Fengyun's loss also could be due to a massive meteoroid or orbital debris hit, occurring coincidentally within range of China's main space launch base. But the odds of that are even smaller.

This accident came two years after the deliberate destruction by the Chinese of their Fengyun-1C spacecraft in the test of an anti-satellite weapon.

Yet the destruction of the Chinese Fengyun-1C in an anti-satellite missile test in 2007 accounts for more than a quarter of all catalogued objects in low-Earth orbit.