CelesTrak's satellite catalogue, retrieved on Tuesday, holds 27 objects listed as Long March 6A rocket bodies, one for each of the vehicle's 26 flights since March 2022 and two from a single September 2023 launch. None of them has come down. All 27 still appear in the current orbital element set with tracking epochs from 3 August, and 22 of the 27 sit with a perigee at or above 600 kilometres — an altitude at which a spent upper stage stays in orbit for centuries rather than years.
The Long March 6A is the vehicle behind two of the worst debris events of the decade. A stage from a November 2022 launch broke apart and is still represented by roughly 800 catalogued fragments; another, from the 6 August 2024 Qianfan launch, produced about 705. Between them those two clouds account for a large share of everything catalogued in low orbit since.
It would be neat to say that China responded by leaving its stages higher, and the aggregate numbers appear to say so: the mean perigee of stages catalogued before 2025 is about 665 kilometres, and for those since it is about 728. But the catalogue does not support that reading, and on closer inspection it says close to the opposite.
On every mission profile the rocket has flown more than once, the disposal perigee fell after the breakups rather than rose. The clearest case is Qianfan, the satellite-internet constellation the vehicle has launched eight times: the stage from the August 2024 flight that shattered was left near 795 kilometres, and the stages from subsequent Qianfan launches average about 645.
The aggregate rise is a composition effect. Eight of the 17 launches since the start of 2025 belong to mission types the vehicle had never flown before, and those missions go high by design. The fleet average moved because the mix of destinations changed, not because the disposal practice did.
The newest stage is the highest yet, at a perigee near 977 kilometres, but that too follows the payload rather than a policy: it flew a mission to roughly 1,150 kilometres and the stage was left about 172 kilometres below its satellites, the same relative separation the vehicle has used throughout.
One figure in circulation does not survive the catalogue. A widely repeated claim that the Long March 6A has suffered four breakups is not supported by the record: only the two launches above produced large fragment counts. The six other flights with catalogued debris carry one or two pieces each, which is ordinary separation hardware rather than a disintegration.
What the catalogue does establish is the simplest fact and the most durable one. Twenty-seven upper stages have gone up on this vehicle in four years and twenty-seven are still there.