That sus red smoke is nitrogen tetroxide [0], and the other fuel would be one of the hydrazine derivatives (I believe UDMH [1] here, given that the Twitter thread says this was a Long March 3B). It's exactly as poisonous as it looks.
edit: Oh yeah, those of you who are concerned about the toxic fumes from gas stoves (popular HN topic), this is exactly* that thing—except the stoves' are measured in micrograms and what you're watching in rocket disaster videos is multiple tonnes. One of these lands on your house, and you will not need to worry about long-term cancer risks ever again.
*(To be accurate, NO2 ⇌ N2O4 interconvert in dynamic equilibrium)
If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I cannot recommend the book Ignition enough. It's got the information density of a textbook, but it's filled with hilarious commentary and fascinating anecdotes.
Nicely uphill from the rice paddy this video was taken in, too. I'm sure that rice will be extra delicious as the rains wash the residues into the field.
WP about N-Nitrosodimethylamine, which apparently dimethylhydrazine is a precursor to "Contamination of drinking water with NDMA is of particular concern due to the minute concentrations at which it is harmful, the difficulty in detecting it at these concentrations, and to the difficulty in removing it from drinking water. It does not readily biodegrade, adsorb, or volatilize. As such, it cannot be removed by activated carbon and travels easily through soils. "
That's a real nightmare. Trace amounts of perchlorates (speaking of rocket chemicals) in water are attributed to some bad health effects, and the compounds you're talking about are so much worse.
SpaceX's Dragon capsule also carries hypergolics and they know not to mess around with the stuff, even trace residues are a concern when egressing astronauts and salvaging the capsule. There are similar stories from the Apollo era. Quite jarring that the Chinese program would knowingly and repeatedly douse civilian populations in them.
> what you're watching in rocket disaster videos is multiple tonnes
But this one hardly had multiple tonnes,hadn't it? It was a spent side booster, so the most of the stuff had been burned before the separation, I think.
When you send a rocket to space, you want a margin for error. Usually this is couple percent for the first stage.
Given that the total weight of fuel at launch in this thing is couple hundred tonnes then yes, the margin for error can be multiple tonnes, but we will not know because the exact value will depend on the particulars of this launch.
You don't need tonnes of it to be extremely toxic. The stench of it even from a properly burning engine is extremely nasty and sickening. I'm talking about the trace residue that you get from non-stoichiometric burning in the engine. Add to that all the excess added as guidance margin and whatever is trapped in the plumbings.
if its hypergolic fuel you can be almost certain it was less than a few hundred pounds. "tonnes" of hypergolic fuel would be enough to level the hillside and send the iphone through your cranium.
most people cannot appreciate just how powerful hypergolic fuels really are. theres just no comparison, even when you see them IRL.
An example is the 2013 failure of a Proton-M at Baikonur, nearly full of propellant shortly after launch, carrying several hundred tons of hypergolics:
Uh for the long march 3b boosters udmh / n2o2 is the primary propellant. That entire booster was full of it, so yes, it's liable to be a tonne or so left over (full propellant mass in the stage is double digit tonnes)
NASA has a vintage 1966 video "Toxic Propellant Hazards in Rocketry" that provides an interesting discussion of the dangers of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine propellants. It includes people mixing them together in the desert, along with a dramatization of how to deal with a nitrogen tetroxide leak.
> Supposedly, only 6 people died, but there are rumors that many more were killed.
Deaths and injuries are always underreported in Chinese media and government figures, because there cannot be any information that is damaging to the public image of the CCP; and if the CCP control everything, then there can't be damaging information about anything.
I looked up the region and its like 1000km inland! It's so strange that they do this.
Nearly everyone else (US, Japan, ESA, India) launches it from sea-coasts. I guess Russia does the same thing (Baikanour), but I haven't heard of such incidents from their side.
Edit:
Apparently Roscosmos' stuff usually falls on unpopulated regions in Siberia. Surprised China didn't build a launch center on the coast (probably still an issue because of the numerous islands looking out from their coast).
The Russian far east is very sparsely populated. Sichuan is heavily populated in the regions where they launched this (it also has unpopulated Tibetan regions, but too many mountains).
One thing that wiki omits is that the foreign observers were not allowed to leave the launch site for several hours and it appears that during this time the entire area was swept by SAR or recovery teams.
