A Spaceship Tank Soared Across the Argentinean Sky, Defying the Fury of the Atmosphere. Could This Be a Chinese Rocket in Disguise?
Outside Puerto Tirol, a small town in the Chaco region, something extraordinary happened. A blackened metal cylinder appeared in the middle of a rural area, disrupting the tranquility of an ordinary afternoon. This was no ordinary piece of scrap: it had traveled from space, endured the scorching reentry, and landed intact.
What Fell from the Sky
The piece measures 1.70 meters long and 1.20 meters in diameter. Its appearance left no doubt for experts: it was a pressurized propellant tank, known in the space jargon as “hydrazine tanks.” These containers, designed to withstand immense pressures, often survive where other rocket parts disintegrate. Charred, frayed, but whole: that’s how it appeared in Chaco.
The First Suspicions
The Argentine Space Agency was the first to publicly identify it: it looked like a piece of a spacecraft. Shortly after, renowned tracker Jonathan McDowell refined the hypothesis. Everything pointed to the fourth stage of a Long March 3 rocket, launched by the private Chinese company China Rocket a day earlier from a sea platform.
The analysis of trajectories confirmed the connection. The rocket had taken off to put twelve satellites of the Xingyun constellation into orbit. After completing the mission, its final stage briefly orbited before plummeting to Earth. The disintegration was visible in the Chaco sky… and the tank miraculously survived the fire.
From China to Chaco
The temporal coincidence left no room for doubt. The launch of the Y8 mission of the Jielong-3 occurred on Wednesday at 07:56 UTC; the reentry occurred the following day at 9:00 UTC, just as a glow crossed the region’s sky. Fifteen kilometers from Puerto Tirol, the piece fell as a silent warning.
The Long March rocket carries a controversial history: state rockets like the CZ-5B have let stages weighing tens of tons fall uncontrolled, causing global fear. Although private companies and state agencies work to equip their vehicles with deorbit systems, the problem persists.
The entire planet faces a crisis: low Earth orbit is becoming an increasingly crowded junkyard. Dead satellites, rocket fragments, rings, pallets… Every day, three large pieces reenter the atmosphere. Most burn up in the fire. But some, like this tank, make it all the way to the ground.
An Inevitable Future
Incidents in inhabited areas are multiplying: fragments that pierced roofs in the United States, rings that appeared in Kenya. Chance still protects humanity: Earth is vast, mostly water and deserts. But statistics are relentless: sooner or later, something will fall where it shouldn’t.
However, the space race is moving faster than regulation. Meanwhile, towns like Puerto Tirol become stages for the improbable: the moment when the cosmos reminds us that nothing we launch up there truly disappears.
That charred tank in Chaco is not just a piece of metal. It is a reminder that the sky doesn’t always return silence. Sometimes, it returns questions.
