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Chinese villagers capture video of falling Long March rocket booster [video]
- petermcneeley 3y agoIs this video real? That booster seems to be falling very slowly.
- plasticchris 3y agoIt’s an illusion, the larger an object is the slower it seems to be moving. It’s pretty strong if you see a wide body jet or old bomber fly by at low altitude.
- macintux 3y agoAs a kid I saw an airliner landing nearby, and I was absolutely certain it had come to a near-stop mid-air. I assumed all of these years that was due to my youth and the fact that I was in a moving car; I didn’t realize this was a known illusion.
- jahnu 3y agoWhen I see a wide body jet fly over my home approaching a landing about 15km away it just looks like it’s impossible how it just hangs there apparently little faster than an airship. Of course it’s actually going 300km/h!
- dredmorbius 3y agoFor a commercial airliner on final, probably slower than that, ~240--280 kph (130--150 knots). Given cruise speed is closer to 1,000 kph, that's comparatively quite slow.
- petermcneeley 3y agoIs there a higher quality video where we could estimate its velocity? It seems very slow. Edit: There is more video here. https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-rocket-booster-lands-near-house/ https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-r...
- throwbadubadu 3y agoMax terminal velocity of a skydiver is only 200 km/h.. if this booster is empty this is even maybe slower. Plus real slowness there is also the optical illusion of a very large object in some distance. So just curious, how fast would you think it should be, and how fast do you think it is in the video?
- petermcneeley 3y agoIt makes more sense when you see the wreckage. The entire booster looks like it is made of very thin metal. It is falling on its side just before impact so it has maximum drag at that stage. I would guess it is going 100km/h or less.
- FpUser 3y agoThis illusion is particularly strong when looking from the moving car. Large low flying planes seem to be standstill in this case.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- wildekek 3y agoHypergolics in your backyard is no joke.
- meepmorp 3y agoA little UDMH never hurt anyone. Well, not for very long at least.
- duskwuff 3y ago"Orange smoke. Don't breathe this." (The color is characteristic of nitrogen dioxide, which is a breakdown product of many hypergolic propellants.)
- ethbr1 3y agoAs wise words now as the days they were spoken. Never forget the eternal question: will it blend?
- cocostation 3y agoReminds me of when a crewed SpaceX capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola and a bunch of idiots in boats went to check it out. https://www.space.com/boaters-crash-spacex-crew-dragon-splashdown.html https://www.space.com/boaters-crash-spacex-crew-dragon-splas...
- Simon_ORourke 3y agoThis kind of event is highly irresponsible, and let's be clear their space program decided for it to fall in or around where the video was taken. Utterly reckless.
- londons_explore 3y agoIn this case that recklessness paid off... Nobody was killed or injured, and they probably gain far more from being able to inspect the used booster than the cost of cleanup/replanting a tree or two.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Thorrez 3y agoIt looks like it exploded when it landed. How inspectable will it be?
- dh2022 3y agoThe fact that nobody was injured does not make it any less reckless...
- abracadaniel 3y agoDoes spreading incredibly carcinogenic compounds in a populated area count as injury? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Disadvantages https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Disadvan...
- elsonrodriguez 3y agoThis line of reasoning is often heard on a crowded lake after a close call with a boat.
- mynameisnoone 3y agoIt's the reasoning of Idiocracy / Darwin Award candidates.
- o0-0o 3y ago[flagged]
- sixQuarks 3y ago[flagged]
- Waterluvian 3y agoA lot of decisions made by the governments of China, Russia, and others make a lot more sense when considering they perceive humans as a renewable natural resource.
- mensetmanusman 3y agoPutin last month said their women need to have at most 8 kids to resupply their special operation stock.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoHe's not wrong. A lot of countries aren't hitting replacement rate, even without a war.
- asia92 3y ago[flagged]
- FredPret 3y agoUnder totalitarian systems like communism or nazism, citizens are assets (or at least the well-behaved ones are). That's why they were prevented from leaving the old soviet bloc, and why things like this happen in China.
- londons_explore 3y agoIf 30% of the US population wanted to migrate away all of a sudden, I think the US government would restrict it too. No government wants to lose all its people - since without people, there is nobody to tax. In fact, giving up US citizenship is already made rather difficult - you typically have a huge tax bill to pay, and many people cannot afford to pay it, so cannot leave.
- Tommstein 3y agoIs it just me, or does the booster disappear shortly before hitting the ground, followed by the explosion happening before the now invisible booster should've hit the spot of the explosion?
- gedy 3y agoIt's just end is pointing towards camera in the last moments
- Tommstein 3y agoThat would explain half of it, although I looked for that and couldn't see it. Wouldn't explain the other half though.
- butlike 3y ago[flagged]
- ChrisClark 3y agoNo, I see it fall right to the ground and explode at the moment it hits the ground.
