Chinese Rocket Debris Showers Intrigue on a Remote Fishing Village

Mr. Pelayo hitched it to his double-outrigger canoe and towed it home to show his wife.

The slightest whiff of something weird draws a crowd in Poblacion, population 6,800. Shortly after Mr. Pelayo’s arrival, curious neighbors emerged from thatch-roofed houses, slipped on their flip-flops and headed to the beach for a look. Children crawled over the long piece of metal and sat on both ends, tipping it up and down like a seesaw. Police arrived with megaphones, warning it could be dangerous and that nobody should touch it.

Poblacion, home to farmlands of corn, rice paddies and garlic trenches, is off the beaten track but not off the grid. A Google search by villagers revealed that other strange debris had turned up near a village farther north, as well as off the coast of Busuanga, a town to the south. A Chinese rocket was the prime suspect, according to the internet.

Soon, talk of spaceships and rockets edged out local gossip at sari-sari shops, where locals sit and chat over instant coffee.

“We got cellphones like 20 years ago,” says Poblacion resident John Erwin, 21. “But you basically had to climb up in a tree to make a phone call.” The village didn’t get internet service until around 2014.  “I’ve never even been inside an airplane,” Mr. Erwin adds, so talk of rockets falling from the sky was pretty strange to him and everybody else.

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Another fisherman from Poblacion, Julie Tarse, 40, found a smaller piece of metal on the same day as Mr. Pelayo’s find. It was as heavy as a bag of rice, he says, but he dragged it home anyway, thinking he could use it as a roof for his bathroom. The next day, fisherman Eric Fuentes found his piece. It had Mandarin characters and a portion of what looked like the Chinese flag.

“It was the talk of the town,” says Joven Gequiñana,

Many Chinese spacecraft launch from the island of Hainan, about 620 miles northwest of Manila. Rockets are typically pointed southeast from launch sites near the equator, according to experts. That allows the spacecraft to piggyback on the earth’s rotational force and reach outer space more efficiently. It also puts the Philippines right under China’s flight path. 

All rockets shed debris shortly after blast off, and what goes up, must come down—at least some of it does. Officials are thinking it might be a good time to give isolated islanders, including those of Poblacion, a crash course in space-junk protocol. “We’re trying to sort of demystify space for the public,” says Marc Caesar Talampas, a senior space-agency official. 

Since July last year, China has launched at least six rockets over the Philippines, according to the country’s space agency. The latest one was in March. The China National Space Administration didn’t respond to a request for comment. The Philippines space agency said Beijing acts in accordance with international norms by issuing warnings. 

Before each launch, China’s civil aviation authority issues a public notice to aircraft pilots, called a NOTAM, alerting them, as well as local authorities, where rocket pieces are likely to be falling. The Philippines space agency notifies local officials so they can issue advisories and alert people via the internet or word of mouth. Unlike rocket debris, warnings can be slow to reach villages.

“I don’t think the local fishermen are reading NOTAMs,” says Bernadette Driza, of the municipal disaster management office in Calintaan. 

Multi-stage rockets, like China’s Long March series, jettison all kinds of junk on the way up. First to fall is the booster that lifts the spacecraft off the ground. Then rockets ditch the upper stages, large tubes filled with fuel for the final push into orbit. Along the way, they also discard payload fairings, coned-shaped protective sheaths that largely make up the debris found by Mr. Pelayo and the other fishermen, according to the Philippines space agency.

Space safety experts say the odds of being hit by space junk are next to nil, and there are no documented deaths from falling rocket debris.

The debris found around Poblacion in November was eventually traced to an Oct. 31 launch by China, according to the Philippines space agency. On Nov. 9, the Philippines coast guard rounded up all the fallen rocket debris, including those found by the fishermen in Poblacion.

“I wish I’d kept a piece of it as a souvenir.” says Mr. Pelayo. 

Mr. Tarse also complained about losing his piece of high-quality metal. He had it propped up against his house until he could find someone to help him hoist it up and make a weatherproof bathroom roof.  Authorities took it away while he was out fishing.

“I wasn’t angry,” Mr. Tarse says, “but I thought they could have at least waited until I got back.” 

Write to Feliz Solomon at [email protected]

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