China today successfully used its Long March 2C rocket to put two Earth observation satellites into orbit.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
30 SpaceX
23 China
9 Russia
5 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 43 to 23 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 43 to 39.
Using its Long March 3B rocket, China today launched the third satellite in the second generation of communication satellites used by its space program.
All told China now has seven satellites in this constellation, giving it a great deal of redundancy.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
29 SpaceX
22 China
9 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
4 ULA
American private enterprise still leads China 41 to 22 in the national rankings, and the entire world 41 to 37.
The new colonial movement: China’s state-run press today announced the ground-breaking of a spaceport on the southern island of Hainan that will be dedicated to launches by that country’s pseudo-commercial companies.
The location is in Wenchang City, the same location of the country’s Wenchang spaceport used to launch government’s newest Long March rockets. While it isn’t clear from the Chinese news report, this new facility is likely at the same location.
Though China touts this as a commercial facility for private commercial launch companies, everything in China is still controlled and owned by the government. Nothing will happen at this new site that China’s military does not approve.
On July 2, 2022, in an interview for a German news outlet, NASA administrator described in somewhat overbroad terms the long range goals of the Chinese space program.
“We must be very concerned that China is landing on the moon and saying: ‘It’s ours now and you stay out,’” Mr. Nelson said in an interview published Saturday in the German newspaper Bild.
….China’s space program, at its heart, is a military space program, Mr. Nelson said. “China is good. But China is also good because they steal ideas and technology from others,” he said, according to Bild.
A China spokesman for its Foreign Ministry, Zhao Lijian, immediately slammed Nelson’s comments, adding some of his own overbroad accusations against the U.S.
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Two launches this morning herald the upcoming busy launch schedule for the last few days of June.
First China launched from its Jiuquan interior spaceport an Earth observation satellite using its Long March 4C rocket. As is usual with China, the first stage crashed on land, though no details have been provided.
Next, Rocket Lab used its Electron rocket to send NASA’s CAPSTONE cubesat lunar probe on its way to the Moon. More information here.
CAPSTONE is currently in low-Earth orbit, and it will take the spacecraft about four months to reach its targeted lunar orbit.
…CAPSTONE is attached to Rocket Lab’s Lunar Photon, an interplanetary third stage that will send CAPSTONE on its way to deep space. Shortly after launch, Lunar Photon separated from Electron’s second stage. Over the next six days, Photon’s engine will periodically ignite to accelerate it beyond low-Earth orbit, where Photon will release the CubeSat on a ballistic lunar transfer trajectory to the Moon. CAPSTONE will then use its own propulsion and the Sun’s gravity to navigate the rest of the way to the Moon. The gravity-driven track will dramatically reduce the amount of fuel the CubeSat needs to get to the Moon.
Once at the Moon, the spacecraft will enter a polar orbit varying from 1000 to 43,500 miles from the surface, with its prime mission to test operations in that lunar orbit.
Not only did NASA hire a private company, Rocket Lab, to launch it, the agency also hired a private company, Terran Orbital, to build it.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
26 SpaceX
21 China
8 Russia
4 Rocket Lab
American private enterprise still leads China 36 to 21 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 36 to 34.
For the rest of June, the American companies SpaceX, Virgin Orbit, and ULA all have planned launches, as well as India. If all succeed, that would put the total launches in the first half of ’22 at 74, a pace that would almost reach 150 launches by the end of the year, smashing the annual record set last year. The U.S.’s pace in turn is likely to exceed the number of launches it completed in all of ’22 in July, with the possibility it could complete 75-80 launches by the end of the year, exceeding the U.S. annual record of 70 set in 1966.
According to a tweet from a Twitter account that specializes in reporting on the Chinese space program, at least one piece of the upper stage from the Long March 2F rocket that launched the present Tiangon space station crew on the Shenzhou-14 crashed into the middle of Mediterranean Sea when the stage’s orbit decayed.
Most parts burned during the reentry while small debris splashed in Mediterranean Sea around E5.2° N39.1°
According to both this Twitter site as well as the Aerospace Corporation’s re-entry site, the event occurred on June 20, 2022. The latter site however says the stage burned up over the Atlantic, though it also indicated a one hour margin of error both before or after that time. If the stage thus stayed up just a bit longer, its orbit would have brought it down exactly where the former site states.
If this is so, it indicates that the Chinese either could not or made no effort to control the de-orbit, something that should be standard for any upper stage that has mass that could hit the ground.
Hat tip from reader Jay.
The science team for Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) today released images identifying the location on the Moon where a mystery rocket stage crashed in March 2022.
The image to the right shows the before and after LRO images, with the impact at the center of the second photo, showing as two superimposed craters. Since the sunlight in the second image come from the opposition direction as the first, the shadows in all previously existing craters are reversed.
