by David Todd | Sep 24, 2015 | China, exploration
While China’s Chang’e 3 landing and rover mission was, in the main, successful, albeit that the Yutu rover failed after only a few weeks, nevertheless, China has decided to not repeat the mission. Instead, China has announced to the United Nations that it...
by David Todd | Sep 21, 2015 | China, commercial launch services, Launches, Seradata News
China successfully launched the first of a new generation of rocket- launched vehicles when the Long March-6 (CZ-6) rocket took off from Jiuquan in the Gobi desert. The flight, which took place at 2301 GMT on 19 September 2015, was seen as a key test of China’s new...
by David Todd | Sep 17, 2015 | China, Launches, Military space, Satellites
China launched two orbital missions in quick succession during mid-September 2015. On 12 September 2015, a Long March 3B launch vehicle carried a spacecraft dubbed the Communications Engineering Test Satellite 1 (aka Tongxing Jisshu Shiyan Weixing yi hao –...
by David Todd | Sep 3, 2015 | China, Military space
“Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel”, or so said Samuel Johnson in 1775. These words still have resonance, even in the modern era, when economic hardship and unpopularity can often be the spur governments into...
by David Todd | Aug 29, 2015 | China, Launches, Seradata News
At 0231 GMT on 27 August a Long March 4C (CZ-4C) rocket launched the Yaogan 27 satellite from the Taiyuan launch site in China. The satellite is officially described as being for “scientific experiments, land survey, crop yield assessment, and disaster...
by David Todd | Jul 29, 2015 | China, ESA, exploration, History, JAXA, NASA, Russia
High Summer is the time of year when the Seradata space team does its annual analysis of the relative chances of each nation “winning the space race”. In this we act as a notional bookmaker offering notional odds that reflect each nation’s relative chances...
