Nation sends tallest rocket into space

China conducted on Friday evening the sixth launch mission of the Long March 5 carrier rocket to deploy a remote-sensing satellite into space, according to the State-owned conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, the nation's dominant space contractor.

The company said in a news release that the rocket blasted off at 9:41 pm from a coastal service tower in the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province and soon roared into cloudy night skies.

After flying a while, the rocket successfully placed the Yaogan 41 satellite in its intended orbit, the company said.

It had been more than three years since the last flight of the Long March 5 model, which took place in November 2020 at the Wenchang center to send the Chang'e 5 lunar probe on its moonward journey.

Compared with its predecessors, the latest Long March 5 had an extended fairing — the top structure on a rocket that contains satellites or other payloads — that was 18.5 meters tall.

The fairings on previous Long March 5 rockets were about 12.3 meters tall.

The new fairing gave the sixth Long March 5 an overall height of 63.2 meters, making it the tallest-ever rocket in China.

Before it, the tallest Chinese rocket was the 60.1-meter Long March 7A.

One of the world's most powerful operational rockets, the Long March 5 model was designed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology in Beijing, the nation's major rocket maker and a subsidiary of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.

The rocket's baseline configuration has a liftoff weight of 869 metric tons, and is capable of ferrying spacecraft weighing up to 25 tons — the combined weight of 16 mid-size cars — to a low-Earth orbit, or 14 tons to a geosynchronous transfer orbit.

The rocket was first flown in November 2016. The second mission took place in July 2017 and failed due to technical abnormalities, leading the type to suspend its operation for overhaul. It took almost two and a half years for designers and engineers to fix the critical defect.

It resumed flight in December 2019 and transported a large satellite into orbit.

The fourth launch, in July 2020, lifted China's first Mars mission, and the fifth in November that year sent the Chang'e 5 to the moon.

Yaogan 41 is the newest in China's fleet of remote-sensing satellites, and will be used to obtain data for land resources surveying, agricultural yield forecasting, environmental monitoring, and disaster prevention and relief.

China has so far sent more than 300 civilian remote-sensing satellites into orbit. The Yaogan family is the largest fleet of remote-sensing spacecraft in the country, and their data has been widely used by governments, public service sectors and businesses.