on today's episode China's Rockets fall from the sky Donald Trump wants weapons in space and India completes their first human spacecraft China keeps dropping rockets on people and is getting to be a pretty big problem Chinese rocket boosters falling on or near populated areas is nothing new it's been an ongoing Hazard for many years now but we were recently reminded of the everpresent danger last week when a security camera captured a Chinese family fleeing in Terror from a nearby rocket explosion here's the Scoop this all went down in the guo region which is right in
the middle of southern China the rocket lifted off from the Spaceport of Z Chang which is about 500 km west of the crash site the rocket in question was a long march 3B which has been a Workhorse medium lift vehicle for the Chinese space program since the mid90s so the flight itself was nothing new this has been done a 100 times before although the payload for this particular Mission remains classified China has only said that it's a Communications technology experiment and that the payload was placed into a geostationary orbit which at over 35,000 kilm is
about as high as orbits get the Long March 3B is strapped with four side boosters that are each 2.5 m in diameter and powered by a liquid fuel engine so it's kind of a lowii simplified version of Russia's soyu and part of that that simplification is the use of hypergolic propellants so having any kind of rocket booster nearly fall on your house is bad but a hypergolic rocket booster is worse you don't want to be anywhere near one of these things even when it's not blowing up it is a violently toxic chemical mixture that will
corrode your lungs on contact kind of like that stuff from the movie The Rock luckily for these people the rocket didn't land in their Village it crashed and exploded on a nearby Hillside proba causing an ecological disaster in the process but it did not kill anyone which is very fortunate but the unwitting villagers who find themselves in the path of danger are not always so lucky back in 1996 on one of the first ever flights of the Long March 3B the entire vehicle flew wildly off course just after liftoff it crashed into a nearby Village
and triggered a massive explosion that severely damaged or even flattened many buildings China claims that only six people were killed but there is speculation that the real number runs as high as 500 deaths but even when the rocket works as intended it still has a tendency to drop bombs from the sky the same thing happened in June 2024 and in December 2023 and we could keep going here these are only the ones that got posted to weebo webo I don't know the Chinese social media app so here's the question if we know this is an
ongoing and obvious danger then why why do they keep doing it there are some unique characteristics of China's rocket launch infrastructure even though the country has hundreds of miles of Coastline available they chose to build their initial spaceports far inland these were constructed back in the Cold War era and at the time China didn't have any Navy or Air Force to guard their launch sites which would have served double duty for both space rockets and intercontinental ballistic missiles if the need for the ladder had ever come up so they hid the launch complexes deep in
the mountains and deserts which at the time were uninhabited regions China isn't the only nation that uses Inland launch sites every Soviet and Russian rocket is taken off from bonor Kazakhstan this is an exceptionally remote area though the rockets fly over thousands of kilometers of empty desert and mountains so it's never been a problem but as the Chinese population exploded they started to develop small towns in the mountain valleys near the launch sites and that led to a situation where people would have to evacuate their town every time that a rocket would be flying overhead
but clearly that's an imperfect system China has also experimented with using things like parachutes and grid fins on the boosters to try and control their descent but that never worked so well either and for whatever reason the Chinese were never motivated to bring an actual solution to their problem they were just cool with dropping chemical bombs on themselves now moving into the current day China has the the largest Navy in the world if you're measuring by number of ships and China's modern space port at Wen Chang is on an island with a clear flight path
over the open ocean so then why are they still using these remote Mountain launchpads it all comes back to the fuel type China's Legacy Rockets Long March 2 3 and four use hypergolic fuel while the W Chang facility was built to support cryogenic fuel like liquefied oxygen and hydrogen which Powers a new generation of Chinese Rockets the Long March 5 7 and 8 over time the Long March 7 and 8 will become the country's Workhorse launchers and they can finally discontinue the problematic hypergolic Legacy Rockets but until then I guess it just sucks to be
anyone living underneath the constant threat of Death from Above speaking of which Donald Trump is talking about space again and it's looking like we've moved very quickly into the militarization of low earth orbit Trump's new executive order calls for the development of a sweeping new missile defense system for the United States including space-based interceptors this is called the Iron Dome for America order which evokes Israel's rocket defense system and directs the Pentagon to accelerate development of defenses against Hypersonic weapons and other Advanced aerial threats that Trump's order describes as the most catastrophic threat facing the
