A private Chinese rocket just suffered its second-ever failure.<\/p>\n
Galactic Energy’s solid-fuel Ceres-1 rocket<\/a> lifted off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China at 11:02 p.m. EST on Sunday (Nov. 9; 0402 GMT and 12:02 p.m. local time on Nov. 10), carrying three satellites toward low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO).<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The rocket’s first three stages performed well, according to media reports<\/a>, but its fourth and final stage shut down too early, leading to the loss of all three payloads.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n Those payloads<\/a> were two satellites for China’s Jilin-1 commercial Earth-observation constellation, as well as a craft developed by Zhongbei University.<\/p>\n “We offer our sincerest apologies to the mission’s customer and to everyone who supports Galactic Energy,” the Beijing-based company said in a statement, according to the Global Times<\/a>, an affiliate of the People’s Daily, the leading paper of the Chinese Communist Party.<\/p>\n “We will draw lessons from the mission setback and continue to optimize rocket design and quality-management systems,” the statement added.<\/p>\n The Ceres-1 stands about 62 feet (19 meters) tall and can haul 880 pounds (400 kilograms) of payload to LEO. The rocket debuted in November 2020 and flew successfully nine times in a row before suffering a failure in September 2023<\/a>.<\/p>\n The Ceres-1 bounced back from that problem, notching 11 consecutive successes before Sunday night’s setback. The rocket has now flown a total of 22 missions, with two failures.<\/p>\n Galactic Energy is thinking beyond the Ceres-1; it’s also developing the more powerful Ceres-2 and Pallas-1<\/a>, a rocket that will feature a reusable first stage like that of SpaceX’s Falcon 9<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A private Chinese rocket just suffered its second-ever failure. Galactic Energy’s solid-fuel Ceres-1 rocket lifted off from Jiuquan…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":255304,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-255303","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-space","8":"tag-science","9":"tag-space","10":"tag-uk","11":"tag-united-kingdom","12":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255303","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=255303"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/255303\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/255304"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=255303"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=255303"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=255303"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}