Four commercial satellites launched from China’s northwestern spaceport Wednesday, riding into a 400-mile-high orbit on top of a two-stage Long March 2D booster rocket.
China added another spacecraft to its growing constellation of Beidou navigation satellites Tuesday with a successful launch by a Long March 3B rocket.
For the second time in less than a week, China has debuted a new type of rocket designed to broaden the scope of the country’s Long March launcher family. This time a solid-fueled booster named the Long March 11 blasted out of a mobile launch canister with four Chinese tech demo satellites.
China’s Long March 6 rocket, fueled by a mixture of kerosene and liquid oxygen, successfully shot into orbit on its first mission Saturday with 20 small satellites, signaling a revolution in Chinese rocketry as the country prepares to test bigger boosters in the coming months.
Two space launches from China in a 37-hour span have placed an experimental communications satellite and a sharp-eyed Earth-viewing craft into orbit, according to Chinese state media reports.
China sent the next in a series of military-operated spy satellites into orbit Thursday aboard a Long March 4C rocket in an unannounced launch from the country’s northeastern space center.
Two Chinese satellites lifted off Saturday on top of a Long March 3B rocket and rode into orbit nearly 14,000 miles above Earth to expand the country’s space-based navigation network.
China launched a new spacecraft into orbit Monday begin growing the country’s Beidou navigation system into a global service alongside satellite constellations from the United States, Russia and Europe.
The expended first stage of a Long March rocket tumbled into a forested region of southwestern China a few minutes after successfully blasting off Dec. 31 with a Chinese weather satellite, and photographers were there to capture the booster’s fall back to Earth.