Villagers look at the rocket debris that fell after a launch on Dec. 2014, near Fuquan, a small city in Guizhou Province, more than 300 miles east of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. (Photo : www.spaceflightnow.com)
The roof of a house was destroyed when rocket debris from the recent launch of a satellite landed on a house in Shaanxi Province, the Beijing Youth Daily reported.
According to the report, a solid rocket booster from the satellite crashed and accidentally fell on a house in a village within the territory of the city of Ankang at around 10:40 a.m. on Aug. 27, which left a gaping hole in the roof. No injuries or deaths were reported.
The U.K.-based paper Daily Mail reported that the home owner was tending to his garden when the rocket booster crashed through the roof, which caused nearby houses to tremble.
The report said that the government has pledged to compensate the home owner for the damage.
According to the local government, the booster may have come from a Long March 4C rocket carrying the Yaogan-27 remote sensing satellite, successfully launched from the Taiyuan launch site nine minutes before the incident happened.
In 2011, debris from another satellite launch fell onto a home in China and compensation for the damage in the incident was paid by the private sector as the government claimed it was covered by insurance.
Chinese state media said that it was not the first time that an accident involving a rocket launch occurred. On Dec. 31, 2014, the expended first stage of a Long March rocket fell into a forested region of southwestern China a few minutes after it blasted off with a Chinese weather satellite.
The incident was covered by the media who witnessed as the rocket debris crashed along a rural roadside near Fuquan, a small city in Guizhou Province. The crash site was more than 300 miles east of the rocket's launch site at the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.
