Chinese private launch firm Landspace successfully placed six satellites into orbit on May 17, marking the fifth flight of its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket and continuing a sharp uptick in China\u2019s orbital activity this year.<\/p>\n
The Zhuque-2E lifted off at 12:12 a.m. Eastern (0412 UTC) from a dedicated commercial pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China. The rocket carried six Tianyi satellites for commercial manufacturer Spacety, designed for a range of remote sensing and scientific purposes, including synthetic aperture radar (SAR), optical imagery, and space environment research.<\/p>\n
Among the payloads were Tianyi-42 for C-band SAR imaging, Tianyi-29 and 35 for optical remote sensing, and Tianyi-34, 45, and 46 for space science missions. Tianyi-45 is part of the university-led Tiansuan constellation and uses argon ion thrusters for end-of-life deorbiting, while Tianyi-34 carries instruments to study gamma-ray bursts, X-ray polarization, and auroras.<\/p>\n
https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=PWREP0gzTyQ<\/p>\n
The launch marked the second flight of the enhanced Zhuque-2E variant, following its debut in November 2024. The rocket, now equipped with an upgraded 4.2-meter-wide composite payload fairing, features improved Tianque-12A engines on the first stage and a Tianque-15A engine with an extended niobium-tungsten alloy nozzle on the second. Landspace also implemented real-time wind correction trajectory technology, claimed as a domestic first.<\/p>\n
The 47.3-meter-long, 3.35-meter-diameter rocket is capable of delivering up to 4,000 kilograms to a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit. Since its maiden flight in December 2022\u2014an unsuccessful attempt\u2014Zhuque-2 has made four successful launches, including its historic second flight in July 2023, the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit globally.<\/p>\n
Landspace is concurrently developing the much larger Zhuque-3 methalox launcher, a two-stage rocket made from stainless steel. Designed to deliver up to 21,000 kilograms to low Earth orbit in an expendable configuration, Zhuque-3 stands 76.6 meters tall with a 4.5-meter core diameter. The company completed system integration testing in April and is preparing for static fire tests as early as June.<\/p>\n
Footage from Saturday\u2019s launch showed construction and support infrastructure for the Zhuque-3 at the Dongfeng site, including a visible flame stack used for fuel venting.<\/p>\n
This mission was China\u2019s 27th orbital launch of 2025 and part of a recent surge in activity that includes missions from both state and private actors. It follows recent launches of TJS-19 via Long March 3C, Yaogan-40 (02) aboard a Long March 6A, and 12 on-orbit computing satellites on a Long March 2D.<\/p>\n
Further missions are scheduled in rapid succession: a Ceres-1 sea launch on May 19, a Long March 7A from Wenchang on May 20, a Kinetica-1 from Jiuquan on May 21, and the Tianwen-2 asteroid and comet sample return mission between May 28 and 30.<\/p><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Chinese private launch firm Landspace successfully placed six satellites into orbit on May 17, marking the fifth flight of its methane-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket and continuing a sharp uptick in China\u2019s orbital activity this year. The Zhuque-2E lifted off at 12:12 a.m. Eastern (0412 UTC) from a dedicated commercial pad at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":20789,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[135,237,1843,20],"class_list":["post-20787","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-china","tag-landspace","tag-long-march-7a","tag-satellite"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20787"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20787"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20787\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20789"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20787"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20787"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20787"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}