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Mengtian Long March 5B Core Stage Reentry Update and Discussion Thread


SunlitZelkova

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One thing that would be super nice would be if all of the entry points so far -- Cote d'Ivoire, the Maldives, Borneo, and now the Pacific Coast of Central America -- were along the same great arc. That would suggest that China designs the re-entry such that the vehicle is at least expected to come down within a single orbit.

Unfortunately, those four points are not at all along the same great arc.  

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Do some research:

CZ-5B Y1 was launched on 5 May 2020. And its wreckage was re-enter on13 May. 8 days.

CZ-5B Y2 was launched on 29 April 2021. Wreckage was re-enter on 9 May. 10 days.

CZ-5B Y3 was launched on 24 July 2022. Wreckage was re-enter on 31 July.  7 days.

And this time was launched on 31 Oct. 2022, Wreckage was re-entered 4 days later. 

The first launch was a 21-ton test piece for Next-generation crewed spacecraft. The second was a 22.5t core module for the space station. I guess it was probably for the sake of safety that made the second one goes into orbit a bit higher resulting in it being two days later than the previous one. Then it turned out that it didn't need to be so conservative so there was a significant acceleration later.

Edited by steve9728
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This might be better placed in the regular Chinese space program spot, but I'm trying to figure out the minimum amount of work China would need to do to make this not happen again. If they simply added propulsive vents to the tanks and some basic star trackers to be able to maintain pointing, surely it would be able to use propulsive vents to point retrograde. Then firing additional propulsive vents should be enough dV to lower perigee, right?

If the tanks are pressed to something on the order of 2 bar and the stage has 2% propellant residuals, how much dV would that provide if you just vent it all?

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