China is reportedly finalizing a plan to use parachutes to better control falling side boosters, but it's a limited solution to a larger problem.
The Long March 5's booster does go into orbit to deliver its payload. “Before you even get to the point of having to worry about parachutes, you’ve got to get them out of orbit,” McDowell said. “The rocket stages transmit data for maybe another 10 minutes or something and then they’re dead pieces of metal in orbit, going around and around the Earth until they eventually re-enter weeks later.” So if it would have a parachute on it, it would fly but there’s stillget to that point.
Earth before ever getting into orbit. However, that adds more cost, and risk, to the mission, which is why China may have steered clear from it.Another way is to perform a controlled reentry by using an engine burn that would steer the rocket towards a remote area, where it can fall freely to the ground without posing a risk to people. Again, that requires extra fuel and a design upgrade that adds more cost.
It’s not just China’s problem, it’s an industry problem as a whole. About 60% of launches to low Earth orbit in 2020 resulted in a rocket body being left in orbit, recent showed. The study predicted a 10% chance of one or more casualties from falling rocket debris in the next decade., a declaration that calls for preventing uncontrolled reentries.
China taking a small step towards strapping some of its side boosters to parachutes in order to control their re-entry is a start. “China’s attitude to risk is, I think, slowly maturing, or slowly getting more in line with other countries,” McDowell said. “This is another sort of example where they were being cavalier before, and now they’re being a little more careful.
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