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CZ5B (Chinese rocket) Reentry Prediction
- seventytwo 4y agoAm I reading this correctly that this is gonna fall over lots of populated areas?
- tgv 4y agoIf I interpret it properly, most of the path is over the ocean. Debris might still hit Indonesia though.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoChina is known for dropping rocket boosters on their own towns fairly regularly. For instance: https://twitter.com/ChinaSpaceNews/status/637174369677123584 https://twitter.com/ChinaSpaceNews/status/637174369677123584 With China situated where it is, this sort of thing is hard for them to avoid. Probably they want to eventually switch to fully reusable rockets, but that's a touch nut to crack.
- ARandomerDude 4y ago> With China situated where it is, this sort of thing is hard for them to avoid. Sea launch or contract launch sites are good ways to avoid it.
- bpodgursky 4y agoMaybe I'm missing something, but China has an enormous east-facing coastline. Why not launch from Hainan over the Pacific? It's basically Florida but better-situated.
- Jabbles 4y agoYou'd have to build the rocket on the island, or transport the rocket to the island for launch. Neither is impossible, but it's a lot easier to build and launch from the mainland.
- bpodgursky 4y agoI mean sure, you could use the southern tip of Guangdong instead. I just don't see a technical advantage* to launching inland. * of course I see a military advantage where foreign countries can't recover your technology on failed launches...
- tjpnz 4y agoIf they launched from Hainan there would also be benefits in terms of Earth's higher rotational speed. Some of the weight saved on fuel could go towards additional payload capacity.
- dudeinjapan 4y ago
- mlindner 4y agoThe curve shown is the entire uncertainty bar on the location. It's +/- 1 hour of the center.
- tgv 4y agoThat's a pretty sad state of affairs. For what, prestige?
- 88840-8855 4y agoScience and prestige probably. Don't forget that China is still catching up. In the 80s, when it started developing, China was poorer than any African country. The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science. Times changes here in the WeSt where safety is first. It will also be in China one day, too.
- tjpnz 4y agoThe US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management.
- noSyncCloud 4y ago> The US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management. It would be correct to suggest equivalence of attitudes while we were nuking Navy sailors and Nevada hundreds of times, to say nothing of willfully infecting citizens with syphilis, etc, etc, etc.
- mdp2021 4y ago> In May 2020, two villages in Ivory Coast were hit by objects – including a 12-metre section of pipe – that appeared to have come from a Chinese Long March 5B expected to land that day > [Dr Shane] Walsh [International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research: ]«They claim to have learned from the last two launches and added some method of control, but the EU tracking network showed this unit is tumbling, which means it’s not controlled» > The US and the EU have embedded risk assessments and will not launch if there is a greater than one in 10,000 chance of causing injury. China appears to have a much lower bar (From The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/29/as-more-space-junk-falls-to-earth-will-china-clean-up-its-act https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jul/29/as-more-space-... ) Some would have though from at least last episode in May 2021 that it finally appeared as clear that fatalist and jus-formalist orientations and behaviours are largely frowned upon.
- troyvit 4y agoThere are no consequences beyond being frowned upon it looks like. One of the perks of being a super power I guess?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> perks of being a super power China is a regional power vying for superpower status. To memory, nobody has ever been punished for fucking up launch and recovery. (EDIT: I stand corrected!)
- MichaelCollins 4y ago> To memory, nobody has ever been punished for fucking up launch and recovery. Canada once fined the Soviet Union six million dollars for crashing a satellite containing a nuclear reactor into northern Canada. The Soviets paid out three million. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosmos_954
- ethbr0 4y ago
- aaron695 4y agoVery cool space junk was found in Australia this week, it's like it's out of a movie - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-29/space-junk-found-in-nsw-snowy-mountains-paddocks-/101277542 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-07-29/space-junk-found-in-n... It'd be cool to get close to where this stuff goes down, but it's impossible. Just good luck. I think seeing the ISS come down in the pacific in 2031 would be cool. Hopefully NASA will help rather than hinder this.
- peteradio 4y agoThat video is incredible. "It's kinda incredible really having this piece of space junk fallin in me uhhh ... paddy. You know think of what else is out there in uhh other people's paddies. inaudible above my children's weird minecraft videos Yeh? I suppose you wouldn't fare too well if a piece landed on yuh"
- MichaelCollins 4y agoProbably best not to get too close unless you know exactly what it is. Hydrazine is very toxic and probably carcinogenic. It would be cool to watch a reentry like that, but I don't think I'd get as close to the debris as that guy is.
- 13of40 4y agoIt looks like it might be made of carbon fiber as well, which tends to burrow into bare skin when you touch it. I definitely wouldn't take a selfie with my hand resting on it like that guy. I'm not sure they still do it, but Soyuz(?) used to have a radiation source on the bottom to use as a kind of altitude detector, so if one of those broke up there could be another surprise for someone who found debris.
