China launched it's Long March Rocket on April 28, with the job of putting the 22-ton, 16.6 m core module of China’s new Tianhe space station into orbit. While the launch was flawless—at least so far as doing its principal job which was getting the Tianhe to orbit ....
What is worrying is the follow-through ..., the expected crash of the launch rocket anywhere on earth, tomorrow, May 8th.
When spacefaring nations send a payload to orbit and jettison a spent first rocket stage along the way, they typically don’t let that stage fly too high or too fast, which would allow it to reach orbit. Rather, they keep it on a parabolic, suborbital trajectory. That means that when it’s done with its work, it falls immediately back to Earth in a predictable way and in an unpopulated area. In the case of rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, the dumping ground is the nearby Atlantic. In the case of China, which launches its rockets from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan, the Pacific is typically the junk yard.
But the Long March 5B didn’t fly that way. Instead, the core stage made it all the way to orbit along with the Tianhe module. Tianhe has its own guidance system to keep it in a high, stable orbit. But the spent Long March core stage was left behind in a much more wobbly (and unsustainable) orbit, and now it’s destined to fall back to Earth.
What is worrying is the follow-through ..., the expected crash of the launch rocket anywhere on earth, tomorrow, May 8th.
When spacefaring nations send a payload to orbit and jettison a spent first rocket stage along the way, they typically don’t let that stage fly too high or too fast, which would allow it to reach orbit. Rather, they keep it on a parabolic, suborbital trajectory. That means that when it’s done with its work, it falls immediately back to Earth in a predictable way and in an unpopulated area. In the case of rockets launched from Cape Canaveral, the dumping ground is the nearby Atlantic. In the case of China, which launches its rockets from the Wenchang Launch Center on the southern island province of Hainan, the Pacific is typically the junk yard.
But the Long March 5B didn’t fly that way. Instead, the core stage made it all the way to orbit along with the Tianhe module. Tianhe has its own guidance system to keep it in a high, stable orbit. But the spent Long March core stage was left behind in a much more wobbly (and unsustainable) orbit, and now it’s destined to fall back to Earth.
