Abandoned Chinese rockets endanger operations in low Earth orbit

The Chinese Communist Party is abandoning spent rocket bodies in orbit at an unprecedented pace, increasing the potential for explosions and collisions and creating risk for all commercial, civil and military space operators, according to a new report.

The findings come despite Beijing’s agreement to follow international guidelines that call for deorbiting rocket bodies after they deploy their payloads and as observers continue to fault the nation for a lack of transparency in its space operations.

The report from LeoLabs of California said that in the first five months of 2026, the CCP has abandoned 11 rocket bodies with a combined weight of 44,000 kilograms in a high section of low Earth orbit (LEO) where they will linger for centuries. Neither the United States nor Russia, the two other leading spacefaring nations, left any rocket bodies in the orbit during that period, the report said.

The Chinese derelicts are “posing an ever-growing collision hazard at these altitudes, likely eroding the reliability of future space systems and possibly fueling a self-sustaining cascading of collision events,” according to the report from LeoLabs, a global radar system providing LEO intelligence that helps the U.S. military guard against threats from space.

Among all spacefaring nations, the CCP is an outlier in this practice, said Darren McKnight, senior technical fellow with LeoLabs, who wrote the June 2026 report with Erin Dale, staff solutions architect. “Getting worse every day,” McKnight told Apogee.

If the practice continues, the CCP will leave 26 rocket bodies in space by the end of 2026. LeoLabs also highlighted how many rockets have been abandoned in high LEO — 650 kilometers and above — over a five-year period ending in January 2026. The number for the CCP was 51, and for the rest of world, just eight.

The dumping of so many rocket bodies threatens to reverse a trend toward more sustainable practices by other spacefaring countries. Beginning in the early 2000s, recognizing the catastrophic possibilities of collisions in space, fewer nations are leaving new rocket bodies to linger and the growth in numbers slowed. Now, the CCP is on pace to overtake Russia as the nation with the most abandoned rocket mass in high LEO.

In addition to the number of rockets, China uses bigger rockets than do most nations to deploy its LEO satellites. Space watchers closely track the mass of derelict rockets; bigger rockets create more debris when they disintegrate or collide with another space object.

“If you cannot manage your collision risk, you are a burden on responsible space operators,” McKnight told Apogee.

The Chinese derelicts are second-stage or kick rockets, moving their payloads beyond the altitude they’re carried to by first-stage rockets that push them out of Earth’s atmosphere into outer space before falling back into the sea. The payloads primarily include satellites in the Guowang and Qianfan constellations, the CCP’s answer to the Starlink broadband network orbited by U.S.-based SpaceX. Some but not all upper-stage Chinese rockets are designed for deorbiting, which shows “China can be responsible,” the LeoLabs report said.

International guidelines call for deorbiting space objects within 25 years after the end of operations, though modern systems are typically removed much sooner. Techniques include leaving enough fuel in a second-stage rocket to power its return toward Earth and equipping payloads with electric propulsion so rockets need not carry them so high.

In a June 2026 report to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, the CCP said it complies with all provisions of the committee’s Guidelines for the Long-term Sustainability of Outer Space Activities. These provisions cover topics including communication and transparency, and “Post-mission Deorbit and Passivation of Rocket Upper Stages.” The report said the CCP takes steps to ensure that rocket stages will not explode in orbit and concludes, “Enforced by national regulations, the in-orbit lifetime of rocket upper stages is limited to less than 25 years.”

Nevertheless, the LeoLabs report noted that of the top four fragment clouds littering low Earth orbit, two are from Chinese rocket body explosions in the last four years. Counting another incident attributable to the CCP, an anti-satellite weapon test in 2007, the nation is responsible for three of the four fragment clouds.

Safety protocols in the deployment of the OneWeb constellation, owned by the Eutelsat Group of France, are featured in the LeoLabs report as an example of responsible behavior in high LEO. This includes communicating broadly about plans and intentions for maneuvering. “There is little evidence that any of these responsible space safety practices are being adhered to by Chinese operators,” the report said. “Building constellations at high-LEO altitudes seems to require an operator to either work hard at space safety through open communications, cooperation, and information sharing to avoid short-term interactions or to invest in future removal of massive derelicts abandoned to prevent space sustainability challenges. The current data suggests China is not dealing with either issue.”

Space is a key component of the CCP’s strategic goal of eclipsing the United States as a global superpower by 2049, the 100th anniversary of the nation’s Communist revolution. With one exception, the CCP has made significant progress across 32 areas identified in a 2021 plan to advance space capabilities, according to a December 2025 report from Georgetown University’s Center for Security and Emerging Technologies. The one area is mitigation of space debris.

The “Annual Threat Assessment of the U.S. Intelligence Community,” published by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence in March 2026, said, “Beijing’s rapid deployment of space capabilities positions it to use space to advance its foreign policy goals, challenge U.S. military and technological superiority in space, and project power on a global scale.”

The LeoLabs report said this push may help explain the abandonment of Chinese rocket bodies, suggesting that in “trying to meet launch rates for constellations and other missions they are producing a space environmental flurry eclipsing even the Cold War flourish of Soviet/Russian activity in the 1970s through … 2010.”

McKnight leads an international team that maintains a Top 50 list of most dangerous derelict space objects. The mass and location of the objects figure into their placement on the list. The largest of them are 17 rocket bodies from the former Soviet Union weighing 9,000 kilograms each and the location ranges from 700 kilometers to 1,100 kilometers in average altitude.

The Chinese rockets abandoned over the past five years may be expanding this range of danger, or what McKnight calls LEO’s “bad neighborhood.” The share of objects in high LEO that are categorized as space junk is growing, the report said. Payloads that still are operational account for only 12% of them, compared to 90% in lower LEO.

“This accumulation of derelict hardware will affect all global space operators for decades,” the report said, “and add an extra level of tension as the space domain becomes more contested with the recent deployment of counterspace and military support space systems globally.”