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
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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
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
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Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID 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. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
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.
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“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.