Bridenstine Criticizes Uncontrolled Long March 5B Stage Reentry
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
In a statement on Friday, NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine said the uncontrolled reentry of the core stage from the recently launched Chinese Long March 5 could have fallen on U.S. cities before reentering over the Atlantic Ocean and west Africa.
“The empty core stage of the Long March 5B, weighing nearly 20 tons, was in an uncontrolled freefall along a path that carried it over Los Angeles and other populated areas. As a matter of fact, had this spent rocket stage, which is the largest uncontrolled object to fall from low-Earth orbit in almost 30 years, reentered earlier, it could have hit New York. Two villages in Cote d’Ivoire have reported finding what they believe to be debris from the fallen rocket.
The Long March 5B first stage reentered the Earth’s atmosphere on May 11, six days after the rocket made its maiden flight from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center. The rocket launched a prototype of a new Chinese crewed vehicle, which landed safely on May 8 after an automated flight.
The first stages of most launch vehicles burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere soon after burnout and separation from their second stages. Most SpaceX Falcon 9 first stages land back on Earth or an offshore drone ship for reuse.
Long March 5B doesn’t have a second stage. The core stage has four strap-on boosters that drop off after their fuel is expended. On this flight, the core stage continued on and entered orbit without a controlled reentry.
China plans to use Long March 5B to begin launching modules for the nation’s first permanent space station next year. The booster will also be used to launch other large orbital payloads.
Bridenstine said the dangerous, uncontrolled reentry was a good reason for nations to adopt the Artemis Accords, a set of principles that will govern the NASA-led partnership to explore the moon. The accords include provisions for controlling orbital debris.
“I can think of no better example of why we need the Artemis Accords. It’s vital for the U.S. to lead and establish norms of behavior against such irresponsible activities. Space exploration should inspire hope and wonder, not fear and danger,” he said.
43 responses to “Bridenstine Criticizes Uncontrolled Long March 5B Stage Reentry”
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The first stages of most launch vehicles burn up in the Earth’s atmosphere soon after burnout and
Actually they don’t they hit the water or a village in China.
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/11/26/chinese-rocket-crushes-houses-after-government-warning-to-residents.htmlOlder hypergolic Chinese rockets like the Long March 2, 3, and 4 do fall on villages because their launch sites are deep inland, and when they do, those spent boosters spreads a nice red toxic cloud of UDMH and N2O4. Video in above link.
These incidents are well documented.
Yes. But I read recently that they were trying SpaceX paddles to steer to a good place to crash. So at least they are trying. Interesting that they used a new launch site so that the 1st stage goes into the ocean and then use a rocket 1st stage that goes into orbit. They should have a way to restart the engine and de-orbit like 2nd stages do.
The LM5B core stage really is pretty much a second stage, with the four strap-ons being the real 1st stage. LM5B is a stage-and-a-half design like the old Atlas, which could also attain orbit. It is the final stage of this particular configuration and must get the payload all the way to orbit. So it, perforce, must also make it into the same orbit.
Or land on the Russian steppe.
Sometimes near houses.
I’m assuming that NASA has positive confirmation that the Chinese could not control the point of reentry such that a oceanic impact occurs. I’ve seen NOTAM’s for other large reentry events. So perhaps folks are keying off that. I had a chuckle when Ars Technica’s headline stated that the stage was only 15 min from hitting NYC. …. But LA to NYC is only 8 min or so at orbital speeds. So 15 min is quite a miss. I’m sure there’s more to this story but a lot of people don’t know what the real questions should be.
1) Was a NOTAM issued?
2) Did the Chinese report loss of control? (They did with their space station.)
3) Did the Chinese give a time range of re-entry?
4) Did NORAD issue a bulletin? (I assure you, they knew if this was a real concern.)
Any competent orbital tracking organization would have known that this was going to be an Atlantic or Pacific dump. The SE Pacific is of course the best dumping range. But this seems to me to be a bit of a non event. I’ll hold out for any other indication the Chinese had no control over where this thing came down before I wag my finger at them.
As for the Artemis Accords. There’s some heavy echoes of Sec of State Hillary Clinton’s proposed code of conduct for space operations. I seem to remember the Republican side getting into a bit of a tizzy over government overreach. But I guess it’s not overreach when Donny Two Scoops’ admin does it.
