Hong Kong
CNN
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Debris from a suspected Chinese missile was seen falling to the ground over a village in southwest China on Saturday, leaving a trail of bright yellow smoke and sending villagers running, according to videos on Chinese social media and sent to CNN by a local witness.
Dramatic footage emerged online shortly after a Long March 2C launch vehicle exploded at 3 p.m. local time on Saturday (3 a.m. ET) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern Sichuan Province.
The rocket launched the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a powerful satellite developed by China and France to study the most distant bursts of stars known as gamma-ray bursts.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has vowed to establish the country as a dominant space power, ramping up missions to compete with other major world powers, including the United States.
Saturday’s launch was declared a “complete success” by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned contractor that developed the Long March 2C rocket.
CNN has reached out to CASC and the State Council Information Office, which handles press inquiries about the Chinese government, including its space agency, for comment.
A video posted on Kuaishou, a Chinese short video site, appeared to show a long, cylindrical piece of debris falling over a rural village and crashing into a hillside, with yellow smoke billowing from one side.
CNN found the location of the video to be filmed from Xianqiao village in Guizhou province, neighboring the country of origin’s Sichuan province to the southeast. The video was posted to Kuaishou from an IP address in Guizhou.
Other videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms analyzed by CNN showed multiple angles of falling debris. In one, villagers, including children, were seen running away as they looked back at the orange trail in the sky, with some covering their ears for the crash.
Several videos had been removed by Monday afternoon.
Witnesses on social media said they heard a loud explosion as the debris hit the ground. An eyewitness told CNN that they saw the missile fall with their “eyes.” “There was a strong wind and the sound of an explosion,” they added.
In a now-deleted government notice reposted by a local villager shortly after launch, authorities said Xinba City, near Xianqiao Village, would conduct a “missile debris recovery mission” from 2:45 p.m. to 3:00 a.m. 3 pm local. time on Saturday.
Residents were asked to leave their homes and buildings an hour before departure and disperse to more open areas to watch the sky. They were warned to stay away from the debris to prevent injury from “toxic gas and explosion,” according to the release.
Residents were also “strictly prohibited” from taking pictures of the debris or “disseminating relevant videos on the Internet,” the notice said.
There were no reports of immediate injuries from local authorities.
Markus Schiller, a missile expert and senior researcher at the International Peace Research Institute in Stockholm, said the debris appeared to be the first stage booster of the Long March 2C rocket, which uses a liquid propellant composed of hydrogen tetroxide. nitrogen and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH). ).
“This combination always creates these orange smoke trails. It is extremely toxic and carcinogenic,” Schiller said. “Any living thing that ingests that stuff is going to have a hard time in the near future,” he added.
Such incidents occur frequently in China because of the location of its origin, he said.
“If you want to launch something into low Earth orbit, you usually launch it in an easterly direction to get an extra boost from the Earth’s rotation. But if you head east, there are definitely always a few villages in the way of the first stage boosters.”
Most of China’s missiles are fired from three inland launch sites – Xichang in the southwest, Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert in the northwest, and Taiyuan in the north. Built during the Cold War, these bases were deliberately located far from the coast for security reasons.
In 2016, a fourth launch site, Wenchang, opened on Hainan Island, the country’s southernmost province.
In comparison, NASA and the European Space Agency typically launch their rockets from coastal sites toward the ocean, said Schiller, who is also director of ST Analytics in Munich, Germany.
Western space agencies have also largely phased out the type of highly toxic liquid propellants for their civilian space programs, which China – and Russia – still use, he added.
Multi-stage rockets throw debris immediately after blast, along trajectories that can be predicted before launch.
Before each launch, China’s civil aviation authority usually issues a notice to pilots, known as a NOTAM, to warn them against “temporary danger zones” where missile debris is likely to fall.
Debris from Chinese missiles has hit villages before. In December 2023, debris from a missile fell in southern Hunan province, damaging two houses, state media reported. In 2002, a boy in northern China was injured when fragments from a satellite launch fell on his village in Shaanxi province.
“I expect we’ll see something like this for a long time, for many years to come,” Schiller said.
China has previously faced criticism from the international space community for its handling of debris from its out-of-control rocket boosters when they re-enter Earth.
In 2021, NASA criticized China for its failure to “meet responsible standards” after debris from its out-of-control Long March 5B rocket sank into the Indian Ocean west of the Maldives after re-entering the atmosphere.
