If they fall down to earth does that mean they come crashing down on land or sea? And isn’t that dangerous threat to people who may be on ground or maybe a ship like a Cruise ship?
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Some parts of rockets are calculated to fall back to earth, like the space shuttles’s reusable boosters and space-x’s self landing boosters.
Some are calculated to fall into remote parts of oceans where you won’t find cruise ships or anything else. Such areas are sometimes specified in “notices to mariners” that tell shipping about areas that are at risk.
Much of the debris burns up on re entering the atmosphere and never reaches the surface.
Some remains in orbit as space junk. The biggest bits of junk are tracked so that other space craft don’t hit them.
>If they fall down to earth does that mean they come crashing down on land or sea?
Yes
>And isn’t that dangerous threat to people who may be on ground or maybe a ship like a Cruise ship?
Not really, no. We can predict the crash zone, and plan the mission to make that zone an empty patch of ocean. The location of launchpads all over the world are influenced by having good options for crash zones.
Depends on speed and elevation. If it’s low and slow then it burns up on re-entry or falls to the ground(usually with parachutes) if it’s fast and high then it stays in orbit and becomes space junk.
IT depends on what orbit the spacecraft is left in, and what the rocket does when it finishes.
If the orbit is high, the rocket stage remains in orbit practically forever. After the craft is released, the rocket often does another burn to put it in an orbit that won’t cause a danger to other spacecraft.
If it is lower, then the rocket will eventually return to earth. These days they often do a burn to make sure the rocket does so quickly, changing to rocket’s orbit so that the orbit drops into the thick atmosphere. Other times the orbit is low enough so that it is slowed down passing through the upper atmosphere, which reduces the height of the orbit slowly, until, again, it enters the thick lower atmosphere.
Either way, it runs into the air at 8km/sec or more – which is fast enough that the rocket will always break up. Most of it will vaporise, much of the rest will be shreds of light stuff that float to the ground, and only very small parts are heavy enough to be dangerous to anything. And the planet is very, very big, so the danger of anything hitting anything except empty and and ocean is very small.
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