Also not noted in Wiki is that the launch took place at 3am, so if everyone was evacuate for safety per the official claim they would have had to have overnight accommodation.
The last starships have all exploded in some sort of spectacular fashion, but I don’t think anyone has ever had to worry about a booster exploding on their head.
Considering now around 700 people die every day in Chinese traffic accidents, it isn't that huge of a price (well, back in 1996 I'm sure that number was much lower).
I mean, tens of billions of dollar (equivalent) have been spent on the Long March rocket program, as with any major rocket. If you spent that much on normal construction, you'd see a lot more than 6 deaths, and indeed I'm sure more rocketry workers were killed than random outsiders.
For reference, there's of order 1 death per billion dollars spent in construction in the US per year. The statistical value of life in the US is roughly $10M, so it's only 1% of cost. I presume in China the statistical value is lower by a factor of 3-10, so it wouldn't be surprising that many dozens or even hundred of workers had been killed since the program started.
They have something called the CAAC (Civil Aviation Administration of China) which appears to be the equivalent of the FAA for the most part. Checking their website (briefly) it doesn't look like they regulate spacecraft or launch/re-entry.
It is common AFAIK. The most used launch sites (there's one on Hainan where rockets only go over the ocean, but it's the least used) are pretty far inland and they don't seem to mind if boosters land on the people there or if the villages get toxic fuel sprayed on them.
China has four major launch sites. Wenchang, the one on Hainan, is used for human spaceflight. Larger cargo rockets use Jiuquan in the middle of the Gobi Desert. It's the other two, Taiyuan and Xichang (this one), that are relatively close to rural villages, although both are still very remote by Chinese standards.
Isn't the point of the booster to use up the entirety of its fuel to propel the main rocket? Is it normal for there to be enough fuel left in it to cause such an explosion?
You can't pump a fuel tank entirely empty. (You could try to displace it with an inert filler gas—compressed helium, for example—but then you're replacing fuel mass with filler-gas mass, and that brings its own set of tradeoffs).
(I understand it's a particularly deep and difficult engineering problem to solve this in space: in zero-gravity, liquid fuels turn into bubbles floating around in nearly-empty fuel tanks—all sorts of phenomena going on).
From 34s onwards it shows an internal view of the liquid oxygen tank. Just to better understand the picture the camera is inside the cylindrical tank. The viewpoint is facing backwards, so the camera is at the bulkhead closer to the tip of the rocket and it is looking “down” towards the engines. The blue “magical portal” is the surface of the liquid oxygen draining away rapidly by the rocket engines. And then suddenly there is main engine cutoff and the rocket is no longer pushed forward by the engines. That is when you see that the “magical portal” sloshes to the side and then breaks up into many floating bubbles. They float because the whole rocket, including the liquid oxygen is in free fall.
Why is this a hard problem? It is absolutely not a problem… unless you want to re-ignite the engine. (Which you might want to do to conduct further maneuvers) If you do that and don’t do anything special to shepherd the fuel to the pumps of the rocket engine they might not suck in a propellant bubble. If they don’t your engine fails to reignite. If the engine ignited, but then the pumps suck in a gas bubble they will break apart. So you absolutely have to coax the fuel to the intake before you try to reignite.
How do you do that? There are multiple strategies. At smaller scales you can try to have a flexible bladder. But at large rockets your best bet is to accelerate the rocket forward so all the propellant sloshes to the back and then
you can ignite. Once the engine(s) are ignited you don’t have to worry about it anymore (that much) because the acceleration will keep the propellants bunched up at the aft bulkhead.
But if you need the engines to be ignited to accelerate, and you need to accelerate to ignite them then you have a circular dependency. How do you in theory solve this? You have some other mean of temporary propulsion. Either a cold gas truster, or a monopropellant rocket with a flexible blader, or a solid propellant engine. It doesn’t have to be powerfull, and it doesn’t have to push you for long. Just enough to collect the propellant while the main engines are reignited. These auxilary motors are frequently called ullage rockets.[1]
Now of course how long is long enough, and how much push you need is the black magic with the whole thing.
(And of course this has nothing to do with the pictured rockets. I don’t think those are reignitable.)
