NASA Administrator Bill Nelson slammed Beijing Saturday as a Chinese rocket crashed back to Earth, landing in the Indian Ocean.
“Spacefaring nations must minimize the risks to people and property on Earth of re-entries of space objects and maximize transparency regarding those operations,” Nelson said in a statement. “It is clear that China is failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris.”
“It is critical that China and all spacefaring nations and commercial entities act responsibly and transparently in space to ensure the safety, stability, security, and long-term sustainability of outer space activities,” Nelson added.
The debris came from the remains of remnants of China’s Long March 5B rocket. According to The New York Times:
The piece that will be dropping out of the sky somewhere is the core booster stage of the Long March 5B, which was designed to lift the big, heavy pieces of the space station. For most rockets, the lower stages usually drop back to Earth immediately after launch. Upper stages that reach orbit usually fire the engine again after releasing their payloads, guiding them toward re-entry in an unoccupied area like the middle of an ocean.
Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts, said that China is the only spacefaring nation that has let its large rocket boosters that make orbit fall back to Earth haphazardly without any attempt to direct where the debris lands, according to the Times.
“An ocean reentry was always statistically the most likely. It appears China won its gamble (unless we get news of debris in the Maldives). But it was still reckless,” McDowell said in a tweet after the Chinese debris crashed into the Indian Ocean.
In the days leading up to impact, experts said that pinpointing the location where the debris would land would be difficult, if not impossible. While the chances of the rocket landing in a densely populated area were small, the odds were not nothing, though, highlighting the risk that China took by not taking safety precautions with the remnants of its Long March 5B rocket.
The Pentagon said last week that it was tracking the remnants of the rocket, but was unable to predict where it would land. As The Daily Wire reported:
The Pentagon has been tracking the Chinese “Long March 5B” rocket. According to a statement from Defense Department spokesperson Mike Howard, the U.S. Space Command is tracking the rocket’s trajectory, expected to enter our planet’s atmosphere this weekend.
According to Howard, the “exact entry point into the Earth’s atmosphere” cannot be determined until just hours before the rocket enters Earth’s atmosphere.
“We expect it to reenter sometime between the eighth and 10th of May. And in that two day period, it goes around the world 30 times. The thing is traveling at like 18,000 miles an hour. And so if you’re an hour out at guessing when it comes down, you’re 18,000 miles out in saying where,” explained McDowell.