Watch: Bright orange rocket debris rains down on terrified villagers in China

Rocket debris has appeared to rain down on terrified villagers in China after the launch of a satellite.

Footage posted on Chinese social media seemed to show a rocket booster followed by a bright orange plume of smoke falling on a town in Guizhou, one of China’s poorest provinces.

The images take the shine off Beijing’s latest successful unmanned mission to the far side of the Moon, which returned to Earth on Tuesday.

Xi Jinping, the Chinese president, has set ambitious goals to become a leading space power, including landing astronauts on the Moon and building a research base on its south pole, but images of falling debris from rocket launches are frequently shared on social media.

“This is not how a major space power operates,” said Todd Harrison, an aerospace and defence expert at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.

“While the US is landing and reusing rocket boosters, China is dropping them over populated areas,” he wrote on X, formerly, Twitter, adding that the orange trail in the sky is “a highly toxic propellant”.

Videos of the debris surfaced on Chinese social media networks including Douyin, TikTok’s sister site, a few days after a Sino-French satellite blasted off in Sichuan province, which neighbours Guizhou.

The satellite, which is part of a civilian research mission intended to capture and observe gamma-ray bursts from distant explosions of stars, headed into orbit on a Long March 2C carrier rocket that took off at 3pm local time on Saturday from the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre.

“The launch mission was a complete success” said the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, one of the main contractors for Beijing’s space programme, in a message on the Weixin microblogging site after the launch on Saturday.