Surprisingly the crater is actually two craters, an eastern crater [59 feet diameter] superimposed on a western crater [52 feet diameter]. The double crater was unexpected and may indicate that the rocket body had large masses at each end. Typically a spent rocket has mass concentrated at the motor end; the rest of the rocket stage mainly consists of an empty fuel tank. Since the origin of the rocket body remains uncertain, the double nature of the crater may help to indicate its identity.
No other rocket body impacts on the Moon created double craters. The four Apollo SIV-B craters were somewhat irregular in outline (Apollos 13, 14, 15, 17) and were substantially larger [>115 feet in diameter] than each of the double craters. The maximum width [95 feet] of the double crater of the mystery rocket body was near that of the S-IVBs.
Though the evidence strongly points to this stage being from China, that fact is not certain, and China denies that conclusion.
Regardless, the unexpected double nature of the impact only increases the mystery, as it suggests that rocket stage had a mass distribution different than past stages.
In the past 24 hours both Europe and China successfully completed launches.
First Arianespace’s Ariane-5 rocket yesterday launched two commercial communications satellites, for Malaysia and India. With this flight the Ariane-5 rocket has only four flights to go before it is retired and replaced with ArianeGroup’s not-yet flown Ariane-6 rocket.
Then, China today used its Long March 2D rocket to launch three remote-sensing satellites.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
26 SpaceX
20 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA
2 Europe (Arianespace)
The U.S. still leads China 35 to 20 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 33.
China today used its smallsat solid rocket Kuaizhou-1A to put a technology test satellite into orbit.
The Kuaizhou-1A rocket is not the same as the Kuaizhou-11 rocket, which some have speculated exploded during a static fire test in the fall of ’21. Both are part of a family of rockets designed for fast launch.
The leaders in the 2022 launch race:
26 SpaceX
19 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA
The U.S. still leads China 35 to 19 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 35 to 31.
Click for full image.
Using orbital images, an amateur space observer has detected evidence that an explosion had occurred at the Chinese Jiuquan spaceport some time in October 2021.
Evidence of the explosion was discovered by space enthusiast Harry Stranger using imagery from Airbus and CNES and posted on Twitter June 10.
The incident occurred at facilities constructed around 16 kilometers to the southwest of Jiuquan’s two main launch complexes. The pair of launch pads are used by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) for hypergolic Long March rocket launches for human spaceflight, civil, military and scientific missions and were unaffected by the blast.
…Further satellite imagery from Planet’s Super Dove satellites seen by SpaceNews indicates that the explosion occurred between 0316 UTC on Oct. 15 and 0407 UTC Oct. 16 (11:16 p.m, Oct. 14 and 12:07 a.m. October 16 Eastern).
At almost exactly the same time China had launched a manned mission from this same spaceport, so the explosion apparently was not related to that launch. Instead, the images suggest that this was related to testing of solid rockets, and could be related as well to the delay in any further launches of the Kuaizhou-11 rocket. According to a press release several months earlier, that rocket was being prepared for a launch by the end of 2021, but no such launch ever occurred.
The uncertainty of science: Using their large FAST radio telescope, Chinese scientists revealed this week that they have detected a new fast radio burst (FRB) whose behavior and location does not fit the present tentative theories for explaining these mysterious deep space objects.
The FRB was an exception from the beginning as it flared again and again in observations recorded by the Five-hundred-meter Aperture Spherical radio Telescope (FAST), which nestles among the hills of China’s Guizhou province. The multiple flares put the source among the few percent of FRBs that repeat. But unlike most repeaters, this one doesn’t have any apparent cycle of bursting and quiescence.
“FRB 20190520B is the only persistently repeating fast radio burst known so far, meaning that it has not been seen to turn off,” Li says.
In addition, whatever made the FRB is also emitting a constant buzz of radio waves. Astronomers have found an association with a persistent radio source in only two other FRBs, and for one of these the low-level radio waves seem to come from ongoing star formation in the host galaxy. For FRB 20190520B, though, the radio source is far more compact, and Li’s team thinks the radio waves probably come from the FRB source itself.
The data also suggests the location does not fit the theories, and even suggests that FRBs might not all come from magnetars, as presently proposed.
The U.S. State Department yesterday announced that France has become the twentieth nation to sign the Artemis Accords.
The full list of signatories so far: Australia, Bahrain, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, France, Israel, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, the United Arab Emirates, the Ukraine, and the United States.
France’s signing is a major breakthrough, as both it and Germany, major players in the European Space Agency, have appeared to resist signing on because to do so would have limited their ability to partner with Russia on space projects (Russia opposes the accords). The Ukraine War has apparently ended France’s resistance. It no longer has any partnerships with Russia, and is not likely to form any new ones in the near future.
We should expect Germany to sign on in the near future as well.
As I wrote in May, the future factions in space are now becoming clearer. On one side we have the American Alliance, signers of the accords who support private property. On the other we have Russia and China, who oppose the accords because they also oppose private property.
In May I also included a third faction, made up of non-aligned space powers. That faction now appears to be fading away, though it still includes Germany and India.
