Chinese startup launches rocket
A SUBORBITAL rocket was launched into space yesterday by a startup in China’s burgeoning commercial aeronautics industry, as private firms snap at the heels of their dominant American rivals.
OneSpace, the Beijing-based company behind the launch, is one of dozens of Chinese rivals jostling for a slice of the global space industry, estimated to be worth about US$339 billion by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and currently dominated by SpaceX and Blue Origin in the United States.
Its 9-meter Chongqing Liangjiang Star rocket took off from an undisclosed test field in China’s northwest and reached an altitude of 273 kilometers before falling back to Earth, the company said.
The launch aimed to demonstrate an early working model of the company’s OS-X series of rockets, designed to conduct research linked to suborbital flights.
By the end of the decade, OneSpace expects to build 20 of the OS-X rockets, capable of placing a 100-kilogram payload into an orbit 800km from the Earth’s surface, the company said.
The firm is also developing the M-series rocket to compete in the growing microsatellite sector.
These small satellites are typically no larger than a shoebox and are used to monitor crops, weather patterns or disaster sites, or used by universities for research purposes, according to Jonathan McDowell, an astronomer at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
Microsatellites are cheaper to build and easier to deploy than traditional truck-sized versions, and their launch has become increasingly an lucrative market, currently dominated by the Indian space program.
Chinese aerospace startups were eschewing the space travel ambitions of their US rivals to compete for these lucrative microsatellite contracts, said McDowell. “Onespace and iSpace have both got their hands on retired Chinese missiles,” he added.
OneSpace’s work has attracted the attention of several domestic and foreign clients, OneSpace spokesman Chen Jianglan said. “A number of satellite companies in Europe and Asia have approached us to establish strategic partnerships.”
Once dominated by state research agencies and the military, China allowed private companies to enter the space industry to build and launch satellites in 2014.
Another Chinese startup, iSpace, launched a suborbital rocket, the Hyperbola-1S, from a test field in the southern island of Hainan last month.
The rocket reached an altitude of 108km and served as a demonstration for its planned small launcher due to be completed by June 2019, the company’s website said.
OneSpace was founded in 2015 while iSpace was founded two years ago.