Spanish flights grounded: Risk of Chinese rocket debris

Several Spanish airports grounded flights Friday morning due to the risk of falling debris from a massive Chinese rocket booster that’s headed for an uncontrolled fall through the atmosphere.

Flights were stopped for close to an hour in regions including Catalonia and the Basque Country as well as in the Balearic Islands, according to tweets published by air traffic control. Operations were due to restart from around 10:30 a.m., the controllers said. Flights were stopped “due to the risk of the space object CZ-5B passing through the Spanish air space,” a Catalan government agency said in a separate statement on Twitter. 

The falling booster is the large core stage of the Long March 5B rocket launched on Oct. 31. The rocket lofted an experimental laboratory module called Mengtian, meant to dock with China’s space station, Tiangong. Unlike other rockets, the Long March 5B’s core stage travels all the way into orbit during launch and circles the Earth for a few days. Eventually, its orbit decays and it descends to Earth.

It’s the fourth time in two years a large Chinese rocket has headed for an uncontrolled impact and that has many space industry experts crying foul. Both the US and Europe adhere to a rule that any space debris that is disposed of over the Earth must not exceed a one-in-10,000 chance that it will cause an injury on the ground, a threshold experts say China’s rocket exceeds.