Even more Chinese rocket debris will fall to Earth. China is not very good at taking care of its spent rockets.

The other day, China launched the second module of its new Tiangong space station. Soon the rocket that launched the module will crash out of control towards Earth.

The US Space Command says the Long March 5B rocket that launched China’s new space station module will come down somewhere on Earth by the end of this week or early next week. The rocket weighs 23 tonnes but will break up into smaller pieces as it passes through Earth’s atmosphere. Should any of these parts hit inhabited areas, they can damage both buildings and, in the worst case, even people.

China has been criticized several times for allowing rocket debris to fall uncontrolled over the earth, but does not seem to have taken this criticism to heart. That space debris from spent rockets falls on the earth is sometimes inevitable, but today technology is available so that it is possible to control where on earth the scrap falls. That’s one of the reasons why many space nations drop their junk over the place in the Pacific sometimes called the “spacecraft graveyard”