Artist’s rendition of satellites orbiting the Earth – rottenman/123RF Stock Photo
This week has seen two launches from some of the workhorses of the satellite industry, namely one of China’s Long March rockets and Rocket Lab’s Electron rocket; however, the outcomes of the launches were very different, demonstrating how difficult the space sector is to operate in.
Rocket Failure
On Monday, 10th August, China’s latest launch ended in failure when the Long March 7A exploded approximately one and a half minutes into its main ascent after taking off from the Wenchang Space Launch Site in Hainan province.
The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation have yet to release a statement, but videos of the launch seem to show the vehicle breaking apart. State news agency, Xinhua, reported that the cause of the failure was under analysis and investigation, although there were reports indicating it was due to an ‘in-flight anomaly’. This was the 18th mission for Long March 7A and is the first failure since its maiden flight, when a similar in-flight malfunction caused the mission to fail.
The rocket was believed to be carrying the ChinaSat-4B, also referred to as Zhongxing-4B, which was a geostationary communications satellite to provide voice, data, radio and television transmission services.
Rocket Success
Two days earlier, on the 8th August, Rocket Lab had a successful launch of its Electron rocket from the Māhia Peninsula on the east coast of New Zealand’s North Island. The mission named ‘The Grain Goddess Provides’ put the QPS-SAR-13 Earth Observation (EO) satellite, also known as MIKURA-1, into a low-Earth orbit for the Japanese company iQPS.
As the name suggests, this is the 13th synthetic aperture radar (SAR) satellite launched by iQPS. These satellites use X-band SAR systems, which operate in two modes:
- Stripmap mode achieves a 1.8 m spatial resolution with 14 x 7 km swath width, and
- Spotlight mode achieves 0.47 m with a narrower swath width of 7 x 7 km.
The data is used for applications including land surface observations and disaster monitoring. iQPS hopes to create a 24-strong satellite constellation by May 2028, with up to 12 further satellites by 2030; these will provide near-real-time EO imaging through frequent revisits. The next launch is scheduled for later this month, again with Rocket Lab.
Summary
To quote Elon Musk’s response to hearing of the Long March failure, ‘Rockets are insanely hard …. I hope they have a speedy recovery.’. Therefore, despite the fact that we are constantly writing about the latest EO satellite launch, it should never be forgotten that these multimillion-pound satellites are placed inside a huge firework and fired upwards with a hope and prayer; successes are greater than failures, but those successes are built on failures. Space is an exciting, difficult, challenging and rewarding sector to work in!
