Tag: Long March 5

Using its most powerful rocket, the Long March 5, China today placed in orbit what its state-run press called a “communication technology test satellite”, the rocket lifting off from China’s coastal Wenchang spaceport.

Though the rocket’s flight path over the ocean meant its lower stages would not crash on land, China did warn the Philippines that some of the drop zones were within its fishing regions, and that fishermen should stay out for about an hour this morning.

China’s state-run press provided no details about the satellite. That it needed a very powerful rocket suggests it is some variation of AST SpaceMobile’s very large Bluebird satellites for providing direct phone-to-satellite service. If so, this is just another example of China copying the work of a private company in the west.

The leaders in the 2025 launch race:

136 SpaceX
64 China
13 Russia
13 Rocket Lab

SpaceX still leads the rest of the world in successful launches, 136 to 105.

An article in the English Chinese press today about the upcoming third launch of China’s Long March 5 rocket revealed some new information about the failures of that rocket during its first two test flights.

On its maiden mission in November 2016, the rocket failed to reach the speed required for the early phase of the flight; still, extra booster fuel burned in the final stage lifted its satellite cargo into orbit and allowed China to declare the trip a success.

In the second flight a few months later, though, the main engine died minutes after take-off, and the rocket plunged into the sea.

I have tried to read every iota of information released about the first two launches of the Long March 5 in order to figure out what went wrong during its second launch. At no time however had I ever come across any report that described any launch problems during its first flight. The Chinese always touted that first flight as a complete success, with no problems.

We now learn that the first stage during that first launch was under-powered, a problem that was not dealt with before the second launch, resulting in the complete failure of that second launch.

This is the typical behavior one sees in a government-run top-down program. Rather than bluntly address problems to fix them, even if it means someone will be embarrassed, management acts to protect itself, hiding problems so as to avoid blame. The result is always more failures.

As long as China’s economy is booming and providing its government with lots of cash for its space program, such problems can be papered over and even overcome. The second however that economy begins to falter, the program will stumble, the hidden problems acting like an avalanche to overwhelm everything.

The next launch of China’s largest rocket, the Long March 5, has now been delayed another six months until July.

The second Long March-5 rocket was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in the southern province of Hainan on July 2, 2017, but a malfunction happened less than six minutes after its liftoff.

In October the Chinese had predicted this launch would occur in January, so this new schedule represents a six month delay. This further delay also confirms to me that their problem in 2017, which the Chinese have never fully explained other to say it caused damage to a turbopump in one first stage engine, resulted from a fundamental design flaw in the rocket’s first stage engines, requiring major reworking.

This delay also delays the launch of the first module of their space station, as well as their first sample return mission to the Moon.

The new colonial movement: China has begun the assembly of the third Long March 5 rocket for its next launch, now set for January 2019.

The article provides the most detailed information yet released about the failure during the rocket’s second launch:

The cause was determined to be damage to the turbopump on one of the two cryogenic YF-77 first stage engines, prompting a redesign of the structure and test-firing in Xi’an.

This is still somewhat vague, though it does confirm that the rocket engine needed a redesign.

Should this January 2019 launch go well, it will allow China to move forward on all of its ambitious space exploration plans, including the building of its own space station, numerous robotic missions to the Moon and Mars, followed eventually with manned missions to the Moon.

There are indications in the Chinese press that suggest the next launch of China’s largest rocket, the Long March 5, will be delayed from its present November launch into 2019.

An online report by People’s Liberation Army Daily, a military newspaper, reports Lin Xiqiang, deputy director of the China Manned Space Engineering Office (CMSEO), as saying at a press conference in Beijing on Wednesday that the Long March 5B will not make its planned test launch in the first half of 2019.

“Due to the failure of the launch of the Long March 5 remote launch vehicle, the first flight of the Long March 5B carrier rocket will be postponed. The specific implementation time needs to be clarified after coordination with relevant departments,” Xiqiang said.

The November launch was to put up a test communications satellite. Should it slip into 2019, this would likely also cause delays in the launch of China’s first lunar sample return mission, Chang’e-5 (originally scheduled for 2017), the launch of China’s first Mars planetary mission in 2020, and finally the launch of the first module of China’s space station, also set for 2020.

All this once again indicates that the problems with Long March 5 were very serious, and might not yet have been addressed, even with a redesign of its engines.

In a report released yesterday China finally revealed that a turbo pump design issue in one of Long March 5’s two first stage engines caused that rocket’s launch failure in July.

The State Administration for Science, Technology and Industry for National Defense (SASTIND), which oversees China’s space activities, released a report April 16 attributing the failure to a turbopump on one of two liquid-oxygen and hydrogen YF-77 engines powering the rocket’s first stage. The turbopump’s exhaust structure, according to SASTIND, failed while under “complex thermal conditions.”

Redesigned YF-77 engines have already been through hot fire testing at a site in a ravine near Xi’an in north China. The tests have verified the effectiveness of the measures taken, according to the report.

Unfortunately, the report is in Chinese, so I can’t read it. It does appear that the problem was a difficult one that required an engine redesign. That they have solved it is demonstrated by the release of this report. China’s space program functions like the old Soviet Union’s. Details about serious problems were only released, if at all, once the program had successfully overcome them