The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

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Ten days ago, in a moment of very high drama in orbit, NASA directed its astronauts living on the International Space Station to briefly seek emergency refuge in a Crew Dragon spacecraft.

Since then, neither the US space agency nor Roscosmos has provided additional public information about the situation in orbit. But according to sources who spoke to Ars, following the spectacle in space, the problem has been successfully fixed.

At issue were persistent cracks in a small area of the International Space Station attached to the Russian Zvezda service module, known as the PrK module. The problem has been ongoing since 2019, and Russian astronauts have been attempting various fixes, often using a sealant called Germetall-1.

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