- traviswingo 3y agoI’ve had people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that the A.I. that will be a threat to humanity will be of Chinese origin. It’s this exact “succeed, at any cost” mentality that cements my belief.
- dylan604 3y agostrange comment for this particular video. not really sure what a rapid disassembly of a rocket has to do with AI. i don't disagree though, maybe for differing reasons
- throwup238 3y agoThe boosters should have their own flight termination system which should have exploded if they were going to fall anywhere near populated land. Everyone in the US has to have them even if they're launching from Florida over the ocean and each independent flight component (like rocket boosters) has to have its own. Allowing a rocket to fall on land like that shows extreme contempt for public safety.
- novagameco 3y ago[flagged]
- ryandrake 3y agoI think what OP might be saying is that the attitude that it's OK to just yeet a rocket booster at a populated area, might also not yield much safety when it's applied to Artificial General Intelligence.
- cma 3y agoSpaceX's flight termination system malfunctioned last year as well, though it was out to sea at that point.
- throwaway4aday 3y agoThat's the entire reason why they launch from the coast, so that if something goes wrong the debris or booster will fall into the ocean.
- izzydata 3y agoIsn't the point of the booster to use up the entirety of its fuel to propel the main rocket? Is it normal for there to be enough fuel left in it to cause such an explosion?
- jackmott 3y agoThere is often some margin, and it doesn’t take much. Many early failed falcon 9 landings were very explodey
- orbital-decay 3y agoYes, there's always residual fuel and oxidizer in the piping, it's always accounted for. For the first stage of a rocket of this size, it should be around a couple dozen kg, give or take. And hypergolic components ignite on contact.
- perihelions 3y agoYou can't pump a fuel tank entirely empty. (You could try to displace it with an inert filler gas—compressed helium, for example—but then you're replacing fuel mass with filler-gas mass, and that brings its own set of tradeoffs). (I understand it's a particularly deep and difficult engineering problem to solve this in space: in zero-gravity, liquid fuels turn into bubbles floating around in nearly-empty fuel tanks—all sorts of phenomena going on).
- CobrastanJorji 3y agoBy no means am I an engineer, but the first thing that comes to mind to me is those little toothpaste keys, and I wonder if you could perhaps just reduce the size of the canister as it empties. I sort of imagine a board with a spring on the top end of the canister that is held compressed under pressure but pushes towards the other end as the fuel is used up. Perhaps the pressure is so great when full that this is very difficult?
- positr0n 3y agoIf that were possible with the fuels rockets use (liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid methane, etc.) it is still probably way cheaper on every axis to just make the tank 3% bigger and ignore the waste. Common axes they care about in rocket design are weight, cost in money, reliability/complexity, and lately reusability.
- emsign 3y agoThat's normal for China, they don't care about the trajectory of their boosters and deorbited satellites.
- edge17 3y agoAnother angle. Looks like it landed on someone's property https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20 https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20
- cma 3y agohttps://nitter.net/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20 https://nitter.net/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20
- ethbr1 3y agoThat looks like a different booster, given that the OP isn't venting as it comes down and explodes. Maybe this is common?
- gs17 3y agoIt is common AFAIK. The most used launch sites (there's one on Hainan where rockets only go over the ocean, but it's the least used) are pretty far inland and they don't seem to mind if boosters land on the people there or if the villages get toxic fuel sprayed on them.
- resolutebat 3y agoChina has four major launch sites. Wenchang, the one on Hainan, is used for human spaceflight. Larger cargo rockets use Jiuquan in the middle of the Gobi Desert. It's the other two, Taiyuan and Xichang (this one), that are relatively close to rural villages, although both are still very remote by Chinese standards.
- bowmessage 3y agoDon't you mean the PRC's property?
- michaelcampbell 3y agoDo "someone"s HAVE property in China?
- wolverine876 3y agoA better link: https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-rocket-booster-lands-near-house/ https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-r...
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThese have fallen out of the sky before killing people on the ground: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B They launched it in Sichuan in a fairly populated region. Supposedly, only 6 people died, but there are rumors that many more were killed.
- drekipus 3y ago> Supposedly, only 6 people died, but there are rumors that many more were killed. Deaths and injuries are always underreported in Chinese media and government figures, because there cannot be any information that is damaging to the public image of the CCP; and if the CCP control everything, then there can't be damaging information about anything.
- Aeolun 3y ago> only 6 people died Only?! The last starships have all exploded in some sort of spectacular fashion, but I don’t think anyone has ever had to worry about a booster exploding on their head.
- Perceval 3y ago[flagged]
- Mr_Minderbinder 3y agoThey have something called the CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) which appears to be the equivalent of the FAA for the most part. Checking their website (briefly) it doesn't look like they regulate spacecraft or launch/re-entry.
