Rocket debris appears to have rained down on terrified villagers in China after a satellite launch.
Footage posted on Chinese social media appears to show a rocket booster launching over a town in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces, followed by a plume of bright orange smoke.
The images take some of the shine off the success of Beijing’s latest robotic mission to the far side of the moon, which returned to Earth on Tuesday.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has set ambitious goals to become a major space power, including landing astronauts on the moon and establishing a research station in Antarctica, but images of debris from rocket launches are frequently shared on social media.
“This is not how a space power operates,” said Todd Harrison, an aerospace and defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute, a think tank.
“While the US is landing and reusing its rocket boosters, China is dropping them over populated areas,” he wrote on Twitter X, adding that the orange trail in the sky was “highly toxic propellant.”
Days after the Sino-French satellite was launched in Sichuan province, neighboring Guizhou, videos of the debris were posted on Chinese social media networks including TikTok’s sister site Douyin.
The satellite, part of a private research mission aimed at capturing and observing gamma-ray bursts from the explosion of a distant star, launched into orbit aboard a Long March 2C rocket at 3pm local time on Saturday from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre.
“The launch mission was a complete success,” China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, one of the main contractors for Beijing’s space program, said in a message posted on the WeChat microblogging site after Saturday’s lift-off.
