Filipino fishermen, who often pick up treasures while fishing in the South China Sea, have had another windfall. In the waters near the city of Carlintan on the western island of Mindoro in the Philippines, a group of Filipino fishermen recently fished two large pieces of metal wreckage, and they guessed that the exotic characters written on the wreckage should be Chinese characters, but they did not know the meaning of these characters.
Subsequently, the Calintan City Disaster Prevention and Management Office confirmed that the two metal wrecks were the arrow fragments of the Long March 5B (Chang-5B) carrier rocket launched at the Wenchang launch site in Hainan on the 31st of last month.
Don't look at the two pieces of five-B wreckage that Filipino fishermen fished up, they are huge, but they are only insignificant compared to the whole rocket.
After successfully sending the Mengtian experimental module to dock with the Chinese space station, the segment of Long Five B will be dragged back by the gravity of the earth. During re-entry, most of the segments will be incinerated due to severe friction with the air, and only a small part will eventually fall to the surface.
Although it may be extremely low, considering that this small part of the wreckage of the arrow body still has the risk of hitting the flowers and plants, we have carefully calculated that the area where the wreckage may fall in the South China Sea in advance, and notified the countries around the South China Sea and the ships traveling in the South China Sea as early as possible.
It is unrealistic to stop the wreckage from falling, but we are at least within our ability to do things as thoughtfully as possible, and this reflects our position and principles as a responsible power.
But even if China's aerospace industry has done this, criticism from the outside world, especially Western public opinion, is still not uncommon. Most of their doubts about us still focus on the so-called "safety" issue, openly and covertly using various spring and autumn brushstrokes, trying to create an illusion for non-Chinese readers that "China's rocket wreckage found somewhere = China's backward aerospace technology = ignoring the safety of people's lives on the surface = China is irresponsible to other countries".
But no matter how much the Western media reverses black and white, illusions are illusions after all. Filipino fishermen have not caught the wreckage of Chinese rockets in the South China Sea for the first time, but not once they have been hit by them, this is the essence of the problem, and the Western media have intentionally or unintentionally ignored this, which in itself is a kind of erasure of our people-oriented space concept.
As long as you know the development process of China's aerospace industry, you should know more or less that after launching rockets at the Xichang launch site in Sichuan, we would see news from time to time that people's houses were hit by rocket wreckage from a certain place. This situation is mainly caused by the geographical location of the Xichang launch site, no more than the vast South China Sea, even in the depths of the hinterland of the southwest, seemingly desolate places may be inhabited, so this situation is inevitable.
What's more, due to limited technical conditions, our Long March series rockets were basically used with highly toxic metadimethylhydrazine fuel, which would be contaminated on the remains of the arrow body, and people who did not understand the situation might have accidents even if they were not hit.
Now, both of these issues have basically been resolved. The wreckage of a Long March rocket that falls into the South China Sea may still be able to hit passing ships, but that probability is much smaller than in Xichang. And since the Long March 5, our rockets have been fueled with more powerful and non-toxic liquid oxygen liquid hydrogen, so that so many Filipino fishermen can excitedly take photos with our rocket wrecks and drag these metal fragments back to shore after picking up the wreckage of our rockets again and again.
What is progress? This is called progress, and we can't stop the Western media from generalizing everything, but at least we should know the cause of the matter ourselves.
Moreover, then again, with the existing technical conditions of human beings, even if the US Space Agency and Musk's SpaceX are allowed to hit this rocket, there will be metal debris that will fall, and they will not be able to make these metal debris disappear out of thin air, which is determined by objective reality.
In recent years, the news of US rocket wreckage falling and smashing into civilian houses is not uncommon, and in terms of actual results alone, this nature is far worse than the wreckage of Long 5B that fell into the sea, but the West can rely on the hegemony of the media to turn all kinds of negative public opinion into invisible again and again.
However, this situation also reminds us that if China wants to become a space power, it is not enough to have advanced space technology, and the corresponding level of public opinion propaganda must also keep up. The better the thing, the more we ourselves should spread the word, and not expect the Western media to spit ivory for us. The importance of building an international public opinion system that belongs to us is only big and not small compared to building a space station, and in this area, we still have a long way to go.