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posted by janrinok on Monday September 21 2015, @07:33AM   Printer-friendly

China has successfully conducted the debut launch of its Long March-6 (Chang Zheng-6) rocket:

China initiated a new era in its space exploration with the debut of a new family of launch vehicle. The first Long March-6 (Chang Zheng-6) rocket was successfully launched from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, with a multi-payload cargo of 20 small satellites. Launch took place at 23:01:14.331 UTC on Saturday.

[...] The core stage consists of a single 120t-thrust YF-100 engine that burns oxygen and kerosene (LOX/Kerosene) propellant, which causes less pollution compared to the UDMH/N2O4 (nitrogen tetroxide) propellant currently in use. The Long March-6 is designed for small-load launch missions, with a sun-synchronous orbit (700km SSO) capability of 1,080 kg.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by gman003 on Monday September 21 2015, @02:18PM

    by gman003 (4155) on Monday September 21 2015, @02:18PM (#239350)

    In the time it took China to design this rocket (2001-2015), SpaceX was founded and went through at least two rocket designs (three, if you count v1.0 and v1.1 separately). And yes, Falcon 9 is completely comparable to this rocket - China's only announced this thing's payload to Sun-Synchronous Orbit, a pretty uncommon target, but there are Falcon 9 SSO-bound missions about 50% heavier than LM6's advertised max.

    Yeah, not really buying the whole "China is doing space better than us" angle.

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