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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.

Genesis cover

On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.

 

The print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.


The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
 

"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News

2 comments

  • Dick Eagleson

    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.

  • Edward

    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.

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