5/24/2023 0 Comments Chinese rocket crashThere's a big difference between a 20-ton rocket stage and the one-ton or two-ton objects that the U.S. MCDOWELL: No, I think the Chinese are being a little disingenuous here. Do you think critics of China's space program are just being unfair? I mean, for example, debris from SpaceX rockets has crashed into farms in Australia and even Washington state. NADWORNY: But even despite kind of that risk calculation difference, the Chinese government has said it's just doing what every other country does when it sends stuff up into space. They see that one in a thousand, and they go, no problem we'll take those odds, whereas in the U.S., we're like, oh, no, you better do some redesign. I think fundamentally the answer is that they have a different attitude to risk than, say, the United States. NADWORNY: Why hasn't China designed its rockets that way? For a big booster like this, the usual way people will take care of it is not to put it in orbit in the first place, make it do most of the work of getting your satellite into orbit but shut it down just a little early so that it falls immediately in the ocean at a predictable place and then make little engines on the satellite do the last little puff of getting it into space. If you have a smaller rocket stage, you can make it a restartable (ph) engine and slam it deliberately down into the atmosphere at a specific place in time. MCDOWELL: Well, there are various things that people do. NADWORNY: Is there a way to make sure that large pieces of debris like this won't cause loss of life or property? If you're doing a lot of these, even a one in a thousand risk, eventually you're going to get unlucky. It's maybe one in a thousand, but that's still a lot higher than the criterion that most countries use for going, eh, probably too high a risk to take. MCDOWELL: The chance of it hurting someone is not that high. NADWORNY: What are the odds that a piece of rocket debris would actually hurt someone? MCDOWELL: And so it's that lack of predictability that makes this particularly worrying. So if you estimate wrong when it's going to break up by an hour, you're 17,000 miles off. The problem is that the rocket booster is tumbling along at the edge of the atmosphere at 17,000 miles an hour. Is there any way to know where this stuff is going to fall? Several years ago, chunks hit villages in West Africa, causing property damage but no casualties. NADWORNY: So this is the fourth time that debris from a Chinese rocket has cascaded down to Earth. NASA administrator Bill Nelson said in a statement Friday that China was taking, quote, "unnecessary risks." Here to talk more about this is Jonathan McDowell with Harvard's Center for Astrophysics. The Chinese rocket booster was designed to fall to Earth after propelling a piece of China's space station into orbit. The debris didn't cause any casualties, but the rocket's uncontrolled descent was no accident. A rocket the size of a 10-story building tumbled out of the sky on Friday and splashed into the Pacific Ocean.
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