NOTAMs for re-entering space objects are typically issued for very limited chunks of airspace for very brief intervals. This, in turn, implies the controllability of the re-entering object. The LM5B stage could have re-entered anywhere between roughly latitudes 41 degrees N. and 41 degrees S. during a period of uncertainty that was an entire day in extent. The only “NOTAM” that would be applicable in such circumstances is the one issued by the fictional children’s story character Chicken Little, namely, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
I don’t know what the Chinese reported and it hardly matters. There is a difference between re-entry of a large object that actually had means of control that were, unfortunately, disabled and the deliberate placement of a large object lacking such control capabilities into a rapidly, but unpredictably, decaying orbit.
If one had a next-door neighbor who was a professional knife-thrower in a circus and he had the habit of occasionally, and randomly, flinging knives in your direction, you would have a clear basis for complaint. The situation with the Chinese LM5B stage is actually worse than this hypothetical as the knife-thrower could presumably exercise a fair degree of control over where his thrown knives would fetch up. That was explicitly not the case with the Chinese rocket stage.
It doesn’t matter whether the Chinese issued a time range for re-entry – unless you regard “some random time in the next 24 hours” as a useful such notification.
The same is true of NORAD or JSPOC notifications. Predicting re-entry of uncontrolled large objects is notoriously imprecise with respect to both temporal and geographic loci.
As bad as doing this once was, it’s apparently going to be the case that the Chinese will do this repeatedly in future. At least 3 LM5Bs are going to fly to put up segments of the new Chinese manned space station over the next two years. Nor is that the exclusive use case for the LM5B. Every manned mission to the new Chinese space station using the new Chinese manned capsule will also be via LM5B.
This seems to be a pretty clear case of your TDS causing you to reflexively take the side of any entity criticized by a Trump administration official simply because he’s a Trump administration official and the Trump administration is, of course, canonically incapable of ever doing anything right.
As to the Artemis Accords, I’m unaware of either Hillary or the Obama-era State Dept. ginning up any sort of code of conduct for space activities. The ESA did so. Perhaps the Obama-era State Dept. supported that effort – it’s certainly a well-established trope that leftist U.S. administrations tend to ape European notions based on the evident belief that, as Europe is more leftist than the U.S., it must, therefore, be smarter too.
But the ESA’s proposed code of conduct is obviously not the same as the Artemis Accords. Therefore, support for the latter and not for the former represents no logical inconsistency. The ESA accords, in particular, were heavily based on a number of U.N. resolutions including ones calling for bans on the deployment of weapons of any kind in space. They also contained the usual “province of all mankind” bilge and the usual pleas for the Grasshutistans of the world to be beneficiaries of space activity.
The Province of Mankind and “share the benefits” terms simply mean everyone is free to access and use space for their benefit. That is want is meant in the 1960’s and still means legally today despite the rantings of revisionist space lawyers. So it’s not surprising it was in the policy statement on the Artemis Accords. Freedom of Space has been a foundational element of American space policy since the Eisenhower Administration.
Yes, I got that wrong. What I should have written was “common heritage of mankind,” the term of art introduced in the Moon Treaty and also contained in some of the U.N. resolutions cited in the ESA draft Code of Conduct..
Yes and is part of the infamous Law of the Sea Treaty that ended development of sea bed resources.
Modern orbital tracking systems not only can track an object down to cubic cm accuracy and precision, but they can also detect and resolve deceleration due to atmospheric drag. More than likely the orientation and any induced spin was also resolved. The state of the upper atmosphere is very well understood, and tracked. I’ll bet you lunch tracking agencies had a very good idea where this was going to come down. The rest of your screed is next to worthless. I’m going to go back to programming, have a great Friday night.
It doesn’t really matter if they knew where it was going to come down after it burned out. Nobody knew where it was going to come down when it was launched–including the Chinese. Especially the Chinese. That’s the issue.
Update: From the Spaceflight Now article:
So now the USSF is suppose to do China’s job of warning the world about the space hazards China creates with its reckless design. Next, you will expect the USSF to shoot it down if it’s going to hit a city or populated area.
NORAD has been doing that for decades. It’s just part of situational awareness. It was a capability needed to detect a FROBS attack and track systems like the Soviet ASAT. NORAD has been playing this game easily since the 1970’s and if you project developments of the radar systems for Nike X as illustrations what NORAD was doing, maybe even the latter 3 or 4 years of the 1960’s.
Tracking ballistic weapon warheads is a rather different job than predicting the final resting place of an uncontrolled orbiting monstrosity that may also be tumbling slowly. If NORAD had been able to pin down the Chinese rocket stage’s impact centroid with any real precision, it would have done so. It didn’t. Ergo, it couldn’t.
