According to a private business, their commercial Chinese rocket misfired during a ground test on Sunday, ascending into the air before colliding with a mountain and bursting into flames.
Owned by Space Pioneer, the Tianlong-3 rocket took off from its launchpad after separating from its testing platform due to a “structural failure” during the testing of its propulsion system. According to the statement, a test facility in Gongyi City, Henan Province, central China, was the site of the disaster at 3:43 p.m. local time on Sunday.
According to the statement, the rocket descended into a mountainous region around one mile from the test site after its automated computer shut down following launch. No one was hurt. The crash location was far from any residential areas, and the business had coordinated with local authorities to evacuate neighboring regions prior to the test.
According to a social media post from the Gongyi local administration, the rocket was seen ascending before it lost power and plummeted. Its bursting in flames caused a brush fire, which was extinguished by Sunday evening.
Astrophysicist Brad Tucker of Australia’s National University examined footage of the disaster and concluded that it happened during a static fire test, in which the rocket is held firmly to the ground while its engines are lit as if to lift off. While most firms execute the test with the rocket horizontally, he mentioned that SpaceX is one of few that has done it vertically and that it was a relatively regular test.
The only other incident of this kind that Dr. Tucker was aware of was in 1952 when a U.S. Viking 8 rocket landed five miles away in the desert after breaking loose during a static fire test.
Dr. Tucker stated that multiple things probably would have had to go wrong for this failure to happen the way it did and went on to say that while China’s national space program was sophisticated, the country’s commercial space industry was still in its early stages.
The private sector has grown substantially in the past few years, coinciding with the government’s increased interest in space exploration. The Chinese government’s annual work report, the most critical policy document describing the government’s objectives for the year, included commercial spaceflight for the first time as a developing industry to be aggressively promoted.
