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A long-running March 4 Chinese rocket failed to put its secret military charge on Wednesday after launching from the Taiyuan space base southwest of Beijing, according to the official news agency. Xinhua.
The three-story rocket took off Wednesday at 22:49 GMT (18:49 EDT), according to numerous Chinese social media posts posted by local spectators. The Long March 4C was moving south to place its satellite charge in a polar orbit a few hundred kilometers above the Earth.
But the confirmation of the launch did not come immediately from the official Chinese media, which usually announce the success of the mission soon after its completion. In addition, the catalog of space objects in orbit of the US military has not listed new spacecraft in orbit Thursday morning that could be attributed to the launch of Long March 4C.
Chinese social media publications also showed images of the Long March 4C exhausted air column in the upper atmosphere shortly after its launch, which took place at 6:49 pm Beijing time on Thursday.
China's official Xinhua news agency confirmed suspicions that the launch failed in a brief statement released on Thursday. Xinhua announced that the third stage of Long March 4C had failed, after good performances of the first and second stages of the rocket during the rise in Taiyuan space.
The failure of the 4C long walk Wednesday was the second failure of the Chinese launch this year, following the first flight of a new commercial launcher in March by OneSpace.
The Long March rocket family is developed and manufactured by state-owned companies. The last failure of a Long March rocket before Wednesday took place in July 2017, when a heavy March 5 launcher was no longer in orbit.
The most recent failure of the Long March 4C rocket variant, used on Wednesday, occurred in August 2016. The Chinese authorities have not acknowledged this accident, in which the Civil Earth Observation satellite Gaofen 10 had been lost several weeks later.
The Chinese authorities did not officially announce the launch on Wednesday in advance, but the government issued airspace warnings to pilots that a space launch would be planned from Taiyuan center in Shanxi province. , in northern China.
Information from the airspace warnings, which included the location of the drop zones for the auxiliary stages of the Long March 4C, suggested that the rocket was heading towards a solar-synchronous polar orbit a few hundred kilometers from Earth. The payload on board the rocket was the Yaogan 33, the latest in a series of Chinese military surveillance satellites.
The Yoagan spacecraft series includes satellites equipped with Earth-facing optical telescopes and radar images to collect high-resolution images for the Chinese military and intelligence services.
The March 4C rocket stolen Wednesday is propelled by three floors powered by a liquid. The rocket engines burn a mixture of hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide, and the third stage of the Long March 4C is designed to be re-lit in space.
The Long March rockets of the 4 series are built by the Shanghai Academy of Space Technologies, a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. The other versions of China's Long March rockets come from the Chinese Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, another organization headed in China's industrial apparatus.
The third step involved in the launch failure on Wednesday is only used on the Long March 4 rocket family, which could limit the impact of the accident on future missions using other Chinese launchers Long March.
Wednesday's mission was China's ninth space launch attempt this year.
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