- throwaway4good 4y agoImagine the coverage of this had that thing been Chinese.
- mlindner 4y ago
- JayGuerette 4y ago1. Disguise payload as space junk 2. Design to "fall" on populated area 3. Say "oops" 4. ...
- ethbr0 4y agoWhat payload would possibly be worth this, that wouldn't be more effectively served by a different delivery mechanism?
- matthewaveryusa 4y agoa plausibly deniable payload purpose
- JustSomeNobody 4y agoI don't think China cares. At all.
- Nextgrid 4y agoBut in this case there are plenty of other, better delivery mechanisms than disguising the payload as space junk.
- MichaelCollins 4y agoAny 'useful' payload would erase any plausible deniability. If the idea is to merely drop a piece of scrap metal on some politicians house or something, with no warhead involved, I don't think they can do that. Reentry is too chaotic for a piece of unguided rocket debris to hit a target that exactly.
- ethbr0 4y agoHow is "Chinese space junk falls on important target" plausibly deniable? Especially compared to alternatives that conceal source? It sounds good, but I'm struggling to think of a use case for (1) an important enough target to be impactful, (2) that could be effected by space debris, (3) for which there's a distinction between "we accidentally hit it" vs "we deliberately hit it"
- Linda703 4y ago[dead]
- throwaway4good 4y agoIt is going to land in the water. The Chinese know what they are doing.
- pid_0 4y ago
- throwawayfck 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- MichaelCollins 4y agoYes they know what they're doing, but what they're doing is taking calculated risks. They don't know it's going to land in the water, and their rocket boosters often don't. They understand this risk, and accept it.
- Rebelgecko 4y agoAre you saying they're able to control it somehow?
- throwaway4good 4y agoI am saying they know more about how this thing will fall and desolve than journalists or US defense organisations that have interest in drumming up fear either as a way to get attention or in a broder anti-China effort. We will see in a couple of hours.
- mlindner 4y agoNo they do not know how it will fall. That's beyond the ability of current known science of any country, let alone China. The last time they did this, they put out a fake "prediction" of where it would fall immediately after it impacted to try to pretend to people that they knew exactly where it would fall.
- ronyclau 4y agoThere is a documentary named "Falling from the Sky"[1] from 2009, which depicts how scared and helpless people in a Hunan village were, every time a rocket wss launched from Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The village was located within the area where rocket debris would fall, and the villagers were basically told to suck it up by officials. [1]: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2136916/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt2136916/
- r721 4y agoSee also this NYT piece with a lot of photos: >Remote Russians Recycle Rocket Wreckage >Space junk from rockets launched from the Plesetsk Cosmodrome in Russia ends up in the remote Mezensky District, where residents repurpose it for hunting sleds, tools and boats. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/lens/space-rocket-parts-russia-towns.html https://www.nytimes.com/2018/09/26/lens/space-rocket-parts-r...
- blinding-streak 4y agoThat is a fantastic alliteration.
- wil421 4y agoThanks for the new word I just learned. Definition of alliteration : the repetition of usually initial consonant sounds in two or more neighboring words or syllables (such as wild and woolly, threatening throngs) — called also head rhyme, initial rhyme
- blinding-streak 4y agoWelcome!
- dreamcompiler 4y agoWe had to learn alliteration in seventh grade US English class, where we were told in no uncertain terms that we would fail the class if we didn't master it with examples. Another word in this category was assonance which as seventh graders we found quite useful for various purposes during instructional hiatus.
- r721 4y agoTheir twitter account to watch for updates: https://twitter.com/AerospaceCorp https://twitter.com/AerospaceCorp
- TedDoesntTalk 4y agoI still remember when Skylab fell to Earth in 1979. I was 9. People on TV who found items (and others who claimed they did by manufacturing junk with aluminum foil). It was inspirational. We looked to the sky at the right time to see what we could see. I wish I could share that with my kid, but he’s away this weekend.
- pid_0 4y ago
- publicola1990 4y agoThere seems a video going the rounds on twitter of its trails over the night sky somewhere in Malaysia[1]. [1] https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1553425522369118208?cxt=HHwWgICy3YeS8I4rAAAA https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1553425522369118208?cxt=HHw...
- r721 4y agoThread: https://twitter.com/DELTA_V/status/1553426891285139457 https://twitter.com/DELTA_V/status/1553426891285139457
- throwaway4good 4y agoIt appears to have landed somewhere in the Indian ocean.
- r721 4y agoUS: "113E 3N" https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1553438866203443207 https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1553438866203443207 China: "119.0E 9.1N" https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1553444872237027329 https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1553444872237027329