- jdougan 3y ago[flagged]
- jessriedel 3y agoI mean, tens of billions of dollar (equivalent) have been spent on the Long March rocket program, as with any major rocket. If you spent that much on normal construction, you'd see a lot more than 6 deaths, and indeed I'm sure more rocketry workers were killed than random outsiders. For reference, there's of order 1 death per billion dollars spent in construction in the US per year. The statistical value of life in the US is roughly $10M, so it's only 1% of cost. I presume in China the statistical value is lower by a factor of 3-10, so it wouldn't be surprising that many dozens or even hundred of workers had been killed since the program started.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoMoloch is winning
- wizzwizz4 3y agoThere are only, like, two dozen launch-capable space agencies in the world (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_government_space_agencies&oldid=1192230822#List_of_space_agencies_with_launch_capability https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_governmen...). This isn't a Moloch problem.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoI agree. I also posted the same information below. I guess I was more responding to the general sentiment in the thread about AI and human rights.
- FrustratedMonky 3y agoYou are correct, as I posted below on launch sites, in agreement. Guess I was reacting to the rest of the thread that was discussing AI and Human Rights.
- perihelions 3y agoThat sus red smoke is nitrogen tetroxide [0], and the other fuel would be one of the hydrazine derivatives (I believe UDMH [1] here, given that the Twitter thread says this was a Long March 3B). It's exactly as poisonous as it looks. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinitrogen_tetroxide https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinitrogen_tetroxide [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsymmetrical_dimethylhydrazine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsymmetrical_dimethylhydrazin... edit: Oh yeah, those of you who are concerned about the toxic fumes from gas stoves (popular HN topic), this is exactly* that thing—except the stoves' are measured in micrograms and what you're watching in rocket disaster videos is multiple tonnes. One of these lands on your house, and you will not need to worry about long-term cancer risks ever again. *(To be accurate, NO2 ⇌ N2O4 interconvert in dynamic equilibrium)
- KMag 3y ago> *(To be accurate, NO2 ⇌ N2O4 interconvert in dynamic equilibrium) ... and isn't N02 red while N204 is clear? So, to be pedantic, the red they're seeing is N02?
- perihelions 3y agoExactly!
- cmrdporcupine 3y agoNicely uphill from the rice paddy this video was taken in, too. I'm sure that rice will be extra delicious as the rains wash the residues into the field. WP about N-Nitrosodimethylamine, which apparently dimethylhydrazine is a precursor to "Contamination of drinking water with NDMA is of particular concern due to the minute concentrations at which it is harmful, the difficulty in detecting it at these concentrations, and to the difficulty in removing it from drinking water. It does not readily biodegrade, adsorb, or volatilize. As such, it cannot be removed by activated carbon and travels easily through soils. "
- justin66 3y agoThat's a real nightmare. Trace amounts of perchlorates (speaking of rocket chemicals) in water are attributed to some bad health effects, and the compounds you're talking about are so much worse.
- fransje26 3y ago"I love the smell of hydrazine in the morning."
- kens 3y agoNASA has a vintage 1966 video "Toxic Propellant Hazards in Rocketry" that provides an interesting discussion of the dangers of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine propellants. It includes people mixing them together in the desert, along with a dramatization of how to deal with a nitrogen tetroxide leak. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA
- kabanda1 3y agoCan there be any news here from China where y'all don't end up on the China is bad, we are good topic? I feel like this was different before Trump? Did he make all of you come out of the closet?
- hmmmcurious1 3y agoAre we all on the china is bad topic because we're concerned about highly toxic rocket fuel spraying over civilians? Or what are we doing wrong here?
- imp0cat 3y agoReplying to a Chinese troll, that's what. ;)
- kabanda1 3y agoBeing concerned is not a problem. It's the trying to make it look like China is that brutal stone age country that doesn't give a damn about the lives of their people, in total disregard of facts. Have you considered that may they try but fail to land them far away from the population.
- csours 3y agoAmazing how villagers these days have cell phones that can take high quality video. My villagers are walking around with wicker baskets and wooden hammers.
- nextworddev 3y agoWhere would that be?
- gerdesj 3y agoIn a game. Wake up matey!
- mytailorisrich 3y agoThis being China they probably also have pretty good 5G connectivity...
- karmasimida 3y agoChina already has almost 100% cell phone penetration so that is it.
- bamboozled 3y agoI hope whoever posted this video isn’t in too much trouble ?
- petre 3y agoProbably not, they're more concerned blocking Winnie the Pooh memes. Rocket stage with toxic propellant landing on some poor peasants' rice paddy? Not a concern. Happens all the time. It's the price of progress: BeiDou and satellite TV used to disseminate CCP worldview.
- geckbench 3y ago[dead]
- Giorgi 3y agoSo they simply launch rockets and then it rains down on their population with pollutants, I wonder what will happen after all that space junk will expire and it is time to decommission.