You Only Die Twice (redux): the unusual and confusing double reentry of a ZQ-3 upper stage (2025-282A)

Click map to enlarge

The uncontrolled reentry of a large (assumed 7-8 ton weight) Chinese ZQ-3 (Zhuque-3) upper stage, 2025-282A (catnr. 66877), on 30 January 2026 for some reason created quite some public attention, especially in Europe. But  the event became decidedly unusual when, nine hours after the US Space Force published the Final TIP, a second Final TIP appeared. We have not seen that happening before. 

So what do we have here: an object that reentered TWICE?

The first published "final" TIP, published about an hour after the listed reentry time, was for 30 Jan 2026, 12:39 UTC ± 1m, near 54.3 S, 170.4 W. 

This time and location incidentally where a very close match to the final result of the experimental Tudat reentry model we were running for this object at Delft University of Technology (nominal 12:39 UTC, 56.0 S, 179.3 W, see here).

Jonathan McDowell and I believe that the final TIP's with a quoted 1-minute uncertainty are in fact based on space-based (satellite) observations of the reentry fireball, so they are accurate (and refer to the object starting to ablate at roughly 90-80 km altitude).

So far so good: observed and modelled reentry moment well in agreement. Nice!

But then it got confusing. Several hours later that day, the US Space Force published a second "final" TIP, also with a quoted 1-minute accuracy: 13:43 UTC ± 1m, near 3.9 S, 60.7 E. This is half-a-revolution (1h 4m) later than the first TIP.

 

Screenshot of the two relevant TIP's as published on Space-Track

 

Both locations are indicated by the yellow circles in the map in top of this post (the blue cross is the nominal result of our Tudat reentry model, the solid blue line the one-sigma uncertainty in that estimate).

So what happened here? How did this object appear to reenter TWICE?

While it could all be a clerical error or a mix-up/false detection, I suspect that this unusual "double reentry" is genuine. This particular reentry was from a somewhat eccentric orbit, more so that your average reentry. The last available orbit from ~2 revolutions before the 12:39 UTC TIP, was 211 x 102 km, with apogee decidely higher than perigee. Under such circumstances, parts might surve a low perigee (low enough to initiate ablation and partial reentry).

My suspicion therefore is that when the object initially reentered in perigee at 12:39 UTC and started to ablate and break up, a single more massive/solid part survived this perigee and continued for half a revolution, before finally reentering at 13:43 UTC.

(alternatively, you could think of this as one reentry with a very, very long stretched debris strewnfield)

The longer surviving part might well be the dummy payload of this experimental launch, which remained attached to the ZQ-3 upper stage but might have separated from the upper stage during the 12:39 UTC perigee/reentry. If this dummy payload was a solid weight, meaning it had a  much larger mass relative to area than the rest of the object, it might have survived and come out of perigee again, while the actual upper stage meanwhile did not survive this perigee and reentered in the first spot at 12:39 UTC. The dummy payload then finally came down in the second spot at 13:43 UTC.

Although a different situation, it reminds me a bit of a confusing case from 2014, the reentry of a Russian Kobalt-M spy satellite (on which I also wrote under the title "You Only Die Twice"  at the time, a blogpost which you can read here). The latter consisted of the uncontrolled reentry of shed parts over the US, preceded by a controlled reentry of the film return capsule over Russia a few hours earlier. So a different situation, but equally confusing.