On August 6, the US Space Command and other commercial space situational awareness companies detected a new dangerous swarm of space debris in LEO.
An upper stage of a Chinese Long March 6A has broken apart in space, creating a debris cloud of at least 300 pieces in the most densely populated region in LEO, between 800 and 900 km of altitude. The US Space Command was able to track objects larger than 10 centimeters thanks to his military’s ground-based radars.
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A larger debris cloud
Later Thursday, LeoLabs, with a more detailed analysis, claimed to be detecting up to 700 objects, which could rise to more than 900. They announced that the collision probability at the center of the debris cloud at 830 km increased by 9%.
Slingshot Aerospace is also tracking over 50 pieces of space debris generated by this event.
The chart visualizes data collected by the Slingshot Global Sensor Network, including key orbital parameters for the objects (orbital period, apogee, and perigee), which highlight that their orbits cross through heavily populated orbital altitudes as they continue to move away from the center of the debris cloud.
According to the latest ESA’s Space Environment Report, released on July 19th, this swarm of nearly a thousand debris adds to the 22163 objects currently present in LEO orbit posing a significant risk to the space environment.
This accident is considered one of the most serious debris-generation events since the dawn of the Space Age.
Ultimately Space Command said in a statement it has “observed no immediate threats” and “continues to conduct routine conjunction assessments to support the safety and sustainability of the space domain.”
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The culprit
According to LeoLabs, radar data indicated a rocket broke apart at an altitude of 503 miles (810 kilometers) at approximately 4:10 pm EDT (8:10 UTC) on Tuesday, around 13-and-a-half hours after it lifted off from northern China.
This is the Chinese Long March 6A rocket, whose second stage has broken apart in space after releasing the first batch of G60 satellites for the Qianfan communications mega-constellation, operated by Shangai Spacecom Satellite Technology.
The stage successfully delivered 18 satellites into a polar orbit and then disintegrated because of an issue related to the spacecraft’s propulsion system and not a collision-induced fragmentation according to the analysis conducted by LeoLabs.
This new rival to SpaceX’s Starlink will form a constellation of 14,000 satellites beaming broadband internet coverage from space. The constellation aims to join a handful of planned or operational large-scale space projects from providers in various countries offering broadband satellite internet services. It is slated to grow more than 600 satellites by the end of 2025 and it is planned to be the first of three Chinese mega constellations.
The launch comes as China ramps up its commercial space sector as part of Beijing’s broader bid to cement its place as a dominant power in outer space. This indicates that China is recognizing the potential of these capabilities from the standpoint of informational superiority or data flow control.
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Not the first time
The Long March 6A rocket counts seven launches since its debut in March 2022, and it’s not the first time that an in-orbit breakup occurs.
In November 2022, a similar event involving a Long March 6A upper stage created a debris field of more than 500 trackable objects, according to NASA’s Orbital Debris Program Office. In this case, the breakup was associated with the launch of China’s Yunhai-3 weather satellite. The dry mass of the upper stage amounted to 5800 kg and was fragmented into 533 detectable and catalogable pieces plus hundreds of thousands of fragments as small as one millimeter in size. This episode is also ranked among the worst debris-generation events in history.
China is also responsible for the worst-ever instance of creating space debris, the accidental disruption of one of its own spacecraft in an anti-satellite missile test in 2007, which generated more than 3,000 trackable objects and hundreds of thousands of smaller fragments.
It was also reported by NASA that the ISS maneuvered three times to avoid a high-probability collision with cataloged objects in 2022, reaching a total of 33 collision avoidance maneuvers against large objects since 1999.
These situations underline the importance of minimizing the probability of accidental explosions associated with upper stages and spacecraft to limit the generation of new fragmentation debris.
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