Uncontrolled Re-entry of Chinese Rocket – UPSC Prelims

The Long March 5B rocket is China’s largest rocket. It was launched into space in April 2021 for putting into orbit a core module named Tianhe.

When a rocket is launched, its discarded booster stages re-enter the atmosphere soon after lift-off. Then, they harmlessly fall into the ocean as a standard practice.

However, in this case, a large part of the rocket went into orbit along with the section of the under-construction space station that it was carrying.

While in orbit, this vehicle kept rubbing against the air at the top of the atmosphere and the resulting friction caused it to start losing altitude.

This resulted in the Long March 5B rocket’s uncontrolled re-entry back to the Earth inevitable.

It is the 4th largest uncontrolled re-entry of debris into the atmosphere.

In March 2021, a SpaceX rocket stage made an uncontrolled landing on a farm in the US. But this happened due to a malfunction in the engine tasked to bring it down and not by choice.

In 1979, when the NASA space station Skylab was brought down, some debris ended up in Australia leading to an apology from the then-US President.

In 1978, when a nuclear-powered Soviet satellite crashed in Canada, Russia was forced to bear a part of the expense gone into cleaning the radioactive debris.