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China’s Long March 4B rocket crashes into town in giant orange explosion – narrowly missing a school
A CHINESE rocket booster has exploded after landing on a town in the country's Shaanxi province.
Footage of the incident posted to Chinese social media shows the booster plummeting to Earth following a satellite launch on Monday.
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The rocket part erupts in a ball of orange smoke after crashing back to Earth, apparently narrowly missing a school.
It's not clear whether anyone was hurt by the explosion, video of which was plastered over social media app Weibo, Space.com .
China launched its Earth-watching satellite dubbed Gaofen-2 on Monday morning from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center in north China.
The probe, carried aboard a Long March 4B rocket, will snap photos for use in urban planning, road network design, disaster prevention and more.
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The spent first stage of the rocket was successfully jettisoned during launch but appears to have veered off course during its descent.
Footage of the collision was captured near the Lilong village, Gaoyao Town in the Luonan county of Shaanxi province, Space.com reports.
One clip appears to be taken from a school yard with children's screams audible and smoke billowing from a crash site.
The fuel carried in Long March 4B rocket boosters contains toxic chemicals such as hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide.
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These could cause serious harm to anyone who comes into contact with them.
Unlike the United States and other western nations, China's rocket flights are largely conducted from three sites deep inland.
Their locations were selected to provide security during the Cold War, but they can also lead to dangerous wayward booster crashes.
Most launch sites, such as Nasa's Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, are coastal to allow jettisoned rocket parts to crash safely into the ocean.
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China recently opened a coastal site at Wenchang but it can only launch new Long March 5 and 7 rockets from here.
Although Monday's launch was not a resounding success, China did pull off a flawless rocket flight last week.
Its space agency announced on Friday the launch of a mysterious new reusable spacecraft from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwest desert.
It's believed the vehicle is a space plane that is carried to orbit before detaching and circling the globe at high altitude.
The spaceship landed on a runway at Jiuquan on Sunday where it will be refurbished for future missions.
Terrifying space weapons of the future
Here are three of the scariest...
Rods from God
- A strange but utterly terrifying weapon has been dubbed "rods from the God" and is based on the concept of creating man-made meteorites that can be guided towards the enemy.
- Instead of using rocks rods the size of telephone poles are deployed.
- These would be made out of tungsten — a rare metal that can stand the intense heat generated by entering Earth's atmosphere.
- One satellite fires the rods towards the Earth's atmosphere while the other steers them to a target on the ground.
- Reaching speeds of 7000mph they hit the ground with the force of a small nuclear weapon — but crucially creating no radiation fall out.
- As bizarre as it sounds, a US Congressional report recently revealed the military has been pushing ahead with the kinetic space weapons.
Molten metal cannons
- This intriguing idea is being developed by the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA).
- It is called the Magneto Hydrodynamic Explosive Munition or MAHEM.
- This game changing rail-gun can fire a jet of molten metal, hurled through space at several hundred miles per second by the most powerful electromagnets ever built.
- The molten metal can then morph into an aerodynamic slug during flight and pierce through another spacecraft or satellite and a munition explodes inside.
Space force ships
- Already the United States is powering head with its spacecraft, although China is busy developing one of their own.
- The top secret American XS-1 under development by DARPA.
- It can travel ten times the speed of sound and launch missiles.
- Meanwhile an unmanned craft is currently being developed in the China Aerodynamics Research and Development Centre in Mianyang, Sichuan province, which is also known as Base 29.
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In other news, the secretive US space plane X-37B recently landed after a record-breaking 780 days in orbit.
A stargazer captured an image of the mysterious spacecraft from his back garden last year.
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And, an Apollo astronaut has admitted that he nearly died ‘trying to do a high jump’ on the Moon in 1972.
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