On Sunday, Chinese state media Xinhua News revealed that the launch of China’s powerful Long March-5 Y2 rocket has failed. This rocket was designed to take heavy communication satellites into orbit.
About 40 minutes after the lift-off, Xinhua news said that the launch was a failure, without giving any further details.
“Abnormity was detected during the flight of the rocket,” the Xinhua news agency reported.
“Further investigation will be carried out,” the report added.
The lift-off of Long March-5 Y2 occurred at 7:23 pm (1123 GMT) on Sunday. The rocket was launched from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in the tropical island province of Hainan, and it was carrying Shijian-18 experimental communications satellite with it.
The Long March-5 is China’s second heavy-lift rocket with carrying capacity of 25 tonnes of weight. It is 57 meters tall and 5 meters in diameter. It was originally announced in 2001, but the project suffered delays because of financial challenges. The first launch of Long March-5 was successfully accomplished by China in November 2016 from the same Wenchang center. In May this year, the Long March-4B had successfully carried with it an X-ray space telescope that would study black holes, pulsars and gamma-ray bursts in the universe.
The failure of Long March-5 rocket simply means delay in China’s space endeavors—including its lunar and Mars missions.
“With the LM-5 being new technology, the failure points out that rocket science is extremely difficult and why more countries don’t have the technology,” CNN cited Joan Johnson-Freese, a professor at the US Naval War College, as saying.
According to Johnson-Freese, a successful launch of the rocket would have given China “heavy lift capabilities” required to reach interplanetary destinations.
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