Near Miss, Miss By Charles Taylor

     China keeps giving us so much. Why, it almost dumped a pile of space junk on New York City. Well, that would have gone down well. Anyway, better luck next time!
  https://nypost.com/2020/05/12/space-junk-from-chinese-rocket-narrowly-missed-hitting-nyc/

“Chunks of the massive Chinese rocket that recently took an uncontrolled plunge back into the Earth’s atmosphere narrowly missed hitting New York City, according to a report. Had the Long March 5B rocket re-entered the atmosphere about 15 to 20 minutes earlier on Monday, it would have rained debris on the nation’s largest metro area, according to Ars Technica, a technology-focused publication. The about 100-foot-long rocket was launched on May 5, carrying an unnamed prototype of a newly designed Chinese crew capsule. After about a week in orbit, the 20-ton core stage of the rocket fell back into the atmosphere around 11 a.m., moving at thousands of miles per hour and largely burning up on its way down. A bit of the spacecraft about the size of a small bus splashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of West Africa, according to the US Space Command, which was tracking the re-entry. Some of the space junk also appeared to have landed in a town in Cote d’Ivoire, according to Quartz. No injuries were reported. Typically, a two-stage launch will drop its first rocket into the ocean before reaching orbit — instead of allowing the large object to come back down uncontrolled, according to NASA. It’s not the first time China has seemingly shown a disregard for debris from its rocket launches. In November 2019, one of its rocket boosters dropped on a Chinese village, spewing toxic fuel and smashing at least one building, Ars Technica reported at the time.”

     If China can ignore the harm caused by the Covid-19 pandemic, space junk crashing into populated areas is no big sweat. What are you going to do, fire a nuke at us? Dare you!