WENCHANG, Hainan, May 5 (Xinhua) — Construction of China’s space station moves a step closer with the successful maiden flight of its new large carrier rocket, the Long March-5B, on Tuesday.<\/p>\n
The Long March-5B is about 53.7 meters long, with a 5-meter-diameter core stage and four 3.35-meter-diameter boosters.<\/p>\n
The rocket uses environment-friendly fuel, including liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen and kerosene. It has a takeoff mass of about 849 tonnes and a takeoff thrust of about 1,078 tonnes.<\/p>\n
Compared with the Long March-5, the Long March-5B has one less core stage but a larger fairing, which is 20.5 meters long and 5.2 meters in diameter, as tall as a six-floor building, and nearly eight meters longer than the fairing of Long March-5.<\/p>\n
The Long March-5 rocket will be mainly used for launching large satellites to high-Earth orbit and deep-space probes such as the Chang’e-5 lunar probe and the Mars probe. The Long March-5B rocket will mostly carry capsules of China’s space station and large spacecraft to low-Earth orbit.<\/p>\n
The Long March-5B rocket has increased China’s payload carrying capacity to low-Earth orbit from about 14 tonnes to 22 tonnes, equivalent to the carrying capacity of leading launch vehicles around the world.<\/p>\n
With the largest payload capacity of China’s current carrier rockets, the Long March-5B enables the launch of large spacecraft. For instance, each module of China’s space station will be over 20 tonnes, and can only be carried into space by the new rocket.<\/p>\n
The research team spent almost 10 years developing the new rocket, making breakthroughs in a series of key technologies, said the rocket’s chief designer Li Dong.<\/p>\n
The Long March-5B has the largest fairing of China’s carrier rockets, specially designed to carry the space station modules. A rotary separation scheme ensures the fairing can separate from the payloads safely in space.<\/p>\n
To meet the requirements of rendezvous and docking of the modules, the Long March-5B rocket needs to be launched within a “zero window”, which means its launch time error should be less than a second, said Li.<\/p>\n
With only one core stage and four boosters, the Long March-5B has a simpler structure and higher reliability than multi-stage rockets. However, it is required to send payloads directly into orbit, which is like a high-speed train suddenly braking and stopping stably at a designated position.<\/p>\n
So the research team equipped the rocket with advanced guidance, navigation and control technologies to continuously adjust its trajectory, Li said.<\/p>\n
The development of the new carrier rocket also helps lay the foundation for the research and development of China’s heavy-lift launch vehicle, Li added.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
WENCHANG, Hainan, May 5 (Xinhua) — Construction of China’s space station moves a step closer with the successful maiden flight of its new large carrier rocket, the Long March-5B, on Tuesday. The Long March-5B is about 53.7 meters long, with a 5-meter-diameter core stage and four 3.35-meter-diameter boosters. The rocket uses environment-friendly fuel, including liquid […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"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":[],"class_list":["post-3760","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3760"}],"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=3760"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3760\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3760"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3760"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3760"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}