China conducted the debut flight of its Long March 12A carrier rocket on Tuesday, achieving a successful launch while the recovery attempt ended in failure.
The 70.4-meter-tall Long March 12A, the tallest space vehicle China has ever built, blasted off at 10 am from a newly constructed service tower at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the Inner Mongolia autonomous region.
After a short flight, the rocket's second-stage booster reached its preset orbital position, but the first-stage booster failed to land at the designated recovery site in Gansu province.
Engineers have started an investigation into the failed recovery attempt, according to the China National Space Administration.
It said that during the flight, engineers obtained critical technical data, laying a solid foundation for launching and recovering reusable rockets in the future.
The Long March 12A model is designed and built by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology, a subsidiary of the State-owned conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, becoming the first from the State-owned conglomerate to undertake a flight mission.
The rocket's main body is 3.8 meters wide, while its fairing — the top structure on a rocket that contains satellites or other payloads — has a diameter of 4.2 meters.
With a liftoff weight of 437 tons, it is capable of transporting at least 6 tons of payloads to a low-Earth orbit.
China has been striving to develop a fleet of reusable rockets that can tremendously reduce launch costs and improve efficiency and frequency of space missions.
Earlier this month, Chinese commercial space company LandSpace launched its ZQ 3 reusable rocket from the Jiuquan spaceport. The rocket managed to reach orbit, but the attempt to recover its first-stage booster failed.
Globally, the best-known reusable rocket is SpaceX's Falcon 9, which has completed multiple launches with reused boosters.
Blue Origin, another commercial space firm in the United States, has also completed its first successful landing of the first stage of its New Glenn rocket in a recent mission.
Both SpaceX and Blue Origin experienced many failures in their recovery attempts before achieving success.