Silly question, maybe, but what is filling the "empty" volume of that cylinder as the oxygen bubbles float around? Clearly it can't be oxygen or nitrogen gas, so is it just vacuum? In a total vacuum, wouldn't the liquid oxygen atomize? (And wouldn't pulling a vacuum in the tank on the way up make it a lot harder to pump the liquid out of it in the atmosphere?)
Not silly question at all. To my knowledge the Falcon uses helium to pressurise the tanks. So the gas you can see is helium. It has several benefits: does not burn, and does not freeze at the temperature of the liquid oxygen. It is also a relatively simple system. They “just”[1] have liquid helium in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel inside the tank and most likely they have a regulator on it to release gas as the oxygen/fuel is used up.
> wouldn't pulling a vacuum in the tank on the way up make it a lot harder to pump the liquid
It would make it impossible to pump. But that is not the only reason you need a pressurant. The tank wall is relatively thin. It would implode in the lower atmosphere if you would have vacuum in it.
I also don't know, but wouldn't it be gaseous oxygen?
Edit:
The tank isn't at vacuum. It started full of liquid oxygen. I assume (without researching) that the oxygen would change phase and fill the void with gas as the liquid is pumped out.
That would just cool the LOX and ultimately cause it to freeze. Such a system would require a heater, and even then there could be problems from sloshing causing the pressurizing gas to condense.
Overall, it's less of a problem in pump fed rockets, since the gas only has to pressurize the propellant up to the inlet pressure of the pumps, not above the pressure of the rocket thrust chamber as it would in tank pressure fed rockets.
A theoretical alternative to ullage motors is to impart a spin on the vehicle. Then the fuel would pool at either end, or along the tank walls, depending on the type of spin.
By no means am I an engineer, but the first thing that comes to mind to me is those little toothpaste keys, and I wonder if you could perhaps just reduce the size of the canister as it empties. I sort of imagine a board with a spring on the top end of the canister that is held compressed under pressure but pushes towards the other end as the fuel is used up. Perhaps the pressure is so great when full that this is very difficult?
These are not cryogenic so something is probably possible but this would add extra weight/mass.
You do not want extra weight on your rocket. Every bit of non-fuel weight you add means you have to add extra fuel, and the extra fuel to carry the extra fuel along with any extra tank needed for the extra fuel. It gets bad fast.
It just isn't worth it when you can just add that weight as fuel that normally doesn't get used. Ideally would dump in the ocean (which you cleared) so it didn't matter (much).
If that were possible with the fuels rockets use (liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid methane, etc.) it is still probably way cheaper on every axis to just make the tank 3% bigger and ignore the waste.
Common axes they care about in rocket design are weight, cost in money, reliability/complexity, and lately reusability.
Yes, there's always residual fuel and oxidizer in the piping, it's always accounted for. For the first stage of a rocket of this size, it should be around a couple dozen kg, give or take. And hypergolic components ignite on contact.
Trying to burn your tank dry is asking for an explosion when the pumps suck gas instead of liquid. And if the fuel feed starts to fail while there still is oxygen the engine itself will burn.
Probably not, they're more concerned blocking Winnie the Pooh memes. Rocket stage with toxic propellant landing on some poor peasants' rice paddy? Not a concern. Happens all the time. It's the price of progress: BeiDou and satellite TV used to disseminate CCP worldview.
Amazing how villagers these days have cell phones that can take high quality video. My villagers are walking around with wicker baskets and wooden hammers.
So they simply launch rockets and then it rains down on their population with pollutants, I wonder what will happen after all that space junk will expire and it is time to decommission.
Is it just me, or does the booster disappear shortly before hitting the ground, followed by the explosion happening before the now invisible booster should've hit the spot of the explosion?
I’ve had people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that the A.I. that will be a threat to humanity will be of Chinese origin. It’s this exact “succeed, at any cost” mentality that cements my belief.
The boosters should have their own flight termination system which should have exploded if they were going to fall anywhere near populated land. Everyone in the US has to have them even if they're launching from Florida over the ocean and each independent flight component (like rocket boosters) has to have its own.
Allowing a rocket to fall on land like that shows extreme contempt for public safety.
I think what OP might be saying is that the attitude that it's OK to just yeet a rocket booster at a populated area, might also not yield much safety when it's applied to Artificial General Intelligence.
Yes. As a guest or visitor. I am granted a lot of deference. Especially in someone's home. Chinese are very friendly.
