Andrew Jones

5–7 minutes

A Long March 6C climbs into the sky carrying 7 satellites in August 2026. Credit: CASC

HELSINKI — A Chinese Long March 6C rocket upper stage has fragmented in orbit, just days after the stage delivered a seven-satellite rideshare mission, according to LeoLabs.

The Long March 6C launched late Aug. 24 Eastern (0321 UTC, Aug. 25) from Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, north China, delivering seven satellites into orbit in a rideshare mission. The two-stage, kerosene-fueled rocket was provided by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST), a major subsidiary of state-owned CASC, China’s main space contractor.

Just under two days after liftoff, the rocket’s upper stage was found to have fragmented, potentially into hundreds of pieces. LeoLabs’ Multi-Object Detection tool first flagged numerous objects near the rocket body, catalogued as NORAD ID 100472 (international designation 2026-195H), during a pass over the company’s radar site in Western Australia. A follow-up pass over its New Zealand site confirmed the event. LeoLabs monitors low Earth orbit with a global network of radars.

“We estimate tens to hundreds of fragments were generated,” LeoLabs stated in an Aug. 28 post on social media platform X.

At 2:30 am UTC on 27 August 2026, LeoLabs detected a fragmentation of a Chinese Long March rocket body, CZ-6C (NORAD ID 100472). The object’s orbit was 396 km perigee and 482 km apogee.

— LeoLabs (@LeoLabs_Space) August 28, 2026

The stage’s orbit was roughly 396 by 482 kilometers, which is low enough that the company expects the resulting debris to reenter within a few years.

Long March 6 issues despite national standards

The event is the latest in a series of fragmentations afflicting the Long March 6 series, most notably the Long March 6A, which uses a slightly larger diameter second stage than the 6C, but both use a single YF-115 engine, powered by kerosene-liquid oxygen propellant.

The first incident, in November 2022, saw the 18th Space Defense Squadron (18 SDS) identify and catalog 533 fragments from a Long March 6A stage by the end of January 2023. Another stage broke up into a cloud of more than 700 pieces of debris in August 2024. Other Long March 6A stages have created clouds of debris without breaking up. Some of these fragmentation events have occurred at much higher altitudes, meaning the debris could take decades or longer to deorbit.

When asked about the Aug. 6, 2024 breakup, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian said the mission was “a peaceful use of outer space consistent with international law and universal practice” and that China had “taken necessary measures” to monitor the debris, but did not address the event’s cause. Neither SAST, CASC, nor CNSA appears to have offered a technical explanation for any of the four prior breakups.

HEO Robotics has also imaged a Long March 6A stage in orbit using its Continuum-1, establishing a baseline for an intact, stable stage, and potentially understanding why any later change in state may have happened.

When HEO acquired Continuum-1, we committed to using it to catalogue objects in low-Earth orbit (LEO). Part of that work means turning attention to derelict hardware.

As noted in the recent issue of the @IntegrityISR Flash, CZ-6A upper stages are a growing concern to the sustainability of LEO as they have produced some of the largest fragmentation clouds in LEO in recent years. These rocket bodies are left in orbits that will take years to decay, with no means of manoeuvre and no plan for removal.

This is one of them.

Continuum-1 imaged this CZ-6A rocket body in orbit. It is the upper stage from the October 31, 2023 launch that carried the Tianhui 5A and 5B satellites. It appears largely intact and is gravity-gradient stabilised.

Images like these establish a baseline. If the object's state changes, that deviation is observable and comparable against something real. Attribution is rarely straightforward after a fragmentation event. A prior record can make the difference between knowing something happened and knowing why.

Reference: https://isruniversity.com/2026/05/19/issue-145/#body

— HEO (@heospace) May 22, 2026

With its launch activities growing rapidly in recent years, China drafted standards for launch vehicle orbital stage disposal in 2023, intending to implement them in January 2024. Guidelines included deorbiting spent stages where possible, guidelines to how long these remain in orbit, and passivation to avoid explosions, and avoiding debris-creating collisions.

Growing issue of space debris

Historic space activities and the recent acceleration of launch rates globally is adding to a growing space debris issue. The European Space Agency’s Space Debris Office estimates there have been more than 660 break-ups, explosions, collisions, or anomalous events resulting in fragmentation. The debris problem these breakups feed into is already vast.

The office estimates around 54,000 space objects larger than 10 centimeters are currently being tracked in orbit, of which roughly 9,300 are active payloads, meaning the rest is debris. Below that, the numbers grow by orders of magnitude, with an estimated 1.2 million objects between 1 and 10 centimeters, and around 140 million between 1 millimeter and 1 centimeter. These fragments are too small and numerous to catalog individually, but still capable of disabling a spacecraft on impact due to orbital velocities.