Missing the mark
A Chinese rocket deorbited over Minnesota and left this in a farmer’s cornfield
All the evidence points to the debris being part of a Chinese Zhuque-2E rocket.
About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest.
The rocket’s flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed streaks of fiery debris falling from the sky, heading north over Kansas toward Minnesota. The overnight spectacle was also visible on the western horizon from Wisconsin.
The exact time, location, and direction of the debris allowed experts to connect it to the launch of a Zhuque-2E rocket, a medium-lift vehicle built by a Chinese company called LandSpace. The rocket had launched from Dongfeng, a commercial launch zone co-located with the military-run Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwestern China, less than two hours before.
Once around the Earth
The incident was largely forgotten until the last few days, when a farmer in rural Minnesota discovered something unusual while combining his cornfield for the fall harvest. A circular metal object about 11 feet in diameter lay amid the forest of corn stalks in Scott Township, a community in west-central Minnesota.
The Stevens County Sheriff’s Office said it received a phone call reporting the discovery Wednesday.
“Upon responding, deputies confirmed that a large, metallic object, approximately 11-feet in diameter, presumably a space object, was present in the cornfield,” the Sheriff’s Office wrote on Facebook. “The Sheriff’s Office is working closely with several state and federal agencies to identify and notify the owner of the debris and to plan for removal from the field.”
Law enforcement officials said the debris posed no danger to the public. That might not have been true had the object reentered over a more populated area. Space junk routinely falls out of orbit, and fragments of old rockets or satellites sometimes survive the heat of reentry to reach the ground. No one has ever been seriously injured by falling space junk, but there are a few examples of property damage.
Under international law, the country that launched an object into space is liable for any damage it causes on the ground.
What makes the debris in Minnesota unusual is its size—it’s larger than most objects that survive reentry—and the fact that it likely originated from a rocket that fell from space the same day it launched. The upper stage of the Zhuque-2E rocket has a diameter of 11 feet, or 3.35 meters, perfectly matching the size of the object found in Minnesota.
Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua via Getty Images
Credit:
Wang Jiangbo/Xinhua via Getty Images
The Zhuque-2E rocket that launched from China on September 15 deployed 10 satellites for the Qianfan, or Thousand Sails, communications network, a Chinese counterpart to SpaceX’s Starlink constellation. China has launched 258 Qianfan satellites over a series of missions since 2024, on the way to completing an initial constellation of 1,296 satellites, with longer-term ambitions of more than 15,000.
The methane-fueled rocket released the 10 Qianfan satellites into a circular polar orbit at an altitude of roughly 560 miles (900 kilometers) around a half-hour after liftoff. The rocket flew south from China, over Antarctica, then north over the Americas. After deploying its payloads, Zhuque’s upper stage performed a burn to slow its velocity and drop out of orbit.
Normally, deorbiting a spent rocket stage after the end of its mission is a good thing, a responsible practice aimed at limiting the creation of new space debris. Chinese rockets have been a problem in this area before, with unguided reentries and in-orbit breakups in low-Earth orbit. US rockets on low-Earth orbit missions usually reserve enough propellant for guided disposal.
The upper stage from the Zhuque-2E rocket’s previous flight in June broke apart after completing its mission, leaving dozens of pieces of debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit that’s home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX’s Starlink broadband network. The good news is the rocket’s altitude was low enough to ensure most of the debris would reenter the atmosphere within a few months.
LandSpace, the company that owns the Zhuque rocket family, has not publicly acknowledged the debris fall over Minnesota. The usual practice for rocket disposals is to steer them toward reentry over the ocean, suggesting the incident on September 15 was perhaps the result of a botched deorbit burn.
