China's space industry is poised to embrace a super busy year in 2020 as about 50 launch missions are likely to take place this year, according to major contractors and sources from space industry circles.
The third Long March-5 rocket, China's largest carrier rocket, is ready to be vertically transported at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in South China's Hainan province on Dec 21, 2019. [Photo/chinadaily.com.cn]
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, the country's leading space contractor, said in a statement on Thursday that it will strive to carry out more than 40 launch missions to serve national space programs, such as the completion of the Beidou Navigation Satellite System, as well as demands from commercial satellite operators.
Sources inside the State-owned space giant who didn't want to be named told China Daily that the all of the 40-some planned missions will be carried out by the conglomerate's Long March-series carrier rockets, the nation's backbone rocket fleet, and do not include those to be made by the company's newly developed Smart Dragon solid-propellant rockets.
This means the space magnate's actual launch number in 2020 will be even bigger.
"In 2020, all of our academy's operational rocket models, ranging from Long March 3A to Long March 5, will make flights, and four new types –the Long March 5B, Long March 7A, Long March 8 and Smart Dragon 2 – are scheduled to conduct their maiden mission," Said an employee at the company's China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing, the biggest developer and maker of carrier rockets in the country.
He said the academy is expected to launch more rockets than any other previous year.
Another State-owned actor – China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp – has plans for at least eight launch missions by its Kuaizhou carrier rockets, according to Zhang Di, a senior rocket scientist and chairman of Expace Technology in Wuhan, Central China's Hubei province, a CASIC subsidiary that builds the Kuaizhou rocket.
Kuaizhou 11, a new type in the Kuaizhou family, is set for its debut flight in 2020 and will become the biggest and most powerful solid-propellant rocket in China, Zhang said in an earlier interview with China Daily.
Moreover, several private rocket enterprises have announced plans to launch missions in 2020 with their own rockets.
China was the world's most frequent user of carrier rockets in 2019 after gaining the title in 2018, with 32 successful orbital launches and two failures that year.
In 2018, China made 39 orbital launches, exactly the same number as the nation's total space missions in the entire 1990s.
