On March 11 at 17:51 UTC, a Long March 7A successfully launched the Shiyan 9 satellite from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Center, which is on the island of Hainan along the southern coast of China.

This marked the second launch of a Long March 7A. According to Chinese media, the satellite is for “in-orbit verification tests of new technologies such as space environmental monitoring.” Put another way, just like NASA, China sometimes launches payloads just to see if a new toy will work, and in this case, the new toys will monitor the conditions in space around the satellite. 

This was the second launch and first successful launch of this new rocket configuration.

Around the time of this launch, information about the Long March 7A launch failure last year was released. After a very quick, but very thorough, fault tree investigation of just twenty days, Chinese engineers determined the cause of the failure was cavitation in the booster tank. Cavitation is a fancy way of saying that the fuel had bubbles in the mix, and this changed how the fuel burned. In this case, it was not in a good way. Those bubbles prevented the usual amount of fuel from reaching the engine. Less fuel means lower thrust. Unfortunately, that lower thrust couldn’t be compensated for by the upper stages of the rocket, and it ultimately failed to reach orbit.

The investigation was followed by numerous tests conducted over the next three months to come up with a fix for the problem. Exactly seven months after the initial failure, the fix was proven successful by this launch of the Long March 7A.

More Information

Spaceflight Fans article (Chinese)

Shiyan 9 info page (Gunter’s Space Page)

Long March 7A failure article (Chinese) 

Launch video