This video shows a stage from the Long March 3B booster crashing down near a town in China. The rocket launched a pair of Beidou navigation satellites from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Thursday. China has launched five satellites on three rockets so far this year. The launches include: Jan. 9 Long March 2D Superview 3 & 4 Earth observation satellites Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center Jan. 11 Long March […]
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“Long March 3B”
A busy day in space, so let’s get right to it: SpaceShipTwo Flies: Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Unity performed its seven glide flight this morning in Mojave. The flight appeared to go as planned based on what I could see from the ground and Virgin Galactic’s tweets; the space plane landed and rolled to a stop on runway 30. The pilots were Mark Stucky and Michael Masucci. This is the seventh […]
Falcon 9 carries the Dragon cargo ship into orbit. (Credit: NASA TV)
by Douglas Messier
Managing Editor
SpaceX had a banner year in 2017, launching a record 18 times and helping to propel the United States to the top of the global launch table with a perfect 29-0 record. The U.S. total made up 32.2 percent of 90 orbital launches worldwide, which was an increase over the 85 flights conducted in 2016.
The 29 American launches were a leap of seven over the 22 flights conducted the previous year. This is the highest number of American orbital launches since the 31 flights undertaken in 1999. However, that year the nation’s launch providers suffered four failures whereas they were perfect in 2017.
The failure of a Russian Soyuz booster to orbit a weather satellite and 18 CubeSats on Tuesday was the sixth launch mishap of the year. That total includes five total failures and one partial failure out of 79 orbital launches. On Jan. 14, the maiden launch of Japan’s SS-520 microsat booster failed after takeoff from the Uchinoura Space Centre. JAXA said controllers aborted second-stage ignition after losing telemetry from the […]
China’s Long March 3B flew for the first time since June on Sunday, placing a pair of Beidou positioning satellite into orbit after launching from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The Long March 3B had suffered a partial failure of its third stage on June 19 that resulted in the Chinasat 9A communications satellite being placed in a lower-than-planned orbit. The spacecraft reached its expected orbit using on-board fuel, resulting […]
A Chinese communications satellite left in a lower-than-planned orbit due to a botched launch has reached its intended destination, the Xinhua news agency reports. ChinaSat-9A (Zhongxing-9A) raised its orbit though a series of 10 firings of its on board propulsion system. Xinhua did not say how much the use of the fuel — normally used for station keeping — has reduced the planned lifetime of the spacecraft. The satellite was […]
Per the Long March 5 failure, this may be a clue as to when things started going off nominal. pic.twitter.com/6xzMk3pDY8 — Chris B – NSF (@NASASpaceflight) July 2, 2017 Chinese media report the launch of the Long March 5 rocket carrying an experimental communications satellite failed in flight on Sunday. “An anomaly occurred during the flight of the rocket, which blasted off at 7:23 p.m. from Wenchang Space Launch Center […]
A Long March 3B rocket placed a Chinese communications satellite into an extremely lopsided orbit on Monday following what official state media say was an anomaly with the booster’s third stage. Space-Track.org reports the Zhongxing-9A (Chinasat-9A) spacecraft is in an orbit measuring 193 x 16,357 km. It is not clear whether the geosynchronous satellite can be salvaged. Chinese media report the spacecraft is healthy with solar panels and antennas deployed. […]
China launched the Zhongxing-9A (Chinasat-9A) communications satellite early Monday morning, but the fate of the spacecraft remains unclear. Normally an official confirmation of launch success would be issued. However, no updates have been provided yet, a sign there might have been a problem with the launch. The spacecraft was launched aboard a Long March 3B rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 00:12 local time. Zhongxing-9A is designed to provide […]
2017.04.12 CZ-3B危险的距离 pic.twitter.com/PuToaL51ba — ChinaSpaceflight (@cnspaceflight) April 12, 2017 How did someone get this close to the launch of a Long March 3B booster at the the Xichang Satellite Launch Center? It’s a good think that rocket didn’t go kaboom at liftoff. The booster lifted off on Wednesday with the experiment Shijian 13 communications satellite. The spacecraft is described as having a high throughput communications system with a transfer capacity […]