WENCHANG, Hainan: Construction of China’s space station moved a step closerwith the successful maiden flight of its new large carrier rocket, the LongMarch-5B, May 5, 2020.
The Long March-5B was specially developed to launch the space stationmodules, said Wang Jue, chief director of the rocket development team atthe China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology (CALT) under the ChinaAerospace Science and Technology Corporation.
The new rocket, a variant of China’s largest carrier rocket, the LongMarch-5, will help expand China’s aerospace activities, said Wang Xiaojun,head of CALT.
The Long March-5B is about 53.7 meters long, with a 5-meter-diameter corestage and four 3.35-meter-diameter boosters.
The rocket uses environment-friendly fuel, including liquid hydrogen,liquid oxygen and kerosene. It has a takeoff mass of about 849 tonnes and atakeoff thrust of about 1,078 tonnes.
Compared with the Long March-5, the Long March-5B has one less core stagebut a larger fairing, which is 20.5 meters long and 5.2 meters in diameter,as tall as a six-floor building, and nearly eight meters longer than thefairing of Long March-5.
The Long March-5 rocket will be mainly used for launching large satellitesto high-Earth orbit and deep-space probes such as the Chang’e-5 lunar probeand the Mars probe. The Long March-5B rocket will mostly carry capsules ofChina’s space station and large spacecraft to low-Earth orbit, according toCALT.
The Long March-5B rocket has increased China’s payload carrying capacity tolow-Earth orbit from about 14 tonnes to 22 tonnes, equivalent to thecarrying capacity of leading launch vehicles around the world.
With the largest payload capacity of China’s current carrier rockets, theLong March-5B enables the launch of large spacecraft. For instance, eachmodule of China’s space station will be over 20 tonnes, and can only becarried into space by the new rocket.
The research team spent almost 10 years developing the new rocket, makingbreakthroughs in a series of key technologies, said the rocket’s chiefdesigner Li Dong.
Read Top Stories
The Long March-5B has the largest fairing of China’s carrier rockets,specially designed to carry the space station modules. A rotary separationscheme ensures the fairing can separate from the payloads safely in space.
To meet the requirements of rendezvous and docking of the modules, the LongMarch-5B rocket needs to be launched within a “zero window”, which meansits launch time error should be less than a second, said Li.
With only one core stage and four boosters, the Long March-5B has a simplerstructure and higher reliability than multi-stage rockets. However, it isrequired to send payloads directly into orbit, which is like a high-speedtrain suddenly braking and stopping stably at a designated position.
So the research team equipped the rocket with advanced guidance, navigationand control technologies to continuously adjust its trajectory, Li said.
The development of the new carrier rocket also helps lay the foundation forthe research and development of China’s heavy-lift launch vehicle, Li added.
This year will see another two flights of China’s large carrier rocket. TheLong March-5 is expected to launch China’s first Mars probe in July, andthe Chang’e-5 lunar probe at the end of 2020 to collect moon samples andbring them back to Earth.
This year also marks the 50th anniversary of the launch of China’s firstsatellite Dongfanghong-1 by a Long March-1 rocket, which had a carryingcapacity of just 173 kg, on April 24, 1970.
China has developed more than 10 types of carrier rockets to send differentpayloads to different orbits over the past five decades. (Xinhua)
