HELSINKI — A Chinese commercial Kinetica-1 solid rocket failed late Thursday, with the launch attempt setting a new domestic record for launches in a calendar year.
The Kinetica-1 (Lijian-1) solid rocket lifted off at 8:03 p.m. Eastern Dec. 26 (0103 UTC Dec. 27) from the Dongfeng Commercial Space Innovation Test Area at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. Rocket operator CAS Space confirmed the failure hours after liftoff.
“We can confirm that the first two stages were nominal. Stage 3 lost attitude three seconds after ignition and the self-destructing mechanism was activated,” CAS Space said in a statement. It added that the investigation into the cause of the anomaly is ongoing. CAS Space is a launch spinoff from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, aiming to secure contracts to launch domestic and international payloads.
Aboard were an undeclared number of satellites. These are known to include CASAA-Sat from the Marseille Astrophysics Laboratory (LAM), supported by French space agency CNES, a cubesat intended to study the South Atlantic Magnetic Anomaly, and DEAR-3 (B300-L01), a 300-kilogram cargo spacecraft from Chinese commercial space firm AZSpace. The spacecraft carried science payloads.
The Kinetica-1 failure is the first loss of the solid rocket. The previous five missions were all successful, with the previous launch taking place in November.
CAS Space is planning the first launch of its kerosene-liquid oxygen Kinetica-2 rocket in the second half of 2025. The rocket will launch the Qingzhou low-cost cargo spacecraft.
2024 China launch breakdown
The launch was China’s 68th launch attempt of 2024, surpassing the national record of 67 launches in a calendar year, set in 2023. The 68 launches include two failures, both of commercial solid rockets: Kinetica-1 and Hyperbola-1 from iSpace in July.
China is second for launches in 2024 behind the U.S., with over 150 launches including Rocket Lab launches from New Zealand, and ahead of Russia, with 17 launches. U.S. launches were dominated by the SpaceX Falcon 9, while Russia’s annual launch activity continued to decline, from 25 in 2021, 22 in 2022 and 19 in 2023.
China overall fell well short of a 100 launches forecast by state-owned main space contractor CASC early in the year. This number included around 70 launches from CASC and around 30 launches from commercial actors. Both CASC and commercial companies such as Landspace (Zhuque-2), Galactic Energy (Ceres-1) and Orienspace (Gravity-1) fell short of planned numbers of launches. CASC’s launch manifest is opaque, meaning assessing causes of a lower than expected launch cadence is difficult. China is working to address a bottleneck in access to launch facilities, including new commercial launch areas at Wenchang and Jiuquan and sea launches.
Despite the advance in launch numbers, China appears to have remained reliant on older rockets and smaller solid rockets. Nearly half (32) of all launches used hypergolic Long March 2, 3 and 4 series rockets. Light-lift solid rockets accounted for 17 further launches (five Ceres-1 launches, four Kinetica-1, four Kuaizhou-1 rockets, two Jielong-3 rockets, one Hyperbola-1 and one Kuaizhou-11).
Jiuquan was the busiest Chinese spaceport, supporting 21 launches, with 19 from Xichang. There were six sea launches, in addition to 13 launches from Taiyuan and nine from Wenchang.
The launches included debut flights for the commercial Gravity-1 solid rocket from Orienspace, the enhanced methalox Zhuque-2E from Landspace, the enhanced Kuaizhou-1A solid rocket from CASIC/Expace and the Long March 6C and Long March 12 from CASC’s Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). The Long March 6A upper stage meanwhile suffered a number of debris-creating events.
China also sent a national record of more than 260 spacecraft sent into orbit in 2024, well beyond the record 221 spacecraft launched in 2023. This is in part due to the first launches for the Qianfan (Thousand Sails) and Guowang (National Net) megaconstellation projects. Both are expected to drive further increases in Chinese launch activity in the coming years.
