Long March 5B Core Stage Re-Enters
Long March 5B Core Stage Re-Enters
“NASA Administrator Bill Nelson released this statement Saturday regarding debris from the Chinese Long March 5B rocket: “The People’s Republic of China (PRC) did not share specific trajectory information as their Long March 5B rocket fell back to Earth. All spacefaring nations should follow established best practices, and do their part to share this type of information in advance to allow reliable predictions of potential debris impact risk, especially for heavy-lift vehicles, like the Long March 5B, which carry a significant risk of loss of life and property. Doing so is critical to the responsible use of space and to ensure the safety of people here on Earth.”
Western powers can eventually be shamed into doing the right thing, but as long as it doesn’t directly harm their own wealth and power the PRC will never care.
I have done a LOT of predicting reentries (not lately however) and wonder what kind of trajectory information the Chinese could have made available? I doubt that we needed more observations and the Chinese wouldn’t know much about the drag coefficient for instance.
The Aerospace Corporation was putting out estimates of the time of reentry (with error bars) and the ground track that implied, and issuing them every few hours. I don’t believe they’re paid to do that. That’s the sort of information CNSA could and should have been providing. The Chinese space agency (and the Chinese government as a whole) were completely silent as far as I can tell, until after the reentry where they provided the location of the impact site. Oh, and saying that it doesn’t matter because it will probably land in the ocean.
I am not sure what their contract specifies but Aerospace Corp has been making reentry predictions available for years. Certainly that is a part of their tasking from the DoD, whether that includes Twitter I don’t know.
The Chinese have been very irresponsible I agree but they don’t have the vast tracking network that the Space Force runs, so they would not have the accuracy of their predictions. They should have communicated far more but still they would not have anything to contribute in the way of trajectory information (I don’t think). I am currently communicating with some Chinese astronomers about satellite tracking and they don’t have the big network that we have.
Continued irresponsible pattern of behavior in space by a third tier space agency
One of these times, they will impact someplace with casualties. I don’t think wearing an aluminum foil hat would help, but I guess the PRC could always be sued…for all the good that will do!