China led the day's rocket launches - at least these two - with the 8:00 AM (EDT here, 1200 UTC) launch of the Long March 7A rocket, from the Wenchang Space Launch Site, in the country's Hainan province.
The mission was short-lived, though. About 85 seconds into the flight, rather close to when other vehicles are going through Max Q, or the maximum dynamic pressure the vehicle will experience, the Long March 7A first stage exploded generating a massive fireball with a cloud of smoke and debris.
A Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat 4B satellite explodes shortly after launching from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Aug. 10, 2026. (Image credit: Meng Zhongde/VCG via Getty Images)
The Long March 7A is a vehicle that has flown before, this was the 18th flight, under the name of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). It's important to note that this doesn't mean this particular rocket flew even once because they're not reusable. Every flight is unused hardware.
The 7A — a variant of China's Long March 7 rocket family — stands just over 197 feet (60 meters) tall and combines the first two Long March 7 stages with a hydrolox (liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen)-powered third stage capable of launching up to 7 tons to geostationary transfer orbit (GTO).
According to China National Radio, today's launch carried China's Zhongxing-4B spacecraft,, a communications satellite presumably bound for GTO. China's Zhongxing satellites provide telecommunications and broadband internet services and are also thought to provide services for China's military.
An interesting aside to this story is that a test flight of the Chinese Zhuque-3 rocket had been scheduled for Monday evening (presumably US EDT again).
That mission is scheduled to fly from China's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, more than 1,500 miles (2,415 kilometers) from Wenchang, at 7:45 p.m. EDT (2345 GMT; 7:45 a.m. local time), and is expected to feature a first-stage landing attempt.
The article these details come from on Space.com was posted this morning (EDT) and at the time there were no updates to details like that, or statements from CASC or any other Chinese source.
Moving to the Japanese launch, that was a fully successful mission. The overview is that the Japanese H3 rocket launched a 10,800-pound navigation satellite to high Earth orbit.
Japan's H3 rocket flew for the ninth time ever this afternoon (Aug. 10).
The H3 lifted off from Tanegashima Space Center today at 3:23 p.m. EDT (1923 GMT; 4:23 a.m. on Aug. 11 local time), carrying the Michibiki 7 navigation satellite aloft.
The two-stage H3 is the successor to Japan's workhorse H-2A rocket, which retired last year after a total of 50 flights.
The term "navigation satellite" brings GPS or the European Galileo satellites to mind. The Michibiki 7 will be part of Japan's Quasi-Zenith Satellite System (QZSS), a homegrown navigation system that operates high above those satellite constellations in geosynchronous orbit. The QZSS is compatible with GPS.
"QZSS can be used even in the Asia-Oceania regions with longitudes close to Japan, so its usage will be expanded to other countries in these regions as well."
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Michibiki 7 is carrying a payload for the United States as well — the Situational Awareness Camera Hosted Instrument (SÃCHI), which was developed for the U.S. Space Force by the MIT Lincoln Laboratory. This is the second of two SACHIs to go up on a QZSS satellite; Michibiki 6, which launched atop an H3 in February 2025, hosts the other one. (Yes, Michibiki 6 launched before Michibiki 5.)
"This program will allow the United States to monitor satellite behavior within the GEO belt over a very interesting part of the world," Mark Huber, a technical staff member in the Lincoln Laboratory's Space Systems and Technology Division, said in a statement in December 2020.
"It is also a pathfinder in several ways," he added. "The U.S. team is blueprinting methods to allow sensitive data sharing between the United States and Japan."
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