A significant part, weighing between 5.5 and 9.9 tons, could nevertheless reach the ground, at a speed of 7 kilometers per second. But Beijing wants to be reassuring. The most likely scenario, according to him, is that of a fall at sea, of which our planet is made up of 75%, or in a desert zone, only 2.5% of the land surface being inhabited. Last year, a piece of a Long March 5B rocket ended its run in the Indian Ocean, as planned. However, as we have already seen in the past, zero risk does not exist, hence the call launched last year by several experts to ask China to equip the machine with retrorockets, so as to to be able to control its descent from orbit.
“In this way, we can determine the location where the debris will crash, causing it to enter the atmosphere at the desired location.explains to TF1info David Mimoun, teacher-researcher at Isae-SupAero, the Toulouse school specializing in the aerospace sector. European, Russian and American rockets are all equipped with boosters that slow down the course of the debris, and bring it down quickly and in a controlled manner. The large space debris thus ends its course in the middle of the Pacific, far from any human life. This spacecraft graveyard even has a little nickname, the “Nemo point”. But it’s both complex and expensive, and the Chinese don’t seem to want to go to the trouble.
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