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New Long March 5B Uncontrolled Reentry Tracked by Aerospace's Experts
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoThis is deeply irresponsible by the CSNA and is a disaster just waiting to happen on the ground. Is it laziness on the part of their flight team or just crass disregard for others safety?
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- graderjs 4y agoI agree. I’m all for China achieving things but this seems really inconsiderate and irresponsible. Dropping debris on populations is unacceptable as nearly happened over the last few years according to this story. Clashes with their environmental stance and desire to be responsible global power. Why?
- zasdffaa 4y agoI can't answer your question but be aware that you are looking through a very western lens, and probably US-centric lens particularly, and other cultures can see things in very different way, starting with assumptions (or simply unthought practices) that you have nothing to compare with.
- cycrutchfield 4y agoYes
- throwaway4good 4y agoIt is a calculated risk; perhaps similar to what have been done by the US and Russia when their space ambitions were at their highest.
- tjpnz 4y agoYou really should learn more about the history of the US program before making such ill informed statements.
- fnordpiglet 4y ago
- iwillbenice 4y ago[dead]
- cycrutchfield 4y agoAh, the good old “whatabout the US did it 50 years ago therefore we can do it today”. Also used to justify all sorts of atrocities, imperialism, IP theft, etc.
- throwaway4good 4y agoI also think there is a somewhat hyperbolic anti-China sentiment in the commentary on all of this. Plus a perhaps frustration at the US Space authorities on the lack of communication from their Chinese counterpart, something of course they themselves are entirely to blame for. Anyway; the Chinese have done a few of these "uncontrolled reentries" now. All crashing into the ocean; so they are either very lucky or it is not so uncontrolled after all.
- causality0 4y agoNeither. There just isn't that big a fraction of the earth's surface that's inhabited. You should regard this similarly to someone firing a gun into the air.
- wlll 4y agoIf you fired a gun into the air in the UK I'm pretty sure that a) You'd get in pretty serious trouble for it by itself and b) if you killed or injured someone that trouble would be significantly multiplied to the extent you'd end up in prison. I think it would be a manslaughter charge.
- holoduke 4y agoThis is China in a nutshell. They don't give a fuck about what's happening around them. Unless it Harms their economic interest. Other than that they do not have any compassion for safety, environment etc. It might change in the future, but with this crazy regime I doubt people ever gonna care about it.
- fwipsy 4y agoLet's not make generalizations about a country of 1b+ people based on one aspect of their space program. You could easily draw an equally unflattering image of the US or any other nation if you're willing to extrapolate from a single datapoint like that.
- ghufran_syed 4y agocharitable interpretation: “china” = “chinese government“ in the statement you are responding to. I try to use the latter form myself when talking about nation state actions to aid people who have trouble translating from one to the other, but it doesn’t seem that hard to figure out in this case. otoh e.g. “the chinese value education highly” is a bit more ambiguous since the statement is true for both the chinese people and the chinese goverment
- fwipsy 4y agoThis interpretation is a little better, but I think my objections still apply.
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoThere are plenty of other data points that line up with this one though.
- pfdietz 4y agoIt's economically hardnosed of them. It's on average cheaper to just take the chance and pay off damages if someone is injured or killed. Remember, the highest chance of fatality will be in densely populated lower latitude countries where the monetary cost of killing someone is lower.
- elteto 4y agoThe won’t even pay for any damages. They would never allow one of these to reenter over US airspace or other large, powerful countries. But if it falls in the middle of some small country, tough luck getting paid for damages.
- pfdietz 4y agoThey are signatory to a treaty that requires them to pay for damages. And they had no control over where this booster came down (except that it would come down between 41S/41N, roughly), so your "they would never allow" is incorrect.
- supertrope 4y agoChina signed the Outer Space Treaty. Your rocket your damage your bill.
- chihuahua 4y agoBut how is anyone going to collect on the bill, if China doesn't want to pay?
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y agoJust quickly and quietly paying is likely cheaper than the international incident, the "China refuses to comply with treaty" headlines, and likely resulting souring of international relations.
- supertrope 4y agoTwo thirds of the planet is water. Most land is uninhabited. Population and property is concentrated in cities. The chance of debris hitting you is less than a lightning strike.
