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At nearly 20 tons, the Long March 5B is the largest space vehicle to re-enter Earth’s atmosphere uncontrolled since Soviet Salyut in 1991. //
The Chinese communist regime is a box of surprises — bad ones. We have not yet recovered from the coronavirus pandemic they caused, and they have already exposed us to another huge risk. At 11:33 a.m. on May 11, a gigantic, out-of-control space object crossed the atmosphere and fell into the Atlantic Ocean, showering debris over several villages on the Ivory Coast.
It even crashed into a family’s house, not causing casualties but spreading panic throughout the area. Just 15 minutes earlier, it had flown over New York, threatening the country’s most populated city with a space massacre.
It was not a mistake, nor a mission failure. Quite simply, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) continues to completely disregard human lives. In fact, it considers the mission to have been “a great success.”
What plummeted to Earth was the wreckage of the Long March 5B rocket, launched May 5 from the Wenchang Space Launch Center. According to the calculations of Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has followed this event in detail, it weighed about 20 tons and is the largest space vehicle to fall out of control to Earth since the Soviet space station Salyut, which crashed in Argentina in 1991.
The crash of Long March 5B was closely followed by the U.S. Space Force’s 18th Space Control Squadron, which monitors space debris from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. The official Chinese story rambles on about the mission’s success and the extraordinary separation between the rocket and its cargo 488 seconds after takeoff, but does not say a word about what happened next. //
Despite its enormous size, however, the rocket did not have a second stage to control of the central part of the vehicle after launch. In other words, China had planned only for the launch. It hadn’t provided any information about the craft’s re-entry to Earth, nor did it have a plan to bring it down safely.
If the Long March were a small rocket, it would have disintegrated when it passed through the atmosphere, but a 176-foot-tall rocket with 10 engines does not completely disintegrate on re-entry. For the sake of comparison, the impending fall of the Chinese space station Tiangong-1 rocked the world in 2018, and it weighed only eight tons. Long March 5B weighs more than double that. Even if atmospheric shock broke it into a million pieces, it would still pose a serious danger if it fell into populated areas.
Following the first reports received from the Ivory Coast last Tuesday night about engine parts falling over several villages in the country, it has been confirmed they are remnants of the Chinese rocket. Local media say it is a miracle that the shower of pipes and engine parts has not caused any casualties, as far as we know. //
China repeatedly fails to comply with rocket-launch regulations, as it sends the crafts off from populated areas. Last year, during the launch of Long March 3B, its first stage fell in the vicinity, destroying several houses and contaminating the area with highly toxic fuel residues. Although the Chinese government veils any technological failures in absolute secrecy, Western sources consider that hundreds of people could have died.
As usual, the CCP’s propaganda machine littered social networks with two surprising statements impossible to prove: that the people were evacuated before the crash and that the owners of the destroyed houses were happy because the regime would give them new houses.