For its part, China also asserted on the same Friday that it was
“highly unlikely” that the rocket debris caused damage on its return to Earth and that it was most likely that it disintegrated during its re-entry into the atmosphere.
Some local Chinese media went even further and accused the foreign press of sensationalism., and portals such as Sina or Guanwang described the information published in this regard as “exaggerations that only seek to discredit the Asian country.”
The rocket was used last week by China to launch one of the modules d
e its future space station and was considered by experts as one of the largest pieces of debris that would re-enter the atmosphere, hence its continued surveillance.
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A Chinese Long March 5B rocket lifts off with the Tianhe space station core module. Credit: Xinhua
Chinese officials confirmed the successful launch of the first element of the country’s space station early Thursday, laying the keystone to a permanently-inhabited orbiting habitat that could welcome its first astronauts this summer.
The liftoff of the Tianhe core module begins the most ambitious project in the history of China’s nearly 30-year human spaceflight program, which seeks to create a national space station after being shut out of the International Space Station, led by U.S. and Russian space agencies.
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The core module of China’s space station undergoes a vacuum test to simulate the conditions it will see in orbit.
The core module of China’s space station is packaged inside the nose cone of a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket for liftoff late Wednesday (U.S. time), the first of 11 launches to deliver astronauts, supplies, experiments, and new laboratory modules to build out the orbiting complex before the end of 2022.