There are fears that debris from China's recently launched Long March 5B rocket will crash back into Earth at an unknown location.

This is what Newsweek writes, according to which medium, it is about the rocket that was launched on July 24 from Wenchang in Hainan province, transporting the Wentian module, "a new laboratory" with solar energy, to China's Tiangong Space Station.

And because of the size, there are concerns that not all of the first part of the rocket will burn up in the atmosphere as it falls — instead, it could land somewhere on the planet.

Normally, after a rocket uses all the fuel in its first stage, the empty section is "jettisoned" to remove the extra weight, falling to Earth.

And usually, these pieces burn up as they hit the atmosphere at high speed.

However, the Long March 5B is very large, however: it is 54 meters long and weighs more than 800 thousand kilograms.

"It will explode, but past experience shows that a bunch of 30-meter-long metal fragments will end up crashing into the ground at several hundred kilometers per hour," said Jonathan McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.

As Newsweek points out, the bigger the spacecraft, the greater the number of pieces of space debris that fall back into the atmosphere, especially those made of heat-resistant materials.

"It is always difficult to estimate the amount of surviving mass and the number of fragments without knowing the design of the object, but a reasonable 'rule of thumb' says that it can be about 20-40 percent of the original dry mass," he said. Holger Krag, head of the Space Safety Program Office for the European Space Agency.

But according to Newsweek, the location of the crash is very difficult to predict, especially at the moment, as solar activity has caused atmospheric fluctuations that complicate flight path modeling.

The speed of the orbital decay process also depends on the size and density of the objects.

According to McDowell, once we know the exact measurements and angle of the rocket's orbit, we should be able to more accurately predict when and where the debris will fall.

However, the chances of debris hitting a residential area are very low: NASA has estimated that the odds of a person being hit by a piece of space debris are about 1 in 3,200.

However, due to the increase in space debris in Earth's orbit, the chances of pieces of debris falling from the sky are increasing, especially in the Global South, according to research published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

Meanwhile, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson has said that China is "failing to meet responsible standards regarding their space debris."

But China disagrees, and in response to the 2021 Indian Ocean debris incident, the Chinese foreign ministry said the likelihood of damage was "extremely low".

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