But China is modernizing, progressing, very rapidly, and much of that has a human cost. So think it still is correct, that OP was implying, that China will not be as worried about controlling AI. As many fear, China will use AI for surveillance and control.
I imagine you're correct if we're talking about the elite enjoying more legal privileges than us mere commoners. Both counties do have have that in common.
You probably still have a >50% chance that it's going to be over water since that's the direction it was initially moving. Yes, if flight termination fails and by chance it vectors backwards towards land somehow without just spinning like out of control rockets normally do then it may fly far enough to wind up on someone else's property but that's why launch sites are located at a reasonable distance from inhabited areas. The point is that it's very different to take all of those precautions vs. just flying your rockets over inhabited areas as a matter of course and not giving a fuck if they land on someone.
In general I agree with the point you are making, but if you will indulge my "well actually..."
From to the Range Commanders Council Range Safety Group, 2010, summary of FTS requirements:
2. produce a small number of pieces, all of which are unstable and impact within a small footprint;
And also another requirement relevant to this particular video where the spent booster clearly had uncombusted carcinogenic hypergolic fuel when it hit the ground:
3. control disposition of hazardous materials (burning propellant, toxic materials, radioactive materials, ordnance, etc.);
- American AI “safety” practices have little or nothing in common with best practices in other fields of engineering, to the extent they can be said to exist at all (most AI safety work focuses on making sure the AI doesn’t say anything that might offend someone).
- When a rocket blows up, people die but we learn from the mistake. When an AI seriously “threatens humanity”, humanity dies and we very possibly don’t get a second chance.
A rocket booster falling on your head is a real threat.
AI taking over the world is, as yet, an imagined threat.
When AI proves it will take over the world and China builds theirs without the "don't take over the world" code mandated by every other country, let's talk more.
I don't feel like parent was talking "in the context of this video" as they mentioned AI, so I figured we left that context behind in this comment-tree. Seemingly, I was wrong.
This kind of event is highly irresponsible, and let's be clear their space program decided for it to fall in or around where the video was taken. Utterly reckless.
In this case that recklessness paid off... Nobody was killed or injured, and they probably gain far more from being able to inspect the used booster than the cost of cleanup/replanting a tree or two.
We have no possible way of knowing that, given this is Communist China with a press-freedom index of approximately -∞, and a *documented history* [0] of concealing and covering up politically-inconvenient mass casualty events, including, very specifically, government rocket boosters landing on civilians.
- "The nature and extent of the damage remain a subject of dispute. The Chinese government, through its official Xinhua news agency, reported that six people were killed and 57 injured. Western media speculated that between a few dozen and 500 people might have been killed in the crash; "dozens, if not hundreds", of people were seen to gather outside the centre's main gate near the crash site the night before launch.[4] When reporters were being taken away from the site, they found that most buildings had sustained serious damage or had been flattened completely.[4] Some eyewitnesses were noted as having seen dozens of ambulances and many flatbed trucks, loaded with what could have been human remains, being taken to the local hospital.[4]"
Any time your reasoning is "because they are bad guys with black hats", you're probably not going anywhere enlightening.
Apparently the sites were established inland for security reasons in the 1970s. One could call that paranoid but they had just had all their coastal cities occupied a few decades prior.
Is there even a viable easterly launch trajectory from Chinese controlled territory?
Philippines - Taiwan - Japan kind of limit options, for diplomatic (oops), military (it looks like you're launching a missile at us), and national security (still boosting and interceptable over another country's territory) reasons.
Launching from south of Shanghai would go between Japan and Taiwan. There is also a gap between Taiwan and Philippines. Also, Philippines is far enough away that would be safe to launch over it.
I’m surprised they don’t launch from Hainan or the coast nearby to get farther south.
Correct.
From article.
It isn't like they are trying to hit people, but the sites and trajectories were defined decades ago.
""China’s first three launch sites were established during the Cold War. Sites deep inland were thus selected to provide a measure of protection amid tensions with the U.S. and Soviet Union.
This means launches result in rocket boosters—which separate from the main stage once they have performed their task—falling to ground downrange rather than in the oceans, as is the case with U.S. and European launches.
Authorities are understood to issue warnings and evacuation notices for areas calculated to be at risk from launch debris, reducing the risk of injuries.""
In a democratic society, humans at least have value if they vote for you in the next election, and dropping rockets on or near them tends to decrease the chances of them doing that. In a dictatorship however...