What you hypothesize here is pretty obviously not the case. Neither the U.S. nor any other nation or entity has complete radar coverage of LEO space in real-time 24/7/365. Even if such was available, no reasonably accurate prediction of debris footprint or centroid would be possible more than a few minutes in advance of final descent. The rarefied atmosphere at LEO altitudes is simply too unstable as to pressure over any time span as long as even a single orbit to allow its effects to be predicted much in advance of final descent and impact(s).
The rest of my “screed” is worthless to you because it invalidated your whole thesis – such as it was.
Friday night was pretty good, actually. I hope your code works.
Where did I say “
coverage of LEO space in real-time 24/7/365″?…. You said that. Why?
Because I don’t know how else you would be able to detect the tiny decelerations you claim it is possible to detect if you aren’t watching them occur in real-time.
Not that even doing that would allow any even approximate landing time and place calculation to be made more than a minute or two prior to the target object’s last plunge.
…The only “NOTAM” that would be applicable in such circumstances is the one issued by the fictional children’s story character Chicken Little, namely, “The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”…
Heh!
This is the largest object to enter without control since the old Salyut space stations in 1980’s and the Chinese have no plan to control their re-entry because they don’t care where they land. Remember your beloved Chinese government has little regard for human life, after all the only purpose for their citizens is to serve the State.
The issue here is that they didn’t plan for disposal. The core stage inserted into an extremely low orbit but, since it couldn’t restart, there was no way to predict where it would impact. Yeah, 15 minutes after New York is a long way away, but if the stage had hit the knee in the orbital decay curve 15 minutes earlier, it would have been a different story.
SLS Block 1 is going to have a vaguely similar problem, in that the core takes the ICPS to a 70 x 1806 km orbit before burning out, and it can’t restart. But that’s sufficiently eccentric that NASA can plan the impact point with enough precision. China apparently didn’t care enough to use a similar orbit.
fully loaded Isuspect the chinese rocket will
I was actually a bit puzzled by why they didn’t go more eccentric and save themselves some international relations pain, but I think I figured it out.
I couldn’t find the initial orbital insertion parameters for the stage. The day before it reentered, it was in a 152 x 270km orbit, so something like 200×400 at insertion seems reasonable. For the same energy, they could have done 70×530. That would have given them a first-orbit disposal at a place of their choosing and nobody would have said a thing.
But their primary test objective was to get the Shenzhou replacement spacecraft’s heat shield qualified. To do that, they wanted to spend as much of the spacecraft’s propellant raising the apogee as possible, which means that they had to have a viable perigee at which to do the burns. If they’d gone for a suborbital insertion to do the safe disposal, they’d have had to waste prop raising the spacecraft’s perigee, and would have lost reentry speed for the spacecraft, which was the mission objective.
Kinda makes sense. Still, if they’d dropped a couple of YF-77’s in Central Park–or anywhere else where there was a high population density, there’d have been some ‘splainin’ to do.
I dont think that they care…and they wanted to fly both the test you mention and a nominal profile with their booster.
we are back to “I just dont think that they care”
You might be right. But there really isn’t a nominal profile when you’re trying to get heavy stuff to LEO.
It’ll be interesting to see what they do with their space station modules. They have to be delivered to something in the circular 500 km range, and from there, the booster will stay up for 10-15 years. If they don’t make arrangements to de-orbit it, then I guess we’ll have our answer.
It was pretty fully loaded this time. The Chinese made a particular point of the payload on this mission being as heavy as the heaviest of the planned new space station”s modules.
Andrew I will be curious to see how this plays out
first we have done this as well. we launched the skylab space station with no control over where the 2nd stage eventually came down. the 2nd stage of the Saturn V never went into orbit during the lunar shots but during the Skylab launch “had to” and as I recall it came “just a few minutes” (Ilike your comment) from coming down on LA
second something tells me this is not their config in the future. might be wrong here…but on this launch 1) the payload was very light 2) the delta V needed very low and 3) I dont think that they had a second stage on the rocket
in the future it doubtless will throw more mass which I suspect will put the “core” stage on a suborbital lob across the pacific
having said this I dont think that the Chinese, the PRC cares. my experience there is that they are quite careless (in western terms) with the safety of their population in rocket launches..(and other things)…the virus death toll seemed to prove this…and well I dont think that they care any more what US Administrations particularly this one say or do
I think thatthey sense the US is on the down hill run…and they are not
the rocket was an impressive feat. as is their crewed vehicle
hope you are well
Actually I had a friend who worked in mission control during that era. According to him they did send signals to both the second stage and Skylab alternating their orientation to increase drag to increase the likelihood of re-entry on a specific orbit. Not full control but an attempt at trying to minimize risk. Perhaps someone here could confirm what he told me long ago.
i recall reading that. It was never intended to lose control. We were supposed to add a tug to it, to control bringing down. However, when Nixon killed Apollo too early and did not properly fund the shuttle, it came out too late. As such, skylab was a pure accident, and NASA did what they could to minimize the chance of hitting land.
