Chinese (Space) Junk

 I spent about two hours yesterday evening watching YouTube channels that were tracking and live commenting on the re-entry of a major piece of "space junk" lunched last month propelling China's new space station into orbit. Although China seems to deny it, the trackers seemed to have no clue where this junk would fall to earth. In the time I spent watching, the junk rocket stage crossed Australia and New Zealand, Costa Rica, Haiti, Portugal and Spain, the Mediterranean including southern Italy and Greece, Gaza and Israel, Jordan, Saudi Arabia and Oman before vanishing. The trackers were unable to report where the rocket crashed for nearly a half hour after it vanished from radar tracking. Had it continued in orbit for another hour it would have passed over Tampa Bay and Orlando.

As near as I was able to tell, none of this was by accident. It was by design. Not designing this booster stage to have the capacity to re-enter the atmosphere in a controlled manner and instead leaving it to chance seems to have been a cost saving measure by design.

Watching this play out left me feeling disgusted with China, not a new feeling for me. There's a lot about China that in my opinion, shared by many, confirms my belief that the Communist Chinese suck big time. China's cavalier attitude towards the safety of the people of the world seems to know no bounds.

Put more politely:

Nasa slams China over irresponsible standards regarding space debris