![\"ZQ-3](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/12\/6b6f5456-ea4f-41ed-b613-b5d79fd6a302.jpeg\")
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ZQ-3 Y1 rocket took off for maiden flight from the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone at noon time on December 3, 2025. Photo: courtesy of LandSpace<\/p>\n
The maiden flight of the ZQ-3 Y1 rocket, developed by Chinese commercial aerospace company LandSpace, successfully reached its designated orbit; however, abnormal combustion occurred during the process, preventing a soft landing of the first stage on the recovery pad, the Xinhua News Agency reported on Wednesday afternoon.<\/p>\n
The rocket lifted off from the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone around noon on Wednesday. Further analysis and investigation into the recovery test failure are underway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Although this mission did not achieve the planned first-stage recovery objective, it successfully validated the correctness and rationality of the overall ZQ-3 carrier rocket test, launch, and flight process schemes, as well as the compatibility of interfaces across all systems, per Xinhua. The flight provided critical engineering data under real flight conditions, laying an important foundation for subsequent launch services and reliable, reusable first-stage recovery.<\/p>\n
It is reported that the development team will promptly conduct a comprehensive review and technical close-out of this test process, thoroughly identify the root cause of the failure, continuously optimize the recovery solution, and continue advancing reusable verification in follow-up missions.<\/p>\n
The two-stage ZQ-3 features a 4.5-meter-diameter core for both stages, a 5.2-meter fairing, stands 66.1 meters tall, and has a liftoff mass of approximately 570 tons with more than 750 tons of thrust. The company positions the rocket as a high-payload, low-cost, reusable solution to meet the growing demand for mega-constellation launches, according to the commercial firm.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
Global Times\u00a0 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"ZQ-3 Y1 rocket took off for maiden flight from the Dongfeng Commercial Aerospace Innovation Test Zone at noon…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":324784,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":{"0":"post-324783","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-au","9":"tag-australia","10":"tag-science","11":"tag-space"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=324783"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/324783\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/324784"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=324783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=324783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=324783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}