The wreckage of the Long March 5B, a delivery rocket launched by China on July 24, was found drifting off the coast of Mindoro Island in the Philippines and recovered by a local fishing boat.
At first, China explained that a part of the rocket had fallen off, but most of it would burn up in the atmosphere, but on the 31st, China apparently revised its information, saying that the rocket was likely to fall into the waters around the Philippines.
So far, no damage has been confirmed, but if the rocket had fallen on an urban area instead of at sea, it would have caused serious damage.
The Philippine Space Agency announced that the object in question fell into the Sulu Sea off Palawan Island at around 0:55 a.m. on the 31st, so it was only after the object fell that China transmitted information about the possibility of its falling.
It is typical of China not to disclose information that is inconvenient for them in any way.
This is not the first incident of falling objects from a Chinese rocket; in May 2020, one fell on a village in Cote d'Ivoire, Africa, damaging buildings.
China, hoping to catch up with and overtake the U.S., is focusing on its own independent space development, but it seems to lack consideration for other countries, including safety.
Even so, there is a lot of space debris floating around in Earth's orbit. Space debris is a negative legacy of space development, but Japan, the U.S., and Europe have begun to take measures to prevent debris from being emitted by new rockets, such as allowing the detached parts of rockets to burn up by entering the atmosphere in a controlled manner.
China has many problems, but I hope that they will not cause any trouble to the people around them.