If 30% of the US population wanted to migrate away all of a sudden, I think the US government would restrict it too.
No government wants to lose all its people - since without people, there is nobody to tax.
In fact, giving up US citizenship is already made rather difficult - you typically have a huge tax bill to pay, and many people cannot afford to pay it, so cannot leave.
I don’t think that’s true at all! How would that go over in the next congressional election? How would that go over with the greater than one out of two US households that own a firearm? How would that go over with the rank and file of whatever agency was supposed to enforce this spectacularly illiberal and probably unconstitutional mandate?
Trying to restrict the free movement of citizens here would throw the country into hellish anarchy, why would any “power that be” attempt that? The cost would wildly exceed any benefit.
Fair. But that's just the government. As powerful as they are, they don't have 100% of the total power in the whole US. Voters get a big say, and so do owners of capital.
If anybody in such a society wants to get anything done, they have to build a coalition and sell others on the thing they want to do. This is a very, very good thing.
I'm not sure what large tax bill you are referring to assuming you have been correctly filing? Googling it looks like there is a flat fee of $2,350. There is an exit tax if you have a net worth above 2 million, or a high income, and this appears to be a capital gains tax on assets.
The market demands growth and the market often has troubles growing when people leave.
Aside from “privatizing profits socialize losses”, why would the government care about fewer people paying the same percentage of their taxes? That makes no sense. Their budgets would contract with the demands.
If 30% of your population wants to emigrate then it's time to remove the people in power. Making the situation more tyrannical by imposing restrictions on leaving the country is the kind of idiotic policy that despots favor and which inevitably leads to governmental collapse.
Perhaps because the country is on the losing side of a war? Or the country has no economic output anymore (oil wells ran dry, drought has made farming impossible, etc).
Plenty of reasons people might want to leave a country en-mass, and some of them can't be fixed with a new government.
The issue with communism/nazism is that they depend on years or decades of political conditioning of populace, so they're even more afraid of accepting new people than they are of the existing ones leaving. Moving in to USSR was even harder than moving out, and they would only do that if you're a good showcase.
Can you quantify “most” please? Specifically what do you mean that “most” labour has a stake in the system? Which companies have a labour majority stake, stocks or otherwise?
Isn’t labour having most of a stake a more communist leaning system?
I didn't say "majority stake". Most people have a stake, period. Everyone with a pension, everyone who owns even one share, everyone who owns their house or any land.
These are people with real power in the system, and even if it's not a majority, it's really almost impossible to be a tyrant when there's lots of minor centers of power spread very wide throughout society.
Even for "the rich" who own the majority of assets - there are millions upon millions of such rich people in the US. They will never all agree on everything.
The defining characteristic of capitalism is how companies are owned. Land isn't part of it. And most people have negligible stakes in companies. Pensions don't spread power very much.
A whole bunch of people sharing power near the top is good for avoiding tyrrany yes, but it doesn't stop normal people from being treated as assets, which was the claim being made.
Capitalist is not the right opposite here; democratic or democratic-republic is. You can have a totalitarian capitalist system (in fact that's what I'd argue China roughly is). Totalitarian socialist systems are often called "communism", but of course ask 10 people what those words mean and you'll get 12 answers (and start a big argument). You can have democratic capitalist and democratic socialist systems and lots more in between (and argue all day about which last longer).
No, under a democratic system, citizens are not assets. Whose assets would they be?
Isn't that pretty much what Russia is today? The elections are a sham and the government works hand in hand with the oligarchy to plunder the country. As for tolerating government interference, anyone that doesn't like it eventually finds themselves flying out a window.
> I agree with you but I wonder if totalitarian capitalism is something that can last more than a few years.
China is so far a counterpoint. And the terrifying thing is that this is not at all a settled question. If you throw enough technology at surveillance and social control, as the Chinese do, the state might be able to become an actual Big Brother state with pervasive control over the daily life of its citizens. The Chinese government is working _hard_ on this.
The Chinese undoing will probably come from more mundane reasons, such as Xi becoming a dictator and the usual decline that comes from these types of governments.
> Surely someone who has gotten rich won't want to tolerate the state's complete control and will find ways around it. I suspect it's not sustainable.
