VANDENBERG, CALIFORNIA — A huge piece of a rocket crashed into the Atlantic Ocean at 8:33 a.m. on May 11, according to the U.S. Space Command's 18th Space Control Squadron. The object, the core stage of China's Long March 5B rocket, laned off the coast of Mauritania.<br /><br />SpaceFlightNow.com reports the core stage of the Chinese rocket was 30 meters long and 5 meters wide. According to CNN, the rocket carried an uncrewed prototype spacecraft to orbit before making an uncontrolled fall to Earth.<br /><br />The 18-tonne core stage is one of the biggest objects to fall uncontrollably to Earth. Jonathan McDowell at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics tweeted that the rocket dashed over Los Angeles and New York City before crashing near West Africa.<br /><br />McDowell says the core stage had slowed enough that it would have at most destroy a house by the time of impact.<br /><br />CNN reports the only larger objects to have made uncontrolled falls were Skylab in 1979, Skylab's rocket stage in 1975, Russia's Salyut 7 in 1991, and the space shuttle Columbia in 2003.
