Footage from southern China has captured the moment rocket debris from a recent satellite launch plummeted from the sky and exploded near village homes.
China launched two new satellites on Tuesday for its BeiDou navigation system, the country’s officials Xinhua News Agency said.
At least two boosters of the Long March 3B multistage launch vehicle fell back to Earth in two different locations, Guangxi region bordering Vietnam and Hainan province on the South China Sea, according to separate local government notices.
Now in its third generation, the BeiDou system is a testament to China’s growing expertise in global positioning technology, rivaling other navigation systems like America’s GPS, Europe’s Galileo, and Russia’s GLONASS.
BeiDou, which has been exported to nearly 150 other countries or regions, also reflects Beijing’s strategic ambitions in space, the next frontier of competition with the United States.
The Long March 3B’s rocket engines, each weighing tens of tons, propel the launch vehicle using a combination of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.
Authorities in Guangxi’s Debao county issued a public notice to local residents as early as December 22, warning of potential rocket debris in seven locations, which was to follow Tuesday morning’s scheduled launch.
“When evacuating, residents should not congregate. When rocket debris falls to the ground, you will hear one or several loud bangs,” the notice said.
A video posted to Weibo, China’s popular microblogging app, showed villagers watching one booster falling from the sky before it impacted the ground in a large fireball. In another clip of the aftermath, the charred debris was seen smoking next to a home.
“The presence of reddish-brown gas or smoke indicative of nitrogen tetroxide is visible in both [videos], while a yellowish gas, possibly the results of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine fuel mixing with air, can be seen next to the building,” Space News, a specialist website, said in its analysis of the resulting plume.
No injuries were reported.
In the clips, bystanders could be heard expressing shock at the sight of the debris, which returned to Earth in an uncontrolled manner. And it was not the first near miss—suspected Chinese rocket debris was found in an Indian village last year.
AFP via Getty/STR
In a separate notice on Tuesday, the maritime safety authority of the Hainan town of Qinglan warned rocket debris would fall into the South China Sea.
At least one local resident filmed the Long March 3B overflying the city of Sanya after it took off from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China’s southwestern Sichuan province.
The two satellites—the 57th and 58th of the BeiDou system—were launched at 11:26 a.m. local time on the Yuanzheng-1 upper stage, Xinhua said. They were the first medium-Earth orbit satellites added to the BeiDou-3 system since it was officially commissioned to provide worldwide satellite navigation services.
The BeiDou system is already integrated into China’s civilian and military infrastructure, and China’s home-grown geographical information system promises to further reduce the country’s dependence on technologies developed in other parts of the world.
Completed in mid-2020, the BeiDou system has more than 36 active satellites, predominantly in medium-Earth orbit, but also includes satellites in geostationary Earth orbit and inclined geosynchronous orbit, ensuring comprehensive and stable signal coverage.
With BeiDou-3 now open to users worldwide, China is one of only three countries with an independent global satellite navigation system.
“The two satellites will play multiple roles by effectively expanding the communication capacity of BeiDou’s global short messages, upgrading the performance monitoring of the integrity of its navigation signals globally, and more,” Xie Jun, BeiDou’s deputy chief designer, told Xinhua after the latest launch.
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.