I think once you have lots of people like this guy (and much less rich people than him) bribing and elbowing their way to special treatment, it might undermine the concept of a totalitarian state to the point where it loses it's credibility with the bulk of the population. Even the strongest government needs people to believe in their power for it all to work.
A lot of decisions made by the governments of China, Russia, and others make a lot more sense when considering they perceive humans as a renewable natural resource.
It’s an illusion, the larger an object is the slower it seems to be moving. It’s pretty strong if you see a wide body jet or old bomber fly by at low altitude.
As a kid I saw an airliner landing nearby, and I was absolutely certain it had come to a near-stop mid-air. I assumed all of these years that was due to my youth and the fact that I was in a moving car; I didn’t realize this was a known illusion.
When I see a wide body jet fly over my home approaching a landing about 15km away it just looks like it’s impossible how it just hangs there apparently little faster than an airship. Of course it’s actually going 300km/h!
For a commercial airliner on final, probably slower than that, ~240--280 kph (130--150 knots). Given cruise speed is closer to 1,000 kph, that's comparatively quite slow.
Max terminal velocity of a skydiver is only 200 km/h.. if this booster is empty this is even maybe slower. Plus real slowness there is also the optical illusion of a very large object in some distance.
So just curious, how fast would you think it should be, and how fast do you think it is in the video?
It makes more sense when you see the wreckage. The entire booster looks like it is made of very thin metal. It is falling on its side just before impact so it has maximum drag at that stage. I would guess it is going 100km/h or less.
Can there be any news here from China where y'all don't end up on the China is bad, we are good topic?
I feel like this was different before Trump? Did he make all of you come out of the closet?
Shallow nationalistic comments are indeed the opposite of what we want here, but please don't start a flamewar about it yourself—that just makes everything worse.
> any news here from China where y'all don't end up on the China is bad
Just to say: this is real bad. Very hazardous to their own people both long and short term. There are historical reasons why they do it, but they could do things differently if they would want to. The underlying reason is that the system does not value the life of the people living in that area.
> we are good
The US has many systemic problems. But in this particular regard they are absolutely the good ones. The US exhibits a lot of systematic disregard toward the health of its population and select subsects of it. This particular kind of careless disregard would not be acceptable in the US.
All in all, you might be right about your point. But this is the worst example to bring it up under.
So with all the changes that China has undergone in the last 30 years, the development in all sectors.
The effort they have put in to reduce pollution in their cities. Research in health fields
Where do you get the idea that they don't want to do better?
It sounds like you are talking about generalities. I am talking about a very particular issue: they launch rockets and stages of the rocket by design fall back on populated areas.
These are not accidents. Sometimes in the US, or elsewere, an airplane falls on your house. This is not that case. The rocket in these videos didn’t “go wrong”. (Altough sometimes they do go wrong and then they cause even more devasation.)
Some engineer in some non-descript office did a briefing. It went something like this “We will launch the rocket at X. The first stage will land somewhere in the indicated area on the map. It will contain Y kg nitrogen tetroxide, and Z kg hydrazine. Ok?” And their bosses said: “ok”. That is the problem.
> The effort they have put in to reduce pollution in their cities.
I know nothing about that and therefore i will not comment on it. I know about rockets, that is why i commented on that. But do post when you have sources so we can all learn.
Because it is inherent in the technology. Lower stages of a multi stage rocket separate and fall off as they run out of fuel. Where they fall is the question of where the launch site is and in which direction the rocket is launched.
> We recently saw a lot of train derailings in the states
A derailing is not the right analogy. That is an anomaly. Something which is not supposed to happen, and people are acting to prevent it. If you want a rail analogy this is like a train crossing a bridge between station A and B. It will keep happening because it is designed to happen. It is inherent in the design.
Being concerned is not a problem. It's the trying to make it look like China is that brutal stone age country that doesn't give a damn about the lives of their people, in total disregard of facts.
Have you considered that may they try but fail to land them far away from the population.
I'm all for looking beyond political things Beijing does and looking at China the massive country and people itself, that alone breaks the minds of most of colleagues, but this was a very irresponsible to do
FR, people only think this is bad because it's China. When NASA or SpaceX drops NO3/UDMH filled rocket boosters all over villages in Florida and Texas, you literally never hear about it.
I think you just became more sensitive to it. Sorry, we'll only post good news about China and hide awful stories like this from now on. You're right, China's image needs protecting.