China’s successfully completes full 10K hop of 3-engine launch test rocket
China’s yesterday successfully completed a 10K hop lasting six minutes of 3-engine launch test small-scale rocket, lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
Developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the carrier rocket features a 3.8-meter diameter rocket body, powered by three 70-tonne LOX/Methane engines and equipped with a full-size landing buffer system.
The rocket achieved vertical soft landing at a fixed point through take-off, ascent and variable-thrust descent. The test fully verified the rocket’s VTOL configuration, heavy-load landing buffer technology, reusable propulsion technology with high and strong variable thrust, and high-precision landing navigation and control technology.
I have embedded below a video that shows the take-off, parts of the flight, and landing. China hopes to fly a full scale orbital version, with a 4-meter diameter, in 2025.
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China’s yesterday successfully completed a 10K hop lasting six minutes of 3-engine launch test small-scale rocket, lifting off from its Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
Developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, the carrier rocket features a 3.8-meter diameter rocket body, powered by three 70-tonne LOX/Methane engines and equipped with a full-size landing buffer system.
The rocket achieved vertical soft landing at a fixed point through take-off, ascent and variable-thrust descent. The test fully verified the rocket’s VTOL configuration, heavy-load landing buffer technology, reusable propulsion technology with high and strong variable thrust, and high-precision landing navigation and control technology.
I have embedded below a video that shows the take-off, parts of the flight, and landing. China hopes to fly a full scale orbital version, with a 4-meter diameter, in 2025.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuses to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five ways of doing so:
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5. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
One has to give credit to the PRC for having its own legacy aerospace apparat follow the trail blazed by SpaceX – something our own legacy aerospace apparat seems singularly unwilling/unable to do.
This test was sort of a mashup of the Grasshopper-era hop testing SpaceX did a dozen years ago anent Falcon 9 reusability and the more recent hop tests of Starship prototypes. The PRC is not really catching up with SpaceX, thereby, but it is keeping rough pace with a number of U.S.-based NewSpace outfits and – sadly – leaving the U.S. legacy aerospace apparat comparably in the dust.
Dick Eagleson,
A major difference between a society that invents its own technology and one that steals it is that the thief does not fall into the “not invented here” trap.