On December 27th, 2024 China made its 68th and last launch attempt of the year. A Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1) rocket was launched at 01:03 UTC from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Gansu Province.
The initial launch of the solid propelled rocket went well as the first and second stage performed as expected. The third stage lost attitude three seconds after its ignition however, and the self-destruction was triggered to destroy the launcher. Chinese commercial rocket firm CAS Space, which developed the rocket, is investigating the mishap. Some form of attitude instability is a likely cause.
The Kinetica carried eleven satellites on this 6th launch of the rocket, all of them Chinese with the exception of one French spacecraft. The target orbit was Sun-synchronous. The most important payload was Liangxi, also called DEAR 3 (Discovery Exploration Advanced Recovery). It was a prototype recoverable science experiment spacecraft built by AZSPACE. The French satellite was a 2U cubesat called CASAA-Sat, designed by the Université d’Aix-Marseille. One of the missions of this small satellite was to characterize the Magnetic Anomaly of the South Atlantic.
Kinetica-1 is a four-stage solid-propellant launch vehicle with a height of 30 m and a 2.65 m diameter. It weighs 135 metric tonnes at lift-off. So far all of it missions targeted a Sun-synchronous orbit, to which it can launch a payload of 1.5 metric tonnes. The first five launches, between July 2022 and November 2024, were all successful.
Jan 08