China did not care 1 whit about theirs. THey had control over it and just let it go. Like i said earlier, I wish that it would have crashed off NYC/North Atlantic. It would be interesting to recover it and see what their missiles are doing now.
There were suppose to be plans to send a Shuttle mission to it, but the Shuttle was delayed while Skylab’s orbit decayed faster than predicted. One of the interesting “what if’s” is what if the Shuttle had rescued it and it remained in orbit during the 1980’s.
skylab was always fascinating to me. A singular massive volume is a useful thing.
The ISS is so broke up, which the only good use for that is, the ability to separate functions like habitat, which they did not do.
that was not possible with the second stage…it went inert almost immediately as its batteries ran out
they did do this with skylab however
I was skeptical about the second stage, but glad you confirm they did do it with Skylab.
The payload was not very light. It was over 20 tonnes.
Delta-V was quite critical. The Chinese wanted to get the apogee as high as possible so as to be able to maximize the incoming rocket-assisted velocity of the capsule in order to test the heat shield as hard as possible.
No, the LM5B doesn’t have a second stage. It’s intended just for lofting big LEO payloads. That’s why this may well happen again, and repeatedly.
The LM5 has the 2nd stage and will be used to send bigger and more capable landers and rovers to the Moon and deep space probes to the planets. On its flights, to-date, the core stage has not made a nuisance of itself after burnout.
“I think that they sense the US is on the down hill run…and they are not”
Yeah, the PRC seems to come equipped with the same sensory organs as the late Third Reich and the late Soviet Union. Like the angle and rate sensors on that errant Proton a few years back, their sensory organs seem to be installed upside down.
That is always the way it is. GOP fought against Tesla and SpaceX. Now, GOP is all excited about Elon getting mad at CA, and moving their HQ out of there.
Tesla and SpaceX drew a lot of Democrat fire too. Opposition to disruptive people and companies is, unfortunately, very much a bi-partisan proposition and always has been. Old, established companies that don’t care to be disrupted always have a lot more public officials – without regard to party – on speed dial than the disruptive newbies.
Actually, neither Tesla nor SX drew democrat fire. Fact is, that Dems supported them with opening up states, as well as NASA budget ,etc. It has only been in fairly recent times that Union backing dems are as GD short-sighted as the GOP. They are cutting off their nose all because Musk is not directly supporting them.
It was NOT the Dems that tried hard to kill commercial crew and esp not the dems that worked hard to kill off SX in the CC bidding and then had NASA deny SNC. That, along with his attitude on Rare Earth, Probably cost him his cushy house job. I know I voted against him.
Who is “him?” Jim Bridenstine? Do you live in OK?
Bridenstine didn’t “lose his cushy House job.” He was re-elected in 2016, nominated for NASA Administrator in 2017 and confirmed for that office in 2018. He would not have run for re-election in 2018 anyway as he had made a three-terms-only pledge in his first campaign.
What is “Rare Earth?” This is a more than usually opaque comment, Dude.
A number of GOP legislators tried several times to scupper SpaceX in the early- and mid-20-teens because they were carrying water for Boeing and other legacy contractors. Some of these have subsequently been replaced by Democrats who are still doing Boeing’s bidding. Rep. Horn, for example, who defeated former Rep. Culberson by ridiculing his interest in space in campaign ads, is a co-sponsor of HR.5666, the “Turn NASA’s Deep Space Program Over to Boeing” bill as it would be entitled if truth-in-advertising laws applied to Congress.
China has no problem just dropping used rocket boosters on their own people so why would they care about dropping it on the rest of the world? Of course they would have liability under the OST, but China doesn’t care about it.
Actually, I wish that it had dropped just off NYC. Would have been useful to obtain the stage and see what it has.
probably not much remaining
With the rest of the stage’s structure and the engine bells likely burned away on descent, probably just the powerheads of the engines. And not in great shape either. But still heavy enough to do some real damage if they hit anything besides water.