Comments on: Chinese smallsat rocket company completes suborbital launch

By: Edward

Edward — Thu, 06 Sep 2018 00:59:46 +0000

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.

By: pzatchok

pzatchok — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 17:53:56 +0000

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?

By: Col Beausabre

Col Beausabre — Wed, 05 Sep 2018 16:52:15 +0000

“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”