China launches nine more satellites in Guowang constellation
Last night China successfully placed nine more satellites for the Guowang (or Satnet) internet-of-things constellation, its Long March 8A rocket lifting off from its Wenchang coastal spaceport, The constellation now has 128 satellites in orbit out of a planned 13,000. Though the rocket’s lower stages all fell in the ocean, some landed within the Philippines, once again requiring that government to warn its citizens to avoid the drop zones.
China’s last night also scrubbed a launch of its solid-fueled Smart Dragon-3 (also Jielong-3) rocket, set to lift off from a launch platform off the coast of northeastern China. The launch was rescheduled for December 28th. China also had a Long March 3B launched scheduled for this morning, but no news about that launch as yet been published.
The leaders in the 2025 launch race:
168 SpaceX
87 China (a new record)
18 Rocket Lab
16 Russia
SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 168 to 146.
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For whatever it’s worth, nextspaceflight.com is showing that Long March 3 scheduled for this morning as having launched and been successful. The PRC still has three more launches with specific 2025 dates attached on that website’s manifest, including the delayed one you mentioned, plus three more notional debut PRC vehicle launches for 2025 which I think are swamp gas at this point. Still, if the PRC manages to launch what it has definitely calendared for the remainder of the year, it will finish 2025 with 91 launches – absent any failures. That’s about a 30% jump over last year’s total.
Dick Eagleson: As of posting, nextspaceflight had not yet confirmed the launch. And nextspaceflight is often wrong when it too quickly says a launch has happened. I suspect I will see a report from China momentarily, and will post it later today.
Robert Zimmerman,
I, too, have not found nextspaceflight.com to be invariably accurate, and PRC launches are where most of its problems tend to be. I tend to blame the PRC for that more than the website. Transparenacy is not exactly a hallmark of PRC space ops.
Dick Eagleson: I agree absolutely. It is the lack of a free press in China that makes things hard.
Note also that as of now, there has been no confirmation by China of that launch. And until I get some real evidence, it doesn’t go on the list.
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