Showing posts with label Jonathan McDowell. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Jonathan McDowell. Show all posts

Friday, November 24, 2023

Kim's rocket goes BOOM! during launch and it was caught on camera


Stage One of a North Korean rocket exploded on Tuesday during a alleged spy satellite launch, a video that captured the event shows. The camera, normally used for tracking meteors or shooting stars, was from South Korea's Yonsei University [Go Jajangmyeons!]. The video showed the first stage of the North Korean Chollima-1 rocket appearing to erupt and spread debris, Reuters reported on Friday.

"This time they appear to have detonated the first stage propellant in mid-air," Byun Yong-Ik, an astronomy professor at Yonsei University, told Reuters. "This kind of measure was not seen in the previous launch attempts, and it could have been an effort to prevent South Korean and U.S. authorities from recovering the (rocket), as it is equipped with a new engine."

The activity was classified as unusual by North Korean rocket experts in the report.

The U.S. Space Force, a branch of the military initiated by former President Donald Trump, cataloged an object in orbit matching the trajectory of the launch, suggesting the spy satellite is actually in space, astronomer Jonathan McDowell posted Tuesday on X.

McDowell, who is based at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, also tracks worldwide space launches, landings and re-entries.

Following North Korea's claims of the successful spy satellite launch on Tuesday, senior U.S. officials and the Biden White House condemned the activity and even wagged their fingers.

White House officials released a statement saying the launch on Tuesday was "a brazen violation of multiple UN (United Nations) Security Council resolutions, raises tensions, and risks destabilizing the security situation in the region and beyond."

South Korea is planning its own first spy satellite for launch later in November, on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launching from Vandenberg Space Force Base.

Monday, May 11, 2020

Ginormous Chinese rocket crashes back to Earth


An enormous Chinese rocket with a length of about 100 feet came plunging back into the atmosphere on Monday. It was the largest piece of crap to crash back down to Terra Firma in decades, and that may be due to the fact that it was made in China.

Forbes reported that the 5B rocket was launched May 5. It carried a prototype of a newly-designed crew capsule.  After about a week in orbit, the core stage of the rocket re-entered the atmosphere at around 11 a.m., honking along at thousands of miles per hour.

“It is the most massive object to make an uncontrolled reentry since the 39-tonne Salyut-7 in 1991,” tweeted Jonathan McDowell, a Harvard astrophysicist who tracks objects in orbit and puts his pants on one leg at a time.

A piece of the spacecraft measuring about the size of a small school bus splashed down into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa, according to the US Space Command, which was tracking the re-entry, causing some to believe the gods must be crazy.

Pooped out satellites and used rocket stages often re-enter the earth's atmosphere, but they pale in size compared to this leviathan craft.



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