Taiwan’s Military Apologizes For Alert Mistaking Space Launch For “Missile Flyover”
Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense issued an apology on Tuesday for a nationwide emergency alert that mistakenly referred to the launch of a Chinese space probe as a “missile flyover”.
In a statement, the ministry said that it had detected a launch of a Long March rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in China’s Sichuan Province at around 3:03 PM local time, with the rocket “unexpectedly” entering Taiwan’s southern airspace as it departed the atmosphere.
The defense ministry then released a nationwide phone alert in Chinese and English on the space launch. The Chinese version correctly identified the space launch, urging Taiwanese citizens to look out for rocket debris and to report any found to authorities. However, the English version mistakenly described it as a “missile flyover”, with the ministry saying that the error was due to an oversight in revising the standardized alert message used.
No comments were made on why an alert was issued over a Chinese space launch, the first time the ministry has done so since the creation of Taiwan’s national alert system in 2017. According to Focus Taiwan, while Chinese space launches on November 9, December 10 and December 30 all passed through Taiwanese airspace or Taiwan’s Air Defense Identification Zone, none of those launches resulted in an alert.
The satellite launch and alert comes four days before Taiwan’s presidential and legislative elections on January 13. Since the start of 2024, Taiwan’s defense ministry has reported Chinese high-altitude balloons entering Taiwanese airspace on a daily basis, saying that they were being released as a psychological warfare tactic against Taiwanese citizens ahead of election day.
Earlier on Tuesday, Colonel Wang Chia-chun, deputy head of the ministry’s joint operations planning section, told reporters at a press conference that the balloon releases were intended to goad the Taiwanese military into overreacting and wasting ammunition by shooting them down.
Tuesday’s space launch saw the successful launch of the Einstein Probe space X-ray observatory into orbit. Developed by the Chinese Academy of Sciences with major instrument contributions from the European Space Agency and Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Extraterrestrial Physics, the Einstein Probe is equipped with a “lobster eye” X-ray telescope offering far greater coverage than previous telescopes, with the ESA saying that it can image nearly all of the night sky in under five hours.