Residents of Xiangdu in southern China pointed their smartphones skyward at an object tumbling from the heavens last month. In , the object explodes in fields on a hillside outside town. It turned out to be a strap-on booster from a rocket that had launched from a site 700 kilometres away.
To reinforce the suspicion that this was no accident, the same thing happened again in the same region this week, with near buildings.
It was sheer luck no one was maimed or killed, especially given the boosters use hypergolic fuels 鈥� dimethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide 鈥� which spontaneously ignite on contact. Those are nasty chemicals: in the second world war, rescuers could only watch as a similar fuel spilled over the pilot of a crashed German rocket plane, dissolving him alive.
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Neither Chinese incident was unforeseen. Both are in a , where with ditched, fuel-carrying rocket boosters and stages is a price China鈥檚 totalitarian government is willing to make citizens pay so they can bask in the geopolitical glory of space flight.
Unfortunately, this heedless behaviour is par for the course for its space programme.
Sky fall
The next and most headline grabbing example of plummeting space debris may well be China鈥檚 first space station, Tiangong-1, or 鈥渉eavenly palace鈥�, reportedly out of control and due to hurtle back to Earth within weeks. There is a risk, albeit a small one, that lumps of it could survive burn up and fall on a large swathe of populated land, including parts of the US and Europe.
When the 8.5-tonne craft was launched in September 2011, a debris-mitigating, end-of-life strategy should have been to the fore for the China National Space Administration. But not a bit of it. Thanks to a complete with Tiangong-1, mission controllers seem unable to fire its rockets and steer it into remote parts of the Pacific Ocean, the traditional spaceship graveyard.
Instead, Tiangong-1 will be re-entering the atmosphere anywhere between 43掳 north and 43掳 south, according to the . If debris mitigation really mattered to the Chinese authorities, they would have had a backup plan for getting the space station down safely 鈥� multiple means of communication, perhaps, or docking a drone cargo ship to steer it into an ocean.
China鈥檚 slipshod attitude to debris extends to orbit as well as to Earth.
Its most infamous act in this regard was testing its by obliterating one of its defunct weather satellites with a missile in 2007. This act of destruction led to low Earth orbit being polluted with an extra 3500 trackable chunks of fast-moving space debris 鈥� and many more untrackable fragments, smaller than a golf ball in size.
Dodging debris
International outrage followed, with the it 鈥渋nconsistent with the spirit of cooperation that both countries aspire to in the civil space area鈥�. The debris, much of which will stay in orbit until 2035, forces other spacecraft to make avoidance manoeuvres, using limited fuel reserves and shortening their lives.
China will claim it pays due attention to debris risks and will doubtless point to its membership of the 聽Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee as evidence. But it is in denial on this: in announcing Tiangong-1鈥檚 fate, for instance, Beijing鈥檚 official news agency, Xinhua, claimed that China has always highly valued the management of space debris, conducting research and tests on its mitigation. Dumping fuel-containing boosters in populated areas and blowing apart an orbiting satellite cannot be reconciled with that.
This lax attitude is a shame because it detracts from some of China鈥檚 more exciting space projects, such as testing quantum cryptographic communications in orbit and its plan to land on Mars in 2021.
It is time China鈥檚 deeds matched its words. The world of space flight has changed since NASA鈥檚 Skylab crashed to Earth in 1979, hitting parts of Western Australia: China needs to get with the programme.
