BEIJING \u2014 China said a Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat-4B satellite failed after an in-flight anomaly following liftoff from the Wenchang space launch site in the southern island province of Hainan on Monday.<\/p>\n
The rocket blasted off at 8:02 p.m. Beijing time (8 a.m. ET), according to Xinhua, China\u2019s state-run news agency, which added that the mission was unsuccessful and the cause was under investigation.<\/p>\n
China\u2019s National Space Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n
SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, commenting on a post about the failed launch on X, wrote \u201crockets are insanely hard.\u201d Many private and state-owned Chinese firms are racing to close the gap with SpaceX.<\/p>\n
\u201cI hope they have a speedy recovery,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n
Jonathan McDowell, an honorary professor at Durham University in England and a member of the Center for Space Environmentalism, said launch video showed the rocket was completely destroyed at relatively low altitude and speed, meaning neither the satellite nor debris reached orbit.<\/p>\n
Monday\u2019s failure was the Long March 7A\u2019s first since its maiden flight in March 2020, when an in-flight malfunction caused the mission to fail.<\/p>\n
The rocket returned to flight successfully a year later and completed over a dozen successful flights before Monday\u2019s mission, based on Chinese launch records.<\/p>\n
A report by China National Radio, later removed from a page hosted by the Baidu search engine, identified the payload as Zhongxing-4B, or ChinaSat-4B, and the launcher as the Long March 7 modified rocket, another name for the Long March 7A.<\/p>\n
The satellite is part of the same series as ChinaSat-4A, launched in 2024, according to an assessment by Reuters of the available evidence. China described that satellite as providing voice, data, radio and television transmission services.<\/p>\n
Such high-orbit communications satellites can relay broadcast programming and telecommunications over large areas, including remote locations beyond the reach of terrestrial networks, but it was not immediately clear whether ChinaSat-4B had the same role, customers or capabilities.<\/p>\n
The Long March 7A is a medium-lift rocket designed for high-orbit missions.<\/p>\n
The findings of the investigation will determine whether the failure is confined to the Long March 7A or prompts wider checks of shared components, manufacturing or launch-site operations.<\/p>\n
Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, called the accident \u201cnot a great development\u201d for the Long March 7A program, but said \u201cthe damage seems limited\u201d based on the information publicly available.<\/p>\n
The vehicle is used mainly to send communications satellites to high orbit, rather than to deploy China\u2019s large groups of satellites in low Earth orbit, meaning the failure should not meaningfully affect the pace of those launches, he said.<\/p>\n