United States while the Israeli system is an entirely groundbased localized defense network covering a territory roughly equivalent to the state of New Jersey anything that could protect the entire Continental USA would have to be dramatically larger in scale about 500 times larger than the Iron Dome and it would need to be leveraging space-based platforms the order directs the Department of Defense to pursue space-based interceptors weapons positioned in orbit to destroy incoming missiles if you think of the way an intercontinental ballistic missile coming across the ocean from China or North Korea would travel they don't fly
in a straight line the missile is essentially just a suborbital rocket with a giant bomb as the payload they fly up into space and then they fall back down so the ideal place to intercept that missile would be at high altitude now there are also Hypersonic weapons these are relatively new they're much more difficult to defend against and the Chinese have been testing their own designs of these weapons for couple of years now what we're really talking about is a Hypersonic Glide vehicle which is basically a spacecraft the vehicle itself which is also the weapon
would be launched into orbit by a conventional rocket booster it would then circle the Earth until commanded to fire up a deorbit burn once the vehicle slows down it's going to start falling back towards the Earth at which point it's going to use aerodynamic control surfaces to Glide down through the atmosphere at Hypersonic speeds which is a speed at or above Mach 5 and it's going to fly directly into whatever Target they want to blow up if that sounds familiar it's because the SpaceX Starship upper stage is essentially a Hypersonic Glide vehicle when it returns
to earth only Starship is specifically designed to slow down as much as possible on re-entry because it's supposed to land in one piece but imagine a smaller streamlined Starship that is going on a kamakazi run straight into the ground that's what we're afraid of here this is much harder to defend against than a ballistic missile because an ICBM falls from space it's pretty simple to figure out where it's going while the Glide vehicle can actively change course all the way down so you pretty much have to blow this thing up while it's still in space
because once it hits the atmosphere you got a much bigger problem according to Trump's order the Pentagon must submit within 60 days a proposed architecture for the new Iron Dome America System including plans to accelerate the missile defense agency's ongoing Hypersonic and Ballistic tracking space sensor program which is another recent development on January 16th it was announced that L3 Harris loed Martin and Sierra space would build a 54 satellite constellation specifically for using infrared sensors to track Hypersonic missiles in All Phases of flight this satellite Network would operate 1,000 km above the Earth the New
Order from Trump called for the development of an additional custody layer to be added to the network so I think the idea is that within the tracking Network there would then be a layer of Interceptor satellites that would be able to neutralize the Hypersonic vehicle while in space on a lighter note astronomers recently thought that they had discovered a new asteroid but it turned out to be Elon musk's car the red Tesla Roadster is currently orbiting on a path that takes it around the earth as close as 250,000 km and then out as far as
Mars and the asteroid belt the elect car was famously launched as a test payload for the SpaceX Falcon heavy rocket in 2018 and I guess we just kind of lost track of it after that but it's now been officially cataloged while the vehicle remains in one piece the utter space environment has likely done a number on any plastic and rubber components and and the paint job would be looking a little worse for wear India has finished construction of their first ever crew capsule for the nation's gagan human space flight Mission the India space research organization
or is Ro announced that assembly of the capsule had been completed and it has been equipped with its liquid propulsion system which are the navigational thrusters for control in orbit and on return to Earth the crew module is now being transported to the vicrum Sarabi Space Center where it will be equipped with electronics necessary for communications navigation and power management following these tasks the crew module will be shipped to isro's primary Spaceport where it will be integrated into the orbital module gagin Yan will fly to IND Indian astronauts to low earth orbit for the first
time this is scheduled to happen as early as 2026 in the meantime ISRO plans to test the capsule on at least four uncrewed missions although the first test is going to carry a humanoid robot that the Indians have named voyetra or space friend which is designed to validate the capsule's flight Hardware local media reports that the first launch of the capsule might come as early as February
