{"id":102190,"date":"2021-05-07T21:54:46","date_gmt":"2021-05-07T13:54:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mediaintel.asia\/?p=367438"},"modified":"2021-05-07T21:54:46","modified_gmt":"2021-05-07T13:54:46","slug":"china-says-extremely-low-risk-of-damage-from-rocket-debris-space-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/2021\/05\/07\/china-says-extremely-low-risk-of-damage-from-rocket-debris-space-news\/","title":{"rendered":"China says \u2018extremely low\u2019 risk of damage from rocket debris Space News"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"MediaIntel.Asia\"<\/a><\/div>\n

The Long March-5 rocket is seen at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China\u2019s Hainan province in July 2020 [Zhang Gaoxiang\/Xinhua via AP] \u2018Shoot it down\u2019?
\nAs fevered speculation over the rocket\u2019s trajectory back to Earth pinballed across social media, US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin on Thursday said the US military had no plans to shoot it down.
\n\u201cWe have the capability to do a lot of things, but we don\u2019t have a plan to shoot it down,\u201d Austin told journalists.
\nHopefully, he said, the rocket will land \u201cin a place where it won\u2019t harm anyone \u2026 the ocean, or someplace like that\u201d.
\nEven if the rocket or parts of it do fall from the sky, without breaking up on re-entry, there is a good chance it will just splash down into the ocean on a planet made up of 70 percent water.
\nBut Austin suggested the Chinese were negligent in letting the rocket body fall out of orbit, saying those who were in the \u201cspace domain\u201d should \u201coperate in a safe and thoughtful mode\u201d.
\nThe location of the rocket\u2019s descent into Earth\u2019s atmosphere as it falls back from space \u201ccannot be pinpointed until within hours of its re-entry\u201d, which is projected to occur around May 8, US Space Command said.
\nHarvard-based astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell said there was a chance that pieces of the rocket could come down over land such as in May 2020, when pieces from another Chinese Long March 5B rocket rained down on the Ivory Coast, damaging several buildings.
\nHe said potentially dangerous debris would likely escape incineration after streaking through the atmosphere at hypersonic speed but in all likelihood would fall into the sea.
\nBased on its current orbit, the debris trail is likely to fall somewhere as far north as New York, Madrid or Beijing and as far south as southern Chile and Wellington, New Zealand, or anywhere in between, McDowell said. \u2018Nation of science\u2019
\nSpace has become the latest theatre for the big power play between China and the United States.
\nThe launch of China\u2019s first module of its \u201cHeavenly Palace\u201d space station in April \u2013 housing life support equipment and a living space for astronauts \u2013 was a milestone in Beijing\u2019s ambitious plan to establish a permanent human presence in space.
\nPresident Xi Jinping called it a key step in \u201cbuilding a great nation of science and technology\u201d.
\nWith the retirement of the International Space Station after 2024, China\u2019s could become the only space station in Earth\u2019s orbit.
\nAlthough Chinese space authorities have said they are open to foreign collaboration, the scope of that cooperation is as yet unclear.
\nThe European Space Agency has sent astronauts to China to receive training in order to be ready to work inside the Chinese space station once it is launched.
\nChina also said in March it was planning to build a separate lunar space station with Russia.
\nThe facility, planned for either the surface or in the orbit of the Moon, would house experimental research facilities and would be Beijing\u2019s biggest international space cooperation project to date.
\nThe Long March rocket is not the first time China has lost control of a spacecraft as it returns to Earth.
\nThe space laboratory Tiangong-1 disintegrated upon re-entry into the atmosphere in 2018, two years after it had stopped working, though Chinese authorities denied they had lost control of the ship.<\/p>\n

This data comes from MediaIntel.Asia's Media Intelligence and Media Monitoring Platform<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Long March-5 rocket is seen at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in south China\u2019s Hainan province in July 2020 [Zhang Gaoxiang\/Xinhua via AP] \u2018Shoot it down\u2019?
\nAs fevered speculation over the rocket\u2019s trajectory back to Earth pinballed across social…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":253,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65,144,325,785,194,249,465,484,445],"tags":[10424,3472,10352,8481,2240,3563,10344,10346,2972],"class_list":["post-102190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-beijing","category-china","category-education","category-new-york","category-news-chinese-law","category-russia","category-social-media","category-united-states","category-xinhua","tag-china-general-news","tag-chinese","tag-european","tag-hainan","tag-military","tag-new-zealand","tag-outer-space","tag-space-station","tag-xi-jinping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102190","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/253"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=102190"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102190\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":102191,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/102190\/revisions\/102191"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=102190"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=102190"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.chinalegalblog.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=102190"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}