- MonkeyMalarky 4y agoI'd chock it up under crass disregard for others safety. They drop boosters on their own people and don't care: https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping-toxic-rocket-parts-on-its-villages/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping... >China's defiance of this norm has resulted in some horrific scenes as its boosters have periodically crashed into villages.
- dangle1 4y agoAnd possibly a fairing half dropped onto a populated area from a different launch yesterday: https://twitter.com/cnspaceflight/status/1589289240776839168 https://twitter.com/cnspaceflight/status/1589289240776839168
- tgsovlerkhgsel 4y ago"It's fine, we did tell everyone to evacuate" - I wonder how many actually evacuate / can afford to evacuate every time.
- throwaway4good 4y agoThe remains of the rocket have landed somewhere in the pacific ocean.
- LatteLazy 4y ago[flagged]
- fnordpiglet 4y agoI like how you squeezed a crazy conspiracy theory that’s been largely dismissed in at the end. Slick.
- LatteLazy 4y agoI don't actually think COVID was leaked from the lab. I just think that Chinas refusal to do basic food hygiene, despite multiple zoonotic diseases already arriving makes it equally criminal...
- dvt 4y agoMy flight from the Canary Islands to Portugal was delayed for ~2 hours because of this. Everyone was a bit on edge and it seems extremely irresponsible, dangerous, and wasteful.
- pfdietz 4y agoThat's a major overreaction.
- speedylight 4y agoBetter be safe than sorry. Uncontrollable entry is actually uncontrollable and anything could happen.
- pfdietz 4y agoSuch decisions cannot be made in a binary, absolutist way. Risk is reduced to some minimal level, not to zero. The risk here was very low.
- elteto 4y agoAnd you know this risk was low because? Are you saying that you had more information on this than those agencies tracking the reentry? Otherwise you are speculating.
- Denvercoder9 4y agoThose agencies tracking reentry also are of the opinion that the risk to any individual is negligble: see e.g. https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1587858672373403654 https://twitter.com/jeff_foust/status/1587858672373403654
- cfraenkel 4y agoDuh - it's going to come down in one place. The odds of "any" one individual being in that exact place is negligible. On the other hand, where it comes down is under it's flight path, which is a predictable series of points on a line, ordered in time. If you (or your airplane) happen to be in one of those points at the same time, your odds go way way up (for a few minutes). The flight in question was no doubt going to be under the boosters flight path. You know this ahead of time, and you can obviously delay with minimal consequence (minimal compared to an airliner being hit with falling debris, anyway.) In that situation, it'd be negligent to say 'screw it, the odds are in our favor, lets just ignore it.'
- tostonescon 4y agoGenuinely curious - why is China doing uncontrolled reentry any different? As far as I understand it the vast majority of rockets have uncontrolled re-entry, save for spaceplanes, falcon 9, and more recently electron.
- mrweasel 4y ago> As far as I understand it the vast majority of rockets have uncontrolled I don't think that's true anymore. There's a Danish radio program[1] that talked about this and apparently China is the only country/operator that still have uncontrolled reentry rocket stages. Everyone else have committed to controlled reentry. Looking that the possible places where the rocket can hit populated areas. It looks like they went out of their way to ensure maximum coverage of Africa. Reentry a little earlier and they would have been almost ensured that it would hit the Atlantic Ocean. [1]: https://www.radio4.dk/program/den-nye-rumalder/?gid=43389&title=prins-joachim-rummet-skal-bruges-ansvarligt https://www.radio4.dk/program/den-nye-rumalder/?gid=43389&ti...
- tostonescon 4y agohttps://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01718-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41550-022-01718-8 >In 2020, over 60% of launches to low Earth orbit resulted in a rocket body being abandoned in orbit >In the USA, the Orbital Debris Mitigation Standard Practices (ODMSPs) apply to all launches and require that the risk of a casualty from a reentering rocket body is below a 1-in-10,000 threshold4. However, the US Air Force waived the ODMSP requirements for 37 of the 66 launches conducted for it between 2011 and 2018, on the basis that it would be too expensive to replace non-compliant rockets with compliant ones I do think China's space program is more irresponsible than USA/EU launches based on some of the debris fall, but blaming uncontrolled re-entry seems like the wrong thing here
- mlyle 4y agoIt's that it's uncontrolled re-entry of a giant first stage. No one does anything like that except China.