Fragments of a Chinese rocket returned to the atmosphere on Friday and crashed into the Pacific Ocean. Because there was a (minimal) risk that the region around Barcelona would be hit by falling waste earlier that day, the airspace over Catalonia was closed for a while. “Over the past 30 years, more than 1,500 rocket parts have crashed on Earth and in 70% of the cases this happened in an uncontrolled manner,” says researcher Bart Vandenbussche of the Institute of Astronomy (KU Leuven).
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After panic over Barcelona, fragments of Chinese rocket luckily crash into the ocean: “At ESA, a mission only starts if it is certain that the rocket will burn up in the atmosphere on reentry”
