The debris cloud problem gained another entry Aug. 27, when LeoLabs’ radar network caught a Chinese Long March 6C upper stage breaking apart roughly two days after launch. The company put the fragment count at tens to hundreds.
The rocket flew a seven-satellite rideshare mission from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, lifting off in the early hours of Aug. 25 Beijing time. Its builder is the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the state-owned CASC subsidiary behind much of China’s launch work.
LeoLabs first noticed a cluster of objects near the stage, registered as NORAD ID 100472, during a pass over its Western Australia radar, then confirmed the event on a second pass from New Zealand. At a perigee of about 396 kilometers and an apogee of 482, the leftover pieces should reenter the atmosphere within a few years.
The breakups are becoming a pattern for the Long March 6 family. A 6A stage from November 2022 left 533 catalogued fragments, and an August 2024 event produced more than 700 pieces. Beijing has not explained any of them.
China wrote stage-disposal rules in 2023 that call for deorbiting and passivation of spent hardware, yet the failures keep coming. Across all nations, Europe’s debris office tallies more than 660 breakups, and fewer than one in five of the roughly 54,000 tracked objects larger than 10 centimeters is an operating satellite.
