Chinese solid-fueled rocket fails during launch
The commercial division of a Chinese space agency, dubbed CAS Space, late yesterday experienced a launch failure of its solid-fueled Kinetica-1 rocket, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
A statement by the pseudo-company described the failure tersely:
We can confirm that the first two stages were nominal. Stage 3 lost attitude three seconds after ignition and the self-destructing mechanism was activated.
Nothing was said about where the first two stages crashed inside China, or whether they landed near habitable areas.
According to the first link above, this was the second launch failure by China in 2024, which is incorrect. This was the third launch failure for China (see here and here for previous two). That article also says this was the 68th total launch this year, suggesting China has completed 66 successful launches. This does not jive with my count, which presently says China has had 64 successful orbital launches this year. I suspect the two additional launched might have been suborbital tests — such as first stage hop tests (here, here, and here) — which I do not include in these totals. It also might be including the accidental launch of one first stage during a static fire test when it broke free and launched itself unintentional.
More recent information from my readers (see the comments below) suggests that, though the numbers above are not correct, my own count for China’s total successful orbital launches needs adjusting as well. I had marked a March 13th Chinese launch as a failure because the satellites were not placed in their proper orbit. However, using their thrusters engineers were eventually able to get them into place and they are operating. I have therefore increased China’s totals below by one.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
134 SpaceX
65 China
17 Russia
14 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 154 to 97, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 134 to 117.
The commercial division of a Chinese space agency, dubbed CAS Space, late yesterday experienced a launch failure of its solid-fueled Kinetica-1 rocket, lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in northwest China.
A statement by the pseudo-company described the failure tersely:
We can confirm that the first two stages were nominal. Stage 3 lost attitude three seconds after ignition and the self-destructing mechanism was activated.
Nothing was said about where the first two stages crashed inside China, or whether they landed near habitable areas.
According to the first link above, this was the second launch failure by China in 2024, which is incorrect. This was the third launch failure for China (see here and here for previous two). That article also says this was the 68th total launch this year, suggesting China has completed 66 successful launches. This does not jive with my count, which presently says China has had 64 successful orbital launches this year. I suspect the two additional launched might have been suborbital tests — such as first stage hop tests (here, here, and here) — which I do not include in these totals. It also might be including the accidental launch of one first stage during a static fire test when it broke free and launched itself unintentional.
More recent information from my readers (see the comments below) suggests that, though the numbers above are not correct, my own count for China’s total successful orbital launches needs adjusting as well. I had marked a March 13th Chinese launch as a failure because the satellites were not placed in their proper orbit. However, using their thrusters engineers were eventually able to get them into place and they are operating. I have therefore increased China’s totals below by one.
The leaders in the 2024 launch race:
134 SpaceX
65 China
17 Russia
14 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads the rest of the world combined in successful launches 154 to 97, while SpaceX by itself leads the entire world, including American companies, 134 to 117.
