4 LOOK OUT BELOW!
On May 8, the booster section of a Chinese Long March 5B rocket came back to Earth in a manner most undignified, hurtling out of control and breaking up over the Arabian Peninsula. Just a couple of weeks earlier, the rocket launched the core module for the new Chinese modular space station called Tianhe. But unlike most other countries’ rocket launches, the booster continued into orbit, where it tumbled uncontrolled with an unknown time and place of reentry—common practice is to separate the booster from the payload and send it along a planned trajectory to a known point of impact in the ocean. While there have been no reported injuries from fragments of the 23-ton rocket stage, another Chinese booster also reentered orbit uncontrolled in 2020, shortly after their first space station, Tiangong-1, returned to Earth in 2018, also uncontrolled. NASA and other international entities have called for better planning and performance from the Chinese space agency and government.