BEIJING, Jan. 17 (China Space News) — China will smash its record for space launches in 2020.<\/p>\n
The country is going to send more than 60 spacecraft into orbit via over 40 launches this year, according to a plan released Friday in Beijing.<\/p>\n
“This year will continue to see intensive launches,” said Shang Zhi, director of the Space Department of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), at a press conference, where a blue book setting out China’s space achievements and future missions was released.<\/p>\n
According to Shang, there are three major missions, mainly focusing on the completion of the BeiDou-3 Navigation Satellite System, the lunar exploration and the network of Gaofen observation satellites.<\/p>\n
Two geostationary orbit BeiDou satellites will be sent into space in the first half of 2020. The Chang’e-5 lunar probe, which is expected to bring moon samples back to Earth, and China’s first Mars probe are also planned to be launched this year.<\/p>\n
In addition, three new types of carrier rockets, which are the Long March-5B, Long March-7A and Long March-8, will make their maiden flights in 2020.<\/p>\n
As a new generation of carrier rocket, the Long March-5B has the largest carrying capacity to low-Earth orbit. It will carry the core capsule and experiment capsules of China’s space station.<\/p>\n
The Long March 7A represents the new generation of China\u2019s medium-sized high-orbit rocket. The Long March-8 rocket will increase China\u2019s lift capacity for launches to sun-synchronous orbits and meet the growing needs of commercial launches.<\/p>\n
The Long March-5 rockets will be launched three times in 2020, carrying a new generation of manned spacecraft, a Mars probe and a Chang’e-5 probe into space.<\/p>\n
The CASC will also send a number of satellites for China’s civil space infrastructure system and plan a series of commercial launches this year, according to the blue book.<\/p>\n
China completed 34 space launches in 2019, ranking first in the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
BEIJING, Jan. 17 (China Space News) — China will smash its record for space launches in 2020. The country is going to send more than 60 spacecraft into orbit via over 40 launches this year, according to a plan released Friday in Beijing. “This year will continue to see intensive launches,” said Shang Zhi, director […]<\/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-3777","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777"}],"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=3777"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3777\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3777"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3777"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3777"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}