how much more Mom knew than the guy who built such things.