Hong Kong
CNN
—
On Saturday, suspected debris from a Chinese missile crashed to the ground over a village in southwest China, leaving a bright yellow trail of smoke that sent villagers fleeing, according to videos on Chinese social media shared with CNN by a local witness.
The dramatic footage appeared online shortly after a Long March 2C carrier rocket was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern Sichuan province at 3 p.m. local time (3 a.m. Eastern Time) on Saturday.
The rocket carried into orbit the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a powerful satellite developed by China and France to study the most distant explosions of stars, called gamma-ray bursts.
Chinese President Xi Jinping has vowed to make the country a leading space power and will step up its missions to compete with other major world powers, including the United States.
Saturday’s launch was described as a “complete success” by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), a state-owned contractor that developed the Long March 2C rocket.
CNN has reached out to the CASC and the State Council Information Office, which handles press inquiries for the Chinese government, including its space agency, for comment.
A video posted on Chinese short video site Kuaishou appeared to show a long, cylindrical-shaped piece of debris falling over a rural village and crashing next to a hill, with yellow smoke rising from one end.
According to CNN, the video was shot in Xianqiao village in Guizhou province, which borders the launching province of Sichuan to the southeast. The video was posted to Kuaishou from an IP address in Guizhou.
Other videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms and analyzed by CNN show the falling debris from different angles. In one of them, villagers, including children, can be seen running away while looking back at the orange trail in the sky, some covering their ears as they hear the impact.
Some videos were removed by Monday afternoon.
Witnesses on social media reported hearing a loud explosion after the debris hit the ground. One eyewitness told CNN he saw the rocket fall with “his own eyes.” “There was a pungent smell and the sound of an explosion,” they added.
A now-deleted government statement, reposted by a villager shortly after the launch, said the town of Xinba, near the village of Xianqiao, would conduct a “missile 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 launch and move to more open areas to watch the skies. They were warned to stay away from the debris to avoid damage from “poisonous gases and explosions,” the statement said.
Residents are also “strictly prohibited” from taking photos of the rubble or “distributing corresponding videos on the Internet,” the statement said.
There were no reports of immediate injuries from local authorities.
Kuaishou
A screenshot from a video shows suspected debris from a Chinese missile falling after a launch over the village of Xianqiao in China’s Guizhou province.
Markus Schiller, a rocket expert and senior researcher at the Stockholm Peace Research Institute, said the debris appeared to be the first stage of the Long March 2C rocket, which uses a liquid fuel made of nitrogen tetroxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH).
“This combination always produces these orange plumes of smoke. It is extremely toxic and carcinogenic,” Schiller said. “Any living thing that breathes this stuff is going to have a hard time in the near future,” he added.
Due to the location of the Chinese missile launch site, such incidents are common in China, he said.
“If you want to put something into low Earth orbit, you usually launch it eastward to get extra thrust from the Earth’s rotation. But if you launch eastward, there are always going to be some villages in the path of the first stage boosters.”
Most of China’s missiles are fired from its three inland launch bases – Xichang in the southwest, Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert in the northwest, and Taiyuan in the north. These bases, built during the Cold War, were deliberately located far from the coast for security reasons.
In 2016, a fourth launch site, Wenchang, was opened on the island of Hainan, the country’s southernmost province.
In comparison, NASA and the European Space Agency typically launch their rockets from coastal locations toward the sea, says Schiller, who is also director of ST Analytics in Munich.
In addition, Western space agencies have largely stopped using highly toxic liquid fuels for their civilian space programs, while China and Russia still use them, he added.
Multi-stage rockets lose debris shortly after liftoff, on trajectories that can be predicted before launch.
Before each takeoff, China’s Civil Aviation Administration typically sends a notification called a NOTAM to pilots to warn them of “temporary danger zones” where rocket debris is likely to fall.
Debris from Chinese missiles has hit villages before. In December 2023, debris from a missile landed in the southern province of Hunan, 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 will see something like this for quite some time, for many years to come,” said Schiller.
China had previously been criticized by the international space community for its handling of the debris from its runaway rocket boosters during re-entry into Earth.
In 2021, NASA sharply criticized China for its failure to “maintain responsible standards” after debris from its runaway Long March 5B rocket crashed into the Indian Ocean west of the Maldives after re-entering the atmosphere.