This week, after delivering the third and final module to China's nascent space station, the core stage of yet another Chinese Long March 5B rocket is scheduled to crash back to Earth.

The roughly 25-ton (23 metric tonnes) rocket stage is expected to reenter Earth's atmosphere on Saturday, Nov. 5 at 11:51 p.m. It was launched on Oct. 31 to carry the Mengtian laboratory cabin module to the Tiangong space station. According to specialists at The Aerospace Corporation's Center for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies, EDT, give or take 14 hours.

The Aerospace Corporation, a nonprofit research organisation supported by the United States government and based in California, asserts that the potential debris field includes the United States, Central and South America, Africa, India, China, Southeast Asia, and Australia, even though the precise location of the rocket's landing is unknown.

China has uncontrollably disposed of its rockets four times in the past two years. Previous crash landings caused metallic debris to fall on towns in the Ivory Coast, debris to float to the surface of the Indian Ocean near the Maldives, and rocket fragments to come perilously close to Borneo settlements.

Typically the largest and most potent component of a rocket, the booster is also the least likely to totally burn up during reentry. There are solutions to this problem. Engineers work to position rockets so that their booster portions land safely in the ocean rather than escaping into orbit. Some rockets are built to fire a few more bursts from their engines if they do reach orbit in order to guide them back into a controlled reentry.

The enormous rocket will be forced to circle the planet before landing in an unknown place because the Long March 5B booster engines cannot be restarted once they have stopped.

China has argued that unchecked reentry is standard procedure and has called worries about possible harm. In 2021, Hua Chunying, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs' then-spokesperson, charged that Western reportage on China's falling rockets was biassed and utilised 'textbook-style double standards.'

For instance, Hua believes Western media outlets reported on the March 2021 crash of a SpaceX rocket's debris into a Washington farm favourably and with the use of 'romantic language.' A second batch of SpaceX debris crashed on an Australian sheep pasture in August 2022, a year later.