BEIJING: Debris from a rocket carrying a Chinese satellite into orbit crashed into a villager’s home minutes after the launch, local police and media reports said.

The parts plummeted to earth with a huge roar on Thursday morning in Xunyang county in the northern province of Shaanxi, news portal Sina said on a social media account, citing local sources. No casualties were reported, it added.

Pictures showed a man standing beside what appeared to be a rocket nozzle as tall as him, in front of a cracked wall and with pieces of broken bricks on the ground. Another image showed a large hole in a red-tiled roof.

In a post on China’s Twitter-like Sina Weibo, Xunyang police said the machinery was part of a rocket’s propulsion system and called on local residents “not to panic”.

A Long March-4 rocket carrying a remote sensing satellite — which is to be used for experiments, land surveys, crop yield estimates and disaster prevention — was launched into space from neighbouring Shanxi province nine minutes before the impact, according to the official Xinhua news agency.

Beijing views its ambitious, military-run, multi-billion-dollar space programme as a symbol of the country’s progress, but it is not unknown for pieces of it to plunge through villagers’ roofs.

In 2013, debris from a rocket carrying China’s first moon rover plummeted to earth more than 1,000 kilometres from the launch site, crashing into two homes.

Published in Dawn, August 29th, 2015

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