Module return marks rocket success
Print Edition
A RE-ENTRY module launched onboard carrier rocket Long March-7 on Saturday touched down successfully yesterday afternoon in a landing area in north China.
Officials in charge of China’s manned space engineering said it landed in Badain Jaran Desert in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region at 3:41pm.
Recovery of the module laid a solid foundation for technological breakthroughs in designing future manned spacecraft, officials said. It also means the Long March-7 fulfilled all the objectives of its maiden flight.
Tang Yagang, an official with China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, said the mission tested the core technologies of future manned spacecraft in orbit.
Tang, who works for the Long March-7 project, said future re-entry modules would be able to stay longer in orbit and carry more people.
The new-generation carrier rocket had taken off from the Wenchang space launch center in south China’s Hainan Province.
Its payload separated from the rocket 10 minutes after lift-off, and entered an oval orbit of 200-394 kilometers above the Earth.
The module was a scaled-down version of “a re-entry module of a multi-function spacecraft,” said Wu Ping, a deputy director with China’s manned space program.
Wu said data collected from the re-entry experiment will help with future research on a new generation of manned spacecraft.
The launch was also the first from the Wenchang site, and the 230th of the Long March family.
The mission was to verify the design and performance of the new carrier rocket, to evaluate the Wenchang site, and to check coordination and compatibility of project-related systems.
The Long March-7 is a medium-sized, two-stage rocket that can carry up to 13.5 tons of payload to low-Earth orbit, 1.5 times as much as the country’s current launch vehicles. “The more our rockets can lift, the farther we can venture into space,” said Ma Zhonghui, its chief designer.
“Long March-7’s maiden flight will greatly lift up China’s comprehensive space capacity, and give the country a hefty boost in building itself into a space power,” he said.
Also onboard the Long March-7 rocket were an Aolong-1 space debris clearer, two Tiange data relay spacecraft, a CubeSat designed to study the Earth’s gravitational field and space radiation, and a space refueling device that could be used to resupply satellites and space stations.
After they separated from the rocket, they were carried into different orbits on upgraded “space shuttle bus” Yuanzheng-1A.
Saturday’s launch marked a key step toward China’s plan to operate a permanent space station in the final step of the country’s three-phase manned space program.
The country launched its first manned spaceflight in 2003, and its first space lab, Tiangong-1, in 2011. The final step will be to assemble and operate a 60-ton space station around 2022.
To do that, engineers have planned four space launches before next April, of which the Long March-7 mission was the first.
A second mission in late September will put the Tiangong-2 space lab into orbit, and the third one will see the Shenzhou-11 spacecraft, carrying two astronauts, dock with Tiangong-2 in October.
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