Posted on 09/08/2020 5:34:12 PM PDT by BenLurkin
A Chinese Long March 4B rocket successfully launched a new Earth-watching satellite Monday (Sep. 7) but the booster's spent first stage narrowly missed a school when it fell back to Earth, witness videos show.
The Long March 4B rocket lifted off from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China, at 1:57 p.m. local time (1:57 a.m. EDT, 0557 GMT). It carried the powerful Gaofen 11 (02) Earth observation satellite, an optical observation satellite capable of returning high resolution images, showing features as smaller than 3 feet (1 meter) across.
Few details of the satellite were made available. Footage of the launch of the first Gaofen 11 in 2018 indicated the satellite was a large aperture telescope for Earth observation.
Amateur footage posted on Chinese social media site Weibo following the launch apparently shows the first stage of the Long March 4B falling to Earth and exploding into a cloud of orange smoke. The footage was captured near the Lilong village, Gaoyao Town in the Luonan county of Shaanxi province, according to its author.
One piece of footage appears to be taken from a school yard with children’s voices audible and a plume of smoke visible in the distance.
The Long March 4B first stage uses a mix of toxic hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide for propellant. Contact with either could bring serious effects on health.
(Excerpt) Read more at space.com ...
BRFC
HAHAHAHAAAAA!!! In other words, "SPY SATELLITE"
Well, that’s a Dong Feng.
A Mickey Maos operation.
Confucius say, you will learn a lot if you watch your government closely.
Lol
Best Rotten Feces Cannabis??
Big Red Freckled Charlene??
Burnt Roasted Folgers Coffee??
British Royal Flying Corp!!
They look at kids there like Doritos. “Don’t worry, we’ll make more”.
When I saw the video,my first thought was that they were trying to do the familiar Falcon vertical landing. I was wrong.Not only are Chinese rockets expendable, so are the people.
So let me understand. The Chicoms are launching what amounts to a spy satellite on one of their larger boosters into a very particular orbital plane — and they don’t figure the potential impact zone for the spent 1st stage? Cost of doing business?
This incident is a perfect metaphor for ‘life is cheap’ priorities of the CCP.
You would think a website calling itself space.com would be sufficiently educated to not say as smaller than or at least to proofread before posting.
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