Hong Kong
CNN
—
According to videos on Chinese social media and sent to CNN by a local witness, suspected debris from a Chinese missile was seen crashing to the ground over a village in southwest China on Saturday, leaving a trail of bright yellow smoke and sending villagers fleeing.
The dramatic footage emerged online shortly after the Long March 2C launch vehicle blasted off at 3 p.m. local time on Saturday (03:00 a.m. ET) from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in southwestern Sichuan Province.
The rocket launched the Space Variable Objects Monitor, a powerful satellite developed by China and France to study the most distant burst of stars known as gamma-ray bursts.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has vowed to establish the country as a dominant space power and boost missions to compete with other major world powers, including the United States.
Saturday’s launch was declared a “complete success” by China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the state-owned contractor that developed the Long March 2C rocket.
CNN has reached out to 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 piece of debris falling across a rural village and tumbling down a hill, with yellow smoke billowing from one end.
CNN has geolocated the video to be shot from Xianqiao Village in Guizhou Province, which borders Sichuan Province to the southeast with the launch site. The video was posted on Kuaishou from an IP address in Guizhou.
Other videos circulating on Chinese social media platforms analyzed by CNN showed falling debris from multiple angles. In one, villagers, including children, were seen running as they looked back at the orange trail in the sky, some covering their ears from the impact.
Some of the videos were taken down on Monday afternoon.
Witnesses on social media reported hearing a loud explosion after the debris hit the ground. An eyewitness told CNN they saw the rocket fall with their “own eyes.” “There was a pungent smell and the sound of an explosion,” they added.
In a now-deleted government announcement reposted by a local villager shortly after the launch, authorities said the town of Xinba, near Xianqiao Village, was set to conduct a “missile debris recovery mission” from 2:45 to 3:15 p.m. local time. time on Saturday.
Residents were asked to leave their homes and other buildings and disperse to more open areas to watch the sky an hour before launch. They were warned to stay away from the debris to avoid damage from “toxic gas and blast,” according to the announcement.
Residents were also “strictly prohibited” from taking photographs of the debris or “disseminating relevant videos online,” the notice said.
No immediate injuries were reported by local authorities.
Kuaisha
A screenshot taken from the video shows suspected debris from Chinese missiles falling over the village of Xianqiao in Guizhou Province, China after being fired.
Markus Schiller, a missile expert and associate senior researcher at the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, said the debris appeared to be the first stage of the Long March 2C rocket, which uses a liquid propellant composed of nitrous oxide and unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine (UDMH).
“That combination always creates these orange smoke trails. It is extremely toxic and carcinogenic,” Schiller said. “Any living thing that inhales this stuff is going to have a hard time in the near future,” he added.
Similar incidents occur frequently in China due to the location of the launch site, he said.
“If you want to launch something into low Earth orbit, you usually launch it in an easterly direction to get an extra boost from the rotation of the Earth.” But if you start to the east, there are definitely always some villages in the way of the first stage boosters.”
Most of China’s missiles are launched from the country’s three inland launch sites – Xichang in the southwest, Jiuquan in the Gobi Desert in the northwest, and Taiyuan in the north. These bases were built during the Cold War and were deliberately located far from the coast for security reasons.
In 2016, a fourth launch site opened, Wenchang, on Hainan Island, the country’s southernmost province.
By comparison, NASA and the European Space Agency typically launch their rockets from coastal sites toward the ocean, said Schiller, who is also director of ST Analytics in Munich, Germany.
Western space agencies have also largely phased out highly toxic liquid propellants for their civilian space programs, which China — and Russia — still use, he added.
Multistage rockets shed debris shortly after launch along trajectories that can be predicted before launch.
Before each launch, China’s civil aviation authority usually issues a notice, known as a NOTAM, to pilots to warn them of “temporary danger areas” where missile fragments are 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 debris from a satellite launch hit his village in Shaanxi province.
“I expect we’ll see something like this for quite some time, for many years,” Schiller.
China has previously faced criticism from the international space community for its handling of debris from its runaway rocket boosters when they re-enter Earth.
In 2021, NASA criticized China for failing to “meet responsible standards” after debris from its runaway Long March 5B rocket plunged into the Indian Ocean west of the Maldives after re-entering the atmosphere.