About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest. The rocket’s flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota.
The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin. The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.
The incident was largely forgotten until the last few days, when a farmer in rural Minnesota discovered something unusual while combining his cornfield for the fall harvest. A circular metal object about 11 feet in diameter lay amid the forest of corn stalks in Scott Township, a community in west-central Minnesota. The Stevens County Sheriff’s Office said it received a phone call reporting the discovery Wednesday.
That might not have been true had the object reentered over a more populated area. Space junk routinely falls out of orbit, and fragments of old rockets or satellites sometimes survive the heat of reentry to reach the ground. No one has ever been seriously injured by falling space junk, but there are a few examples of property damage.
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