Where and when will the Chinese rocket Long March 5B fall back to Earth?

China’s most powerful rocket departed Earth on Halloween from Southern China. It is bringing the final module of China’s space station into orbit.

The Long March 5 rocket, known as Changzheng 5 in Chinese, is named after the famous ‘Long March’ conducted by Mao Zedong’s Chinese guerillas in the 1930s. The encircled army managed to escape with a sliver of its forces, enabling the Chinese communists the rebuild and defeat the Kuomintang national government in the Chinese Civil War in 1949.

The majority of the Chinese rockets are named a variant of Changzheng.

It is very normal for debris of rockets to be left to fall back down to Earth. They break up in the atmosphere before crashing into land or sea.

“It is understood that the type of rocket you mentioned uses special technology designed so the vast majority of components that will be destroyed by ablation during re-entry into the atmosphere, and the probability of causing harm to aviation activities and the ground is extremely low,” said Zhao Lijian, a spokesman at the Chinese foreign ministry.

What time will the rocket come down?

The first stage of the Long March rocket is expected to come down in the middle of the Atlantic sometime on Friday. It is expected in the next hour or so.

Although some Spanish flights were delayed as a precaution, the expected landing zone means chances of damage are low.

“Due to the risk associated with the passage of the space object CZ-5B through the Spanish airspace, flights have been totally restricted from 09:38 a.m. to 10:18 a.m. in Catalonia and other communities,” the Spanish service said in its Twitter account.

Ted Muelhaupt, who is a consultant in the chief engineer’s office at the Aerospace Corporation, has said that “you’ve got far better odds of winning the lottery tonight than you are getting hit by this object.”

“The risk to an individual is six per ten trillion. That’s a really small number.”