Chinese smallsat rocket company completes suborbital launch
iSpace, a Chinese smallsat rocket company, completed a suborbital test rocket launch today, releasing three cubesats.
The article at the link is very short and poorly written. It implies that two cubesats reached orbit, with a third returning to Earth using a parachute. This was clearly a suborbital flight
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
iSpace, a Chinese smallsat rocket company, completed a suborbital test rocket launch today, releasing three cubesats.
The article at the link is very short and poorly written. It implies that two cubesats reached orbit, with a third returning to Earth using a parachute. This was clearly a suborbital flight
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
“sub-orbital” ? Way too grandiose. Any shot that doesn’t put something into orbit is “sub-orbital”. We used call such beasts a “sounding rocket” and there’s been thousands of ’em launched since the late Forties.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sounding_rocket
And no disrespect to the Chinese, there’s several companies around the world that have made their living building sounding rockets, welcome to the club, but lets call a “spade” a “god da@# shovel”
Just how does a sub orbital rocket launch place two cube sats into orbit and at the same time drops one into re-entry with a parachute?
Did the dang thing fall apart and they only found one cube sat so they came up with this poor cover story like the old Soviet union?
I suspect that it was poor writing or poor translation by this Chinese news organization. From the article: “After entering its preset orbit, the rocket will release two satellites for testing” from a (Chinese language) statement from the company.
A suborbital flight is an orbit that intersects the Earth, so the preset orbit would have been suborbital, and the two test CubeSats, released into that preset suborbital orbit, may have merely fallen back to Earth without parachutes.
It would have been nice for the article to have said more about the flight, such as altitude, and the tests that the CubeSats did.