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Genesis cover

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Hurricane damages China’s new launch facilities at its coastal Wenchang spaceport

China's spaceports

When Typhoon Yagi (what hurricanes are called in the Asian Pacific) made landfall on September 6, 2024, carrying winds as high as 150 miles per hour, it not only caused flooding and power outages, it apparently did significant damage to China’s new launch facilities at its coastal Wenchang spaceport.

The site has two launch towers, one dedicated to servicing the state’s Long March 8 rockets, while the other services both public and private rockets, including a Long March 12 that was due to make its debut launch later this year.

On Saturday, the city’s deputy mayor, Wei Bo, said the typhoon had posed a “serious threat” to facilities and equipment at the commercial space hub but emergency restoration work was being carried out.

As is usual with China’s state-run press, few details were released, including the actual damages, both to the launch facilities and to the nearby cities.

China has been using this spaceport increasingly to support its space station as well as launch planetary probes. It has also developed a commercial launchsite there for its pseudo-private companies to use. How this damage will impact future launches remains unknown.

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One comment

  • Dick Eagleson

    U.S. space launch sites, all being coastal, this sort of thing has been an occasional nuisance here since the get-go decades back. The PRC’s veteran launch sites are all well inland, though, and not subject to damage from massive storms that sweep in from the sea. Welcome to the Coastal Launch Site Club, PRC. It’s not all beer and skittles.

    One also has to wonder how much of the purported damage at Wenchang is due to deficiencies in build quality of PRC space launch infrastructure. The PRC has long spent a great deal on infrastructure of all kinds as a way to boost its GDP, but a lot of it is apparently of questionable quality. Rail and roadway bridges have collapsed with some frequency and so have entire apartment blocks. There has even arisen a pejorative phrase to describe this type of sub-par corner-cut construction – tofu dreg, as though the stuff was built with bean curd instead of concrete.

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