![]() ![]() The core stages of most orbital rockets are steered to a safe demise in the ocean or over unpopulated land shortly after liftoff, or, in the case of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy vehicles, come down for vertical landings and eventual reuse. “The worst case in this event is going to be less serious than a single cruise missile strike that we’ve been seeing every day in the Ukrainian warso let’s put it in some perspective here,” astrophysicist and satellite tracker Jonathan McDowell, who’s based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said during today’s discussion.Īll of that being said, the coming Long March 5B crash is a serious and unfortunate event, McDowell and others stressed, particularly because it could have been avoided. Such impacts will be energetic and destructive, but they won’t be cataclysmic. The surviving chunks of the Long March 5B will be traveling several hundred miles per hour when they hit the ground (or water). “Personally, if this were coming down on my head, I’d run outside with a camera to watch it, because I think it would be more of a visual than an actual risk,” he added. There’s a “99.5% chance that nothing will happen,” Ted Muelhaupt, a consultant with The Aerospace Corporation’s Corporate Chief Engineer’s Office, said during a discussion about the coming Long March 5B crash that the company livestreamed today (July 28) on Twitter. ![]() Related: The biggest spacecraft to fall uncontrolled from space The odds of a piece hitting anyone are minuscule, however, given how much of Earth is covered by ocean and sparsely populated land. Most of the rocket will burn up in Earth’s atmosphere, but a significant portion of it - about five to nine metric tons (opens in new tab) (5.5 to 9.9 tons), according to The Aerospace Corporation’s Center for Orbital Reentry and Debris Studies - will make it all the way down. The latest predictions have the 25-ton (22.5 metric tons) booster coming down on Saturday evening (July 30), although there’s a pretty big margin of error in such estimates: plus or minus 16 hours at this point. The doomed hunk of space junk is the core stage of the Long March 5B rocket that launched a module to China’s Tiangong space station last Sunday (July 24). A huge Chinese rocket body is expected to fall to Earth this weekend, but that doesn’t mean you should scurry into a bunker.
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