China just broke its single-year launch record \u2014 and with nearly two months left in 2025.<\/p>\n
Four Chinese rockets<\/a> lifted off over the weekend, taking the nation’s total number of orbital missions this year to 72. The previous record, set last year, was 68<\/a>.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Two of this weekend’s launches were performed by Long March<\/a> rockets, venerable vehicles operated by the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation.<\/p>\n You may like<\/p>\n On Saturday afternoon (Nov. 8) U.S. Eastern time, a Long March 11H lofted three Shiyan-32 satellites, mysterious craft that will be used to test space-based technologies, according to Chinese media reports<\/a>.<\/p>\n Then, on Sunday night (Nov. 9), a Long March 12 launched a batch of broadband satellites for the SatNet megaconstellation in low Earth orbit<\/a> (LEO), which will eventually harbor 13,000 satellites, if all goes according to plan.<\/p>\n The other two Chinese launches this weekend were conducted by private rockets \u2014 CAS Space’s Kinetica-1 and Galactic Energy’s Ceres-1.<\/p>\n The Kinetica-1, also known as Lijian-1, sent two Earth-observing test satellites to LEO on Saturday as planned. But Ceres-1, which launched on Sunday night, had problems: Its upper stage suffered an anomaly, resulting in the loss of all three satellites on board<\/a>.<\/p>\n However, China is not the global launch leader in 2025; that distinction goes to the United States, which has conducted more than 150 orbital liftoffs<\/a> so far this year.<\/p>\n The vast majority of those launches have been performed by a single rocket \u2014 SpaceX’s Falcon 9,<\/a> which has flown 143 times in 2025 already. More than 100 of those missions have been devoted to building out Starlink<\/a>, SpaceX’s huge and ever-growing broadband constellation in LEO.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China just broke its single-year launch record \u2014 and with nearly two months left in 2025. Four Chinese…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":256014,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[90,416,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-256013","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\/256013","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=256013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/256013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/256014"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=256013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=256013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=256013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}