Southeast Asia was bombarded with the wreckage of a Chinese rocket

The wreckage of the Chinese rocket "Changzheng-5B" fell on the territory of the countries of Southeast Asia. This is reported by the publication Business Insider.

At the end of July, the 25-ton Changzheng-5B rocket launched a new segment of the Chinese Tiangong space Station into orbit. Then the launch vehicle, instead of the usual practice of flooding in the Pacific Ocean, ended up in Earth orbit and slowly lost altitude for a week. On August 6, it finally reached Earth, breaking up into pieces that collapsed, apparently, on the territory of at least Indonesia, Malaysia and the Philippines.

In the village of Pengadang, on the Indonesian side of the island of Borneo, locals discovered a large rounded object similar to the stage of a Chinese rocket. Two more small fragments were found in the small towns of Batu Niah and Sepupok in Sarawak State, on the Malaysian side of Borneo. And in the Mindoro Strait in the Philippines, residents a few days earlier found pieces of the rocket fairing that separated when it was launched. In addition, the trajectory of the rocket accelerator was falling over the strait.

"This means that we suffered twice from the debris of this launch: at the beginning and at the end of the rocket flight. This shows that the risk for us is higher because we are under the flight path of most missiles launched by China," said Jay Batongbakal, professor at the Institute of Maritime Affairs and Maritime Law of the University of the Philippines.

This is not the first case of Chinese rocket debris falling to Earth — in April 2022, parts of the Changzheng-3B rocket collapsed in India, and before that they fell into the Indian Ocean, villages in Ivory Coast and near the Xichang satellite launch center in China.