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China Suffers its Second Launch Failure in Less Than a Month

posted by Fnord666 on Friday April 10 2020, @03:12AM   Printer-friendly
from the expensive-fireball dept.
Hardware

Freeman writes:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/04/china-suffers-its-second-launch-failure-in-less-than-a-month/

The Long March 3B rocket is one of China's oldest active and most reliable boosters, with more than five dozen successful launches. On Thursday, however, the rocket failed when it attempted to launch an Indonesian telecommunications satellite, Nusantara Dua, from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center.

Although ground-based observations showed the first and second stages of the rocket performing nominally, apparently something went wrong with the final stage needed for a boost into geostationary transfer orbit. Chinese media reports indicate that the third stage failed due to unspecified reasons and that the 5.5-ton satellite fell back into Earth's atmosphere.

From a comment on the arstechnica article:
https://twitter.com/sybil_ms/status/1248253670476546048 (Picture of a fireball falling from the sky.)

Residents on Guam and Saipan heard a loud explosion and then debris falling from the sky. Homeland Security said it's the March 3B. Here is some video of what was seen pic.twitter.com/JqwWIK5Uxk
        — Ms Sybil Ludington (@sybil_ms) April 9, 2020

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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @11:27AM (4 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @11:27AM (#980782)

    The Chinese Communist Party is perfect and it is racist and stigmatizing to call their non-success a failure. As Nature explains: [nature.com]

    When the World Health Organization (WHO) announced in February that the disease caused by the new coronavirus would be called COVID‑19, the name was quickly adopted by organizations involved in communicating public-health information. As well as naming the illness, the WHO was implicitly sending a reminder to those who had erroneously been associating the virus with Wuhan and with China in their news coverage— including Nature. That we did so was an error on our part, for which we take responsibility and apologize.

    For years, it was common for viral diseases to be associated with the landscapes, places or regions where the first outbreaks occurred — as in Middle East respiratory syndrome, or Zika virus, named after a forest in Uganda. But in 2015, the WHO introduced guidelines to stop this practice and thereby reduce stigma and negative impacts such as fear or anger directed towards those regions or their people. The guidelines underlined the point that viruses infect all humans: when an outbreak happens, everyone is at risk, regardless of who they are or where they are from.

  • (Score: 2) by DannyB on Friday April 10 2020, @04:28PM

    by DannyB (5839) Subscriber Badge on Friday April 10 2020, @04:28PM (#980850) Journal

    Would it violate the laws of physics for rockets to be able to fail due to rocket worker dissatisfaction?

    --
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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @05:58PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 10 2020, @05:58PM (#980873)

    If you count their launch of coronavirus.

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