Stranded in Orbit Again—Did 3I/ATLAS Just Trigger a Second Space-Rescue Crisis?

This silence stands in stark contrast to the transparency displayed during the ISS incident, when physicists could track coolant particles and model the leak almost in real time. China’s secrecy is fueling speculation, especially because 3I/ATLAS has been shedding material, lighting up the solar system with anti-tail jets, and interacting with solar radiation in ways mainstream scientists still struggle to explain.

U.S. astronomers have repeatedly warned that the environment around Earth is currently more volatile than at any point in recent history. 3I/ATLAS brightened by orders of magnitude during perihelion, shed mass, and produced jet structures that Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb calls “one-in-100-million unlikely to be natural.”

At the same time, an intense sequence of solar flares erupted, bombarding near-Earth space with radiation and electromagnetic disturbances. Whether the object is natural or artificial, its presence has changed the region’s dynamical environment—an environment China’s damaged Shenzhou-20 passed directly through. The possibility that a fragment from 3I/ATLAS or a flare-energized particle stream contributed to this strike is not far-fetched. Experts simply do not know. And China is not helping by withholding the basic facts.