China's first attempt to launch a reusable, orbital class rocket, had a lot to celebrate after the mission as the rocket successfully delivered the payload to orbit, but like the first launch of New Glenn, it was successful except for landing the booster.
LandSpace, a decade-old company based in Beijing, launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket for the first time at 11 pm EST Tuesday (04:0 UTC Wednesday), or noon local time at the Jiuquan launch site in northwestern China.
It's widely being reported that the Zhuque-3 (Vermillion Bird-3) was based on the Falcon 9, and it would be believable in any case, whether or not the rocket was being built in China, but let me give you a view of the "business end" of the system during initial liftoff and the start of climbing into orbit.
Nine TQ-12A engines, burning methane and liquid oxygen, power the first Zhuque-3 rocket off the launch pad. Credit: LandSpace
Notice the black triangular shapes? Those are the landing legs. Now the methane/lox combination is different from the F9's kerosene/lox combination, but a relatively minor change. That is, they probably didn't copy the F9's Merlin engines but either used an existing engine from elsewhere in China or they developed their own. The nine engines develop 1.7 million pounds of thrust, similar to but slightly less than the Falcon 9. The payload capacity is therefore a bit less than Falcon 9's as well. Zhuque-3 is able to lift 40,350 pounds to low Earth orbit (LEO), around 80% of the 50,265 pounds Falcon 9 can send to LEO.
That view simply has "Falcon 9 copy" written all over it to my eyes.
The rocket’s upper stage fired a single engine to continue accelerating into orbit. LandSpace confirmed the upper stage “achieved the target orbit” and declared success for the rocket’s “orbital launch mission.” This alone is a remarkable accomplishment for a brand new rocket.
But LandSpace had other goals for this launch. The Zhuque-3, or ZQ-3, booster stage is architected for recovery and reuse, the first rocket in China with such a design. Made of stainless steel, the first stage arced to the edge of space before gravity pulled it back into the atmosphere. After making it through reentry, the booster was supposed to relight a subset of its engines for a final braking burn before a vertical landing at a prepared location about 240 miles (390 kilometers) downrange from the launch pad.
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Videos shared on Weibo, a Chinese social media platform, showed the final moments of the booster’s supersonic descent. A fireball enveloped the rocket at the start of the landing burn, and it impacted the recovery pad at high speed. But the rocket appeared to survive the most extreme aerodynamic forces of reentry, and it nearly hit a bullseye at the landing pad, situated in a remote dune field in the Gobi Desert.
Video of the last ~25 seconds of the flight here.
“According to telemetry data, an anomaly occurred after the first stage initiated its landing burn, preventing a soft landing on the designated recovery pad,” LandSpace wrote on X. “The stage debris came down near the edge of the recovery pad, and the recovery test was unsuccessful. The specific cause is under further investigation.”
Those of us following new rocket developments would probably have been truly shocked if this vehicle had made the landing on its first try. New Glenn, of course, completely missed its first landing attempt and had to try again on its second flight just weeks ago. SpaceX, once they successfully landed a booster on land at the KSC and then landed on a drone ship offshore, put out a light-hearted video called "How Not to Land an Orbital Rocket Booster" which showed many attempts to land a Falcon 9 before finally accomplishing that. The current count of successful F9 landings is over 500. That has to make the next systems being developed easier to succeed with.
China needs reusable rockets to keep up with the US launch industry, which is dominated by SpaceX, a company that flies more often and hauls heavier cargo to orbit than all Chinese rockets combined. There are at least two Chinese megaconstellations now being deployed in low-Earth orbit, each with architectures requiring thousands of satellites to relay data and Internet signals around the world. Without scaling up satellite production and reusing rockets, China will have difficulty matching the capacities of SpaceX, Blue Origin, and other emerging US launch companies.
Without reusable rockets, China has turned to a wide variety of expendable boosters this year to launch less than half as often as the United States. China has made 78 orbital launch attempts so far this year, but no single rocket type has flown more than 13 times. In contrast, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 is responsible for 153 of 182 launches by US rockets.
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