The sky above the village of Xianqiao, in southwest China, was the scene of a striking spectacle on Saturday. Captured footage shows suspected debris from a Chinese rocket tumbling towards the ground, leaving behind a trail of bright yellow smoke. Residents of the village witnessed this terrifying spectacle, with some fleeing at the sight of this unusual object heading towards them, as shown in videos posted on Chinese social networks and transmitted to Fatshimetrie by a local witness.
The dramatic images were released online shortly after a Long March 2C carrier rocket lifted off at 3 p.m. local time Saturday (3 a.m. Eastern Time) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, Sichuan province. , in southwest China.
The rocket placed into orbit the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a powerful satellite developed by China and France to study the most distant star explosions known as gamma-ray bursts.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has vowed to make China a dominant space power, stepping up missions to rival other major world powers including the United States.
Saturday’s launch was described as a “complete success” by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned enterprise that developed the Long March 2C rocket.
Fatshimetrie contacted the CASC and the State Council Information Office, which handles press inquiries from the Chinese government, including its space agency, for comment.
A video posted on Kuaishou, a Chinese short video site, shows what appears to be a cylinder-shaped piece of debris falling on a rural village and crashing near a hillside, with yellow smoke billowing from a end.
Fatshimetrie geotagged the video as having been filmed from the village of Xianqiao, in Guizhou province, bordering Sichuan province, where the launch site is located. The video was posted to Kuaishou from an IP address in Guizhou.
Other videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms, analyzed by Fatshimetrie, show multiple angles of the falling debris. In one, villagers, including children, were seen running away while looking back at the orange streak in the sky, some covering their ears for the crash.
Some of these videos were removed earlier this week.
Witnesses on social media said they heard a loud explosion after debris fell to the ground. A witness told Fatshimetrie that he saw the rocket fall with his “own eyes”. “There was a pungent smell and the sound of an explosion,” they added.
In a now-deleted government notification reposted by a village resident shortly after the launch, authorities said the town of Xinba, near the village of Xianqiao, would carry out a “rocket debris recovery mission” from 2:45 p.m. to 3:15 p.m. local time on Saturday.
Residents were asked to leave their homes and other buildings an hour before the launch and spread out to more open areas to observe the sky. They were warned to move away from the debris to avoid the risk of “toxic gas and explosion,” according to the advisory.
Residents were also “strictly prohibited” from taking photos of the debris or “spreading relevant videos online,” the notice said.
There were no immediate reports of injuries from local authorities.
Markus Schiller, a rocket expert and senior research associate at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the debris appeared to be propellant from the first stage of the Long March 2C rocket, which uses liquid fuel composed of tetraxide nitrogen and UDMH (dimethylated asymmetric hydrazine).
“This combination always creates these orange smoke trails. It’s extremely toxic and carcinogenic,” Schiller said. “Any living thing inhaling this cocktail will have difficulties in the near future,” he added.
Such incidents are common in China due to the location of its launch sites, he explained.
“If you want to launch something into low orbit around the Earth, you usually launch it eastward to get extra thrust from the Earth’s rotation. But if you launch eastward, there’s always villages on the trajectory of the first stage boosters,” he stressed.
Most rockets in China are launched from the country’s three domestic 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 locations into the ocean, noted Schiller, who is also director of ST Analytics in Munich, Germany.
Western space agencies have largely abandoned these types of highly toxic liquid fuels for their civilian space programs, which China – and Russia – still use.