{"id":233561,"date":"2025-10-22T22:39:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-22T22:39:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/233561\/"},"modified":"2025-10-22T22:39:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-22T22:39:09","slug":"chinese-rocket-falls-to-earth-explodes-in-epic-fireball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/233561\/","title":{"rendered":"Chinese Rocket Falls to Earth, Explodes in Epic Fireball"},"content":{"rendered":"

There\u2019s an intense space race<\/a> back to the Moon underway \u2014 between the People\u2019s Republic of China and the United States.<\/p>\n

Undergirding the PRC\u2019s ambitions is a rocket known as the Long March 2, a workhorse of the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA). Recently surfaced videos circulating on social media show the aftermath of a Long March 2 launch, where a rocket booster propelling experimental satellites tumbled back down to Earth and exploded in a massive orange fireball as it impacted the ground.<\/p>\n

Though the fireball was visible from miles away, an English-language Chinese government statement<\/a> declared the launch a success, planting the test satellite firmly in low earth orbit.<\/p>\n

Western social media users were broadly incensed, arguing that the uncontrolled booster posed a risk to nearby residents.<\/p>\n

\u201cTechnically not a failure, the sick bastards in the Chinese government just don\u2019t care where these land,\u201d one poster wrote<\/a>. \u201cDamn that\u2019s in the middle of nowhere. Gonna be a long march to recover that,\u201d another joked<\/a>. The Chinese netizen who posted the original clip on Weibo<\/a>, meanwhile, claimed that government officials \u201chad already made emergency response preparations before the debris fell, and the area had been evacuated.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the hours before lift-off, ArsTechnica reports<\/a> that Chinese authorities made an unusual move in deciding not to alert international authorities about the launch, leading some western commentators to speculate<\/a> that the Long March 2D\u2019s payload was really a spy satellite.<\/p>\n

The PRC has set a clear plan to put an astronaut on the Moon<\/a> before 2030. It would be an astonishing feat, given the country was one of the poorest nations on the planet<\/a> as recently as just a few decades ago and only launched its first human astronaut<\/a> to space in 2003.<\/p>\n

The ambitions clearly galvanized the US, which jumped into the mix back in 2017<\/a>, establishing plans to return to the Moon as part of a long-term goal to get to Mars. Yet according to western analysts<\/a>, the Chinese space program is set to match most of the capabilities of the US by 2030; by 2045, China will likely be the dominant force in space.<\/p>\n

As this latest video shows, that immense push hasn\u2019t come without controversy. In a series of similar incidents, debris some the country\u2019s spacecraft have reportedly fallen uncontrollably down to Earth<\/a>, and sometimes over populated areas<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Still, there haven\u2019t been any known fatalities in the Chinese space program since the 1990s \u2014 which is more than NASA can say, after the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003.<\/p>\n

More on rockets: NASA May Ditch SpaceX for Moon Landing Because It\u2019s So Behind
<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"There\u2019s an intense space race back to the Moon underway \u2014 between the People\u2019s Republic of China and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":233562,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-233561","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233561","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233561"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233561\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/233562"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233561"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233561"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233561"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}