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A bird”s-eye view of the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Wenchang, Hainan province. China Daily <\/p>\n
China’s primary spaceport for heavy-lift missions set a new annual launch record in 2025, highlighting the country’s rapidly advancing high-density launch capabilities and the parallel rise of a commercial space ecosystem.<\/p>\n
The Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in South China’s Hainan province conducted its 12th launch of 2025 on Dec 31, using a Long March 7A rocket to send the Shijian 29A and 29B satellites into their preset orbit.<\/p>\n
This milestone followed another one reached on Nov 30, when the launch of a modified Long March 7 rocket marked the first time the site’s annual launch tally had reached double digits. Since its inaugural mission in 2016,Wenchang has executed 45 launches, with the rate steadily growing.<\/p>\n
The site, China’s first independently designed green, modern spaceport, operates two all-weather launchpads specializing in medium and large cryogenic-liquid rockets. Officials attribute the increased launch rate to optimized efficiency, achieved primarily by slashing rocket testing cycles on the launchpads.<\/p>\n
“Shortening the rocket’s on-pad occupation time is critical,” said Wang Yuliang, a site official.<\/p>\n
The launch cycle for the 2017 Tianzhou 1 mission was roughly 40 days. It was streamlined to more than 30 days for the 2021 Tianzhou 2 launch and cut to about 20 days for Tianzhou 4 in 2022, which also pioneered simultaneous loading of liquid oxygen and kerosene.<\/p>\n
Technicians achieved this through innovations in the process, merging tasks, eliminating redundancies and simplifying installations.<\/p>\n
Between missions, they also upgraded and maintained equipment to ensure reliability. Propellant handling efficiency has tripled by adding tankers and enabling parallel transfer operations, according to commander Fu Yihang.<\/p>\n
Experts said these refinements are key for Wenchang’s future role in national projects like crewed moon landings and deep-space exploration, which will demand higher launch rates.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A bird”s-eye view of the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Wenchang, Hainan province. China Daily China’s primary spaceport…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":253729,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[111,139,69,147,392],"class_list":["post-253728","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253728","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=253728"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/253728\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/253729"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=253728"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=253728"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=253728"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}