Galactic Energy’s Pallas-1 launches on first flight. Chinese commercial launch company Galactic Energy announced it successfully launched its first Pallas-1 rocket Monday, with future flights to attempt first stage recovery, Space News reports. The Pallas-1 is the sixth new Chinese rocket to debut this year, and the fifth with a potentially recoverable and reusable booster stage. Galactic Energy’s first rocket, the expendable, solid-fueled Ceres-1, has flown 23 times on missions carrying small satellites into low-Earth orbit. Pallas-1 is a medium-class rocket with a maximum payload capacity of about 15,400 pounds (7,000 kilograms) to low-Earth orbit.
Some doubt?… While Galactic Energy and Chinese state media heralded Monday’s launch as a success, the US Space Force had not added the Pallas-1 rocket’s upper stage or any payloads to its catalog of space objects as of late Thursday. This is highly unusual for a successful orbital launch. Jonathan McDowell, an expert tracker of spaceflight activity, noted on X that Galactic Energy has not announced the orbital altitude or inclination achieved by the Pallas-1 rocket. “I must regard success of the launch as not confirmed at this point,” McDowell wrote.
China’s Long March 6C can’t keep it together. A Chinese Long March 6C rocket upper stage has fragmented in orbit, just days after the stage delivered a seven-satellite rideshare mission, Space News reports. LeoLabs, a commercial space surveillance company, confirmed the breakup. The rocket launched on August 24, but LeoLabs’ Multi-Object Detection tool flagged the fragmentation of the rocket’s upper stage less than two days later. “We estimate tens to hundreds of fragments were generated,” LeoLabs stated in an August 28 post on social media platform X.
An unenviable track record… The good news is that the rocket’s orbit is low enough that the debris should reenter the atmosphere within a few years. The bad news is that this breakup is the latest in a series of fragmentations afflicting the Long March 6 series, most notably the Long March 6A, which uses a slightly larger-diameter second stage than the 6C. Both rockets use a single YF-115 engine powered by kerosene-liquid-oxygen propellant. The Long March 6A breakups have been especially troubling, with more than 1,200 pieces of debris cataloged by the US Space Force from two upper stages in 2022 and 2024.