A massive hunk of dark material recently found smoldering in the Australian outback is likely part of a top-secret Chinese rocket, experts say. The charred debris likely crash-landed shortly after it failed to completely burn up upon entry into Earth’s atmosphere.
ABC News first reported that local miners discovered the smoking debris, about 5 feet (1.5 meters) in diameter, about 18.5 miles (30 kilometers) from the town of Newman in Western Australia’s Pilbara region at around 2pm local time on Saturday (October 18).
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Marco Langbroek, an aerospace engineering analyst at the Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, who tracks the orbits of orbiting spacecraft, first identified the likely source of the debris as the upper stage of China’s Liberation 3 rocket, which had left orbit shortly before the discovery, according to Live Science’s sister site Space.com.
This theory was later supported by other experts, including Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics who has been tracking space debris entering the atmosphere for more than 35 years. It is currently unknown when this rocket was first launched into space.
Experts are not sure exactly what part of the 102-foot-tall (31-meter) rocket was discovered near Newman. That’s because of the extensive damage and uncertainty surrounding the spacecraft’s design resulting from the high level of secrecy surrounding China’s entire space program, including rocket design, spaceplanes, moon missions, and satellite constellations.
However, it appears to be mostly composed of carbon fiber, according to Space.com. Therefore, the most likely scenario is that it is either a composite outer pressure vessel (COPV) with high-pressure gas and liquid inside the rocket, or the destroyed remains of the entire upper stage.
Based on its size and impact point, Langbroek estimates that the remaining rocket mass weighs 660 pounds (300 kilograms). He added that solid fuel is heavier than traditional liquid rocket fuel, so this could be further evidence that the rocket is powered by an experimental solid fuel source.
But one of the biggest surprises about the incident was that the wreckage was still partially burned when it was discovered, which is highly unusual. This is likely a sign of “very recent effects,” Langbroek wrote in a blog post.
What goes up must come down
According to NASA, all objects that reach low-Earth orbit, whether they are satellites, rocket stages, or large spacecraft like the International Space Station (ISS), are ultimately destined to fall back to Earth at the end of their operational lives.
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Typically, these objects burn up completely upon re-entry into the atmosphere. When a spacecraft is too large to disintegrate completely, such as China’s Shenzhou 15 spacecraft, which created a spectacular fireball when it burned up over California in April 2024, it is often strategically deorbited and ends up landing in a remote part of the ocean.
But in some cases, objects expected to burn up don’t completely disintegrate, or heavy spacecraft reenter uncontrollably. For example, the dead Soviet spacecraft Cosmos 482 made headlines when it crashed to Earth in May. When this happens, large chunks of debris can rain down on the surface, with potentially devastating consequences.
China has long been criticized for the large number of rocket boosters that have fallen to Earth in the past few years. This occurs because the booster is much larger than most other boosters and is left alone to re-enter without guidance from operators on the ground.
So far, no one has been injured or killed by falling space debris, but there have been some near misses. For example, in January, an 8-foot-wide (2.5-meter) metal ring fell into the middle of a Kenyan village, and in April 2024, the remains of a battery pallet jettisoned from the ISS crashed into a house in Florida.
A 2022 study predicted a 10% chance of a space debris-related casualty within the next 10 years, with higher mortality rates for people living in the Southern Hemisphere.
Many space agencies and private companies are researching new ways to remove space debris, but the rate at which new objects are being deployed into orbit is far outpacing advances in removal technology.
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