The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free. According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”
Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.
I feel slightly better knowing that the Chinese suffer from Chinesium-based products as much as we do.
They suffer far more than anyone else from it. I mean just last week another rocket malfunctioned, lost a fuel tank that crashed close to a nearby village, enveloping homes in toxic gas. And spacecraft catastrophes are only the tiny tip if the tip of the iceberg.
To paraphrase Scott Manley; they got the rocket science down but need to work on their bolt science
(Fly safe)
oopsy doodle
-rocket clamper guy
Actually - “structural engineering team”, you can see it was ripped apart when it came off the test stand.
They should probably not rip off rocket (from spacex) when they dont have the intelligence to engineer it in the first place.
Uh, I guess that’s why many of the more reasonable static test rigs have the rocket flat on the ground with a hill on the pointy side just in case.
That’s a different type of test for a different type of rocket.
Gotta admire the rocket’s enthusiasm.
I hear Boeing ordered 6 of these rockets all ready
Getting all my aerospace technology on Temu.
Somebody just lost their job…
Maoist rocket says, “Fuck your imperialist and capitalist clamps” and commits revolutionary suicide.
Is anyone speaking Chinese able to tell me what the guy in the first scene of the video is crying out? The one where the rocket falls horizontally. I mean, I have a general idea what is being said there conceptually, but I’d love to get an actual, accurate translation.
Basically it’s two people saying “Is it falling? Wouldn’t it explode? I’m recording it. Fuck the rocket is falling!”
From 5-8 seconds, the person seems to be saying争着争着中火大了, which doesn’t mean anything to me, but it may be something of the local dialect.
Hey, much appreciated!
By any chance, were the clamps filled with styrofoam or something? 😁 (Tofu-dreg joke)
The test stand is only about 5 km away from the city’s downtown and less than a kilometer from a smaller village.
No NIMBY in The People’s Republic ™.
I’m pretty sure it’s ridiculously hard to stop government projects in your backyard there. The best you can do is refuse to sell your land.
These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.
Yet those don’t have cities right next to the blast zone
Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn’t exactly lightly developed.
From Apple Maps, it looks like it’s on a mostly undeveloped island, with the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away. I can’t tell how far away Orlando is, but much further.
Compared to this Chinese test site, it looks like population centers are 5x - 10x farther, plus you have an entire ocean to blow stuff up
the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away
The Falcon 9 that made an uncontrolled reentry in March of 2021 spread debris from Washington to Oregon.
Chinese Long March rocket failures have dropped parts into Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Ten miles isn’t far for a vehicle moving 17,500 mph during the 12 minutes or so necessary to break Earth’s gravity well.
Anyone else curious about the off-camera person who sounds like a cowering goblin?
