Loading...

This is Rocketman Ed with tonight's rocket report. Last week's launches. Let's dive into that. China was certainly busy. We had eight total launches the past week and that was dominated by China's five launches contrasted to SpaceX's three. Space launch of the week was on Wednesday, August 13 at 0043 Mountain Daylight Time. China's KASIC launched a Long March 5B slash YZ-2 rocket from the Wen Chang Space Launch Center in China. The Long March 5B took SatNet LEO Group 8, another batch of communication satellites, to polar orbit. The Long March 5B is China's heavy lift rocket with a big 5 meter diameter fairing and can lift 25 tons to low Earth orbit. It's also called the Fat 5. Second launch of the week. We have on Wednesday, August 13 at 2305 Mountain Daylight Time, SpaceX successfully launched Starlink Group 17-4 on a Falcon 9 from Slick 4E at Vandenberg. Vandenberg made for another fogged in launch but a great view of the landing and the recovery vessel. Another 24 satellite satellites, Starlink satellites, made it to a high inclination polar sun synchronous orbit. It was booster 1093's fifth landing. That brings us to Thursday with third launch. August 14 at 0629 Mountain Daylight Time, SpaceX launched a Starlink Group 10-20 mission on a Falcon 9 from Slick 40 Cape Canaveral Space Force Base in Florida. 28 satellites are boosted to low Earth orbit. Booster 1085 completed its 10th flight and became the first booster to complete 10 launches in its first year of service. All right, fourth launch of the week. China's land space experienced a launch failure of a ZQ-2E rocket launched from Jiaquan Satellite Launch Center in China on Thursday, August 14 at 19-17 Mountain Daylight Time. Video of the launch showed no apparent issue. The undisclosed payload failed to reach orbit when the Roflker suffered an anomaly two minutes into the flight. The ZQ-2E was the first methalox rocket to fly. It was the sixth ZQ-2E launch and the second failure. We're going to reset the repeaters there.