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Cloud Of Space Rubbish From China's Long March Rocket
One of China's Long March 6C rocket stages has disintegrated in a very inconvenient spot for everyone else.
(Amazingly detailed picture of the breakup)
A Chinese Long March 6C rocket upper stage has fragmented in orbit, generating an estimated cloud of tens to hundreds of debris fragments. The breakup came just two days after the stage delivered a seven-satellite rideshare mission...LeoLabs said its Multi-Object Detection tool first flagged numerous objects clustered near the rocket body during a radar pass over its Western Australia site. A follow-up pass over the company’s New Zealand site then confirmed the event, according to SpaceNews.
The fragmentation occurred at 2:30 a.m. UTC on Aug. 27, 2026, LeoLabs said in a post on the social platform X. The affected object is catalogued as NORAD ID 100472, international designation 2026-195H.
“We estimate tens to hundreds of fragments were generated,” the company said...
The stage’s orbit measured roughly 396 km at perigee and 482 km at apogee, according to LeoLabs. That altitude range overlaps with operational shells used for crewed spaceflight and large satellite constellations, including Starlink.
As far as I know, one of the earliest references to clouds of human-created space rubbish occurs in the short story Deadly Litter by James White, published by Science Fiction Adventures in 1960:
The individual particles of the material spread, having been given motions tangental to the arc of the steward’s swing. Within seconds the material was spread out over fifty yards, in a matter of hours it might occupy several cubic miles of space, and years later it was still spreading... By this time it would have expanded and joined with other ejections which had occurred from the same ship hours or maybe days earlier...
('Deadly Litter' by James White)... a deadly, superfast and ultra-destructive meteor shower extending across hundreds or thousands of miles of space.
Other science fiction authors were concerned, and at least one proposed an sfnal solution; see Operation Cleanup from The Fountains of Paradise (1978) by Arthur C. Clarke.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 8/29/2026)
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