Chinese rocket segment disintegrates near Maldives

There was fevered speculation over where the 18-tonne object would come down

Debris from a large Chinese rocket landed in the Indian Ocean near the Maldives early Sunday, China’s space administration announced.

It said most of the debris had burned up on re-entry. It was not immediately clear whether any of what remained had landed on any of the Maldives’ 1,192 islands.

The rocket, a Long March 5B, launched the main module of China’s next space station, Tiangong, on April 29. Usually, the large booster stages of rockets immediately drop back to Earth after they are jettisoned, but the 23-ton core stage of the Long March 5B accompanied the space station segment all the way to orbit.

Because of friction caused by the rocket rubbing against air at the top of the atmosphere, it soon began losing altitude, making what is called “uncontrolled reentry” back to Earth inevitable. The chances that debris would strike anything or hurt anyone were slight, but not zero, and people around the world kept a wary eye on its trajectory for days.

China’s space administration announced that the debris had entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Mediterranean before flying over the Middle East and coming down near the Maldives, south of India. People in Israel and Oman reported sightings of the rocket debris on social media.

Also read: A Chinese rocket is tumbling back to Earth. Where will it land?

Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said on Twitter that an ocean splashdown had always been the most likely outcome but that the episode raised questions about how China designs its space missions.

“It appears China won its gamble (unless we get news of debris in the Maldives),” he wrote. “But it was still reckless.”

China’s space program needed a large, powerful vehicle to carry Tianhe, the main module of the space station, which is to be operational by 2022.

Several smaller side boosters dropped off shortly after the launch, crashing harmlessly in the Pacific Ocean. But the core booster stage carried Tianhe into orbit.

In recent decades, rocket stages that reach orbit typically fire the engine again after releasing their payloads so that they drop out of orbit, aimed at an unoccupied area like the middle of an ocean.

China did not do that for this launch.