No one knows where the discarded piece of hardware might land, but there’s no reason to panic.
There are many unknowns in the field of space exploration. What came before the Big Bang? What is dark matter? Will we ever make contact with another civilization, or are we destined to remain alone, floating along on this tiny, insignificant speck in the universe? The latest unknown to captivate the space community is something a little less grand: Where is that giant rocket going to land when it falls out of the sky? The rocket in question belongs to China, and it is currently hurtling through the atmosphere, circling the planet about every 90 minutes, toward what is known as an “uncontrolled reentry” sometime this weekend. The expendable hardware was once part of a larger vehicle, the Long March 5B, which launched last month with the first piece of China’s new space station. Once the payload successfully reached space, the rocket, emptied of fuel, slipped away and became space junk. Launch providers usually try to ensure that their discarded rocket bits descend soon after a flight, and the hardware mostly falls into the ocean, though some pieces, on rare occasions, hit land. But this empty rocket is different. The Long March 5B vehicle was designed in such a way that its expendable rocket ended up in orbit, tumbling around at more than 17,000 miles per hour. Parts of the rocket are expected to survive the fiery reentry through Earth’s atmosphere and reach the surface, and who knows where they might land? The U.S. military is tracking the object, but even the best available data can’t predict its final destination. Considering the size of this thing—nearly 100 feet tall, more than 15 feet across, weighing 23 tons—the idea of even parts of it hurtling toward us is particularly unnerving, enough that a friend whom I haven’t seen in ages sent me this text message last night: “Are you following this China rocket thing? Are we doomed??” No one is doomed! Not because of this, at least. While the chances are not zero, the likelihood that debris from the Long March 5B will drop onto a populated area is extremely low. Even without a controlled entry, it is far more likely to smash into the ocean, which our planet thankfully has a lot of. (Honestly, the reentry we should probably be more preoccupied with is the return to social interaction after vaccination.) Stuff falls into the atmosphere every day, burning up as it goes. You’re more likely to get struck by lightning than smacked with a piece of falling space debris. “The chance of someone being hurt is maybe a percent or so,” Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who is well known in the space community for his expert monitoring of artificial space objects, told me. “The chance of you being hurt is 8 billion times smaller than that, so don’t worry about it.
