World's largest solid-fuel rocket makes 2nd flight

Orienspace, a private Chinese rocket maker, successfully launched its Gravity 1 carrier rocket on Saturday morning, marking the second flight of what is considered the world's largest and most powerful solid-fuel rocket.

The 30-meter-tall rocket lifted off at 10:20 am from a launch vessel off the coast of Haiyang in Shandong province and soon placed its payloads — an optical remote-sensing satellite and two experimental satellites — into their preset orbits.

The mission was the second flight of the Gravity 1 model, which made its debut from the same site in January 2024.

Xu Guoguang, the rocket's chief designer and project manager, said the latest launch was intended to further verify the model's reliability, capability, prelaunch procedures and flight sequence. The operation also demonstrated the rocket's adaptability to different flight trajectories, he said.

The successful mission shows that the Gravity 1 is now capable of stable performance and is commercially ready, according to Peng Haomin, cofounder and vice-president of Orienspace.

"Its carrying capacity meets major demands from satellite companies that need rockets to deploy their networks in low — and mid-altitude orbits," Peng said. "We have established infrastructure at the Haiyang spaceport to handle assembly, testing and prelaunch work for the Gravity 1. These facilities, along with the rocket's all-solid-fuel design, enable us to carry out a launch on short notice — in emergency situations, within 24 hours."

The Gravity 1 consists of three core stages and four side boosters, all powered by solid-fuel engines and equipped with flexible swinging nozzles for control.

With a liftoff weight of 405 metric tons and a thrust of 600 tons, the rocket can send spacecraft weighing up to 6.5 tons into low-Earth orbit, or 4.2 tons into a sun-synchronous orbit about 500 kilometers above Earth, according to Orienspace.

Founded in 2020 by a group of veteran researchers from State-owned space enterprises, Orienspace has positioned the Gravity 1 as the world's most powerful solid-fueled launch vehicle and the strongest among China's private rockets.

Its liftoff weight and thrust far exceed those of the European Space Agency's Vega-C, which previously held the title of the world's most powerful solid-fuel rocket.

Gravity 1 is also the first and currently only private Chinese rocket equipped with side boosters. It features the largest payload fairing — the nose cone that protects satellites during launch — among rockets developed by China's private space sector.

The company said many of the designers and engineers involved in the Gravity 1 project previously worked on the Long March 5 and Long March 11 rockets, key models developed by State-owned China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp.

To date, five private Chinese companies have successfully placed payloads into orbit with their own rockets: Orienspace, i-Space, Galactic Energy, Space Pioneer and Land-Space.