Faced with the imminence of the fall of the remains of a rocket from China, Spain temporarily closed its airspace over the territory of Catalonia and three other regions this Friday (4), delaying hundreds of flights. The debris later landed near the coast of Mexico.
The Long March 5B (CZ-5B), Beijing’s most powerful rocket, launched from the south of the country on October 31 and carried the last remaining module of a Chinese space station under construction.
After the mission, gravity tends to pull the rocket back to Earth, and most of the aircraft’s debris disintegrates when it returns to the atmosphere. There is, however, the possibility that larger wreckage will resist the degradation of the fall.
The Chinese space agency reported that the pieces of the Long March returned to the atmosphere at 6:08 pm Beijing time (7:08 am GMT) and that most of them fell apart in the process. A smaller part of the debris fell into the Pacific, about 1,000 kilometers southeast of the coast of Acapulco, Mexico.
“Due to the risk associated with the passage of the space object CZ-5B through Spanish airspace, flights were completely restricted from 9:38 am to 10:18 am in Catalonia and other communities,” the Spanish Emergency Service said in its Facebook account. Twitter. According to airport operator Aena, 300 of the 5,484 flights were delayed by the closure of airspace.
According to Zhao Lijian, a spokesman for the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the return of rockets into the atmosphere is a common international practice. Asked if the country had taken steps to reduce the risks of the crash, he claimed that the probability of causing damage to the aircraft and the ground was “extremely low”.
This was the fourth voyage of Long March 5B since its maiden flight in March 2020. On its first trip to the space station, fragments of the rocket’s booster fell off Ivory Coast. There were no injuries, but several buildings were damaged.
Without major inconvenience, the wreckage of the second flight plunged into the Indian Ocean. The same thing happened on the third voyage: they landed in the Sulu Sea, in the Philippines, without causing any problems.
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