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China’s Out-of-Control Rocket Booster Falls in the Pacific

Mr. Zhao added that the Long March 5B had been designed to pose less danger upon re-entry. The rocket “is designed with special technology; most of the components will burn up and be destroyed during the re-entry process, and the probability of causing harm to aviation activities and on the ground is extremely low,” he said.

The China Manned Space Agency issued a statement in the final hours before the core booster crashed, providing the altitude of the perigee and apogee of the core’s decaying orbit, along with the inclination of the orbit.

What are the odds that someone would have been struck by falling debris?

It depended on where you live.

Because of the orientation of the orbit, if you live somewhere like Chicago or farther north — that includes almost all of Europe and all of Russia — the odds of being hit by this falling rocket were always zero. The last few orbits also completely missed Asia and South America, so no one on those two continents ever had to worry.

For people elsewhere, the chances of being hit were minuscule, although not quite zero.

“You’ve got far better odds of winning the lottery” than of being hit by part of the Chinese rocket, Dr. Muelhaupt said. “The risk to an individual is six per 10 trillion. That’s a really small number.” (That is, if 10 trillion Chinese Long March 5B rocket boosters fell out of the sky, six of them would hit you personally.)

On Wednesday, he put the odds that all of the nearly eight billion people on Earth would survive unscathed at 99.5 percent.

But the 0.5 percent possibility that someone could have been injured or killed is “high enough that the world has to watch and prepare and take precautionary steps, and that has a cost, which is unnecessary,” Dr. Muelhaupt said.

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