Status: 11/04/2022 3:57 p.m
The remains of a Chinese rocket have fallen to earth again. According to Beijing, they landed in the Pacific. According to previous calculations, southern Europe could also have been hit. The airspace over Spain was temporarily closed.
The remains of a Chinese space rocket have fallen into the Pacific, according to Beijing. The Chinese space program shared the coordinates of the impact site, after which debris landed in the Pacific off the Central American coast.
Most parts of the “Long March 5B” rocket were burned up and destroyed when it re-entered the earth’s atmosphere, it said. The re-entry took place at 6:08 p.m. Chinese time (11:08 a.m. CET). The US Forces Space Command previously tweeted that the missile had entered the atmosphere over the Pacific.
Airspace closed over Spain
The airspace over parts of Spain was temporarily closed in the morning because of the remains of the rocket. The reason was a warning from the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), it said. According to previous calculations, it would have been possible for the rocket to crash over parts of southern Europe. Air traffic in several regions of Spain was disrupted for 40 minutes “due to the danger posed by the passage of space object CZ-5B (…)”, the Catalan civil defense said on Twitter.
The airports of Barcelona, Tarragona and Ibiza were affected, as reported by Spanish media, citing civil defense. However, it could still lead to significant delays in air traffic throughout the day, the newspaper El País wrote. All air traffic at the airports mentioned had temporarily come to a standstill.
Already international criticism
The space debris comes from a rocket that China used to launch the last module of its Tiangong space station, which is currently under construction, on Monday. The re-entry of large Chinese rocket parts into the earth’s atmosphere has repeatedly triggered international criticism. According to official information from Beijing, rocket parts fell into the sea near the Philippines in July.
Even though experts considered the likelihood of people or populated areas being hit to be low, there was criticism from NASA and experts: “No other country leaves these 20-ton things in orbit to be released back into the earth’s atmosphere in an uncontrolled manner enter,” said the astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell from the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics to the US broadcaster CNN in July.