Washington: While the world was occupied with NASA and Space X launching first manned orbital spaceflight from the US, China made space strides of its own with two successful rocket flights back to back.
According to Space.com. China blasted off two flights at the same time NASA launched its Demo-2 mission toward the International Space Station on May 30.
Beijing first launched two new technology-demonstrating satellites at 4:13 am (Beijing time). The satellites rose successfully into space aboard a Long March-11 rocket, according to Chinese state media outlet CCTV.
“Peng Kunya, a chief designer of the Long March-11, said that it was the first time that the Long March-11 was launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, proving its adaptability to different launch sites,” CCTV said in its report.
Within 36 hours, China sent another satellite duo aloft from the country’s northwest region.
A Long March-2D rocket blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on May 31 at 4:53 p.m. Beijing time (4:53 a.m. EDT or 0853 GMT).
According to Xinhua, one of the satellites was Gaofen-9. The civilian remote sensing satellite can take photographs with a resolution of roughly 3.3 feet (1 meter). “It will be used in land surveys, urban planning, road network design and crop yield estimates, as well as disaster relief,” Xinhua stated.
The other satellite is HEAD-4. It is designed to support the Internet of Things (IoT), which allows connected devices to send and receive information from orbit.
On May 30, SpaceX’s Crew Dragon spacecraft successfully took off from Kennedy Space Center for the International Space Station (ISS), with two NASA astronauts — Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley.
The spacecraft is the first to take the American astronauts to orbit from American soil in nearly a decade and took off at 3:22 pm Eastern Time (ET). (ANI)
