China's iSpace rocket fails soon after launch, 3 satellites lost

A Chinese rocket start-up has suffered yet another launch failure, resulting in the loss of three satellites as part of a commercial constellation being assembled for global weather forecasting and earthquake prediction.

Hyperbola-1 -- a 24-metre (79ft) high solid-fuel rocket produced by iSpace -- lifted off on Thursday from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Centre in China's Gobi Desert.

"The rocket's first, second and third stages flew normally, but the fourth stage suffered an anomaly and the launch mission ended in failure," the company said, adding that the specific reasons for the failure would be announced as soon as possible after detailed investigations, the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post reported on Friday.

The relatively small Hyperbola-1, which can deliver a 300 kg (661 pounds) payload into a 500 km (311 miles) sun-synchronous orbit, was carrying Yunyao-1 weather satellites 15, 16 and 17 for the Tianjin-based Yunyao Aerospace Technology company.

The satellites did not reach orbit.

Yunyao Aerospace Technology had planned to launch nearly 40 satellites this year to complete its 90-satellite Yunyao-1 constellation by next year, according to the Post report.

"Our constellation will break a foreign monopoly and provide high-resolution, high-precision, and all-scale weather monitoring and earthquake early warning services to Belt and Road Initiative countries," a Yunyao Aerospace representative told Tianjin Daily in January.

In 2019, iSpace became the first private rocket company in China to reach Earth orbit with Hyperbola-1. But since then, the rocket has failed on three consecutive occasions.

Problems have ranged from a first-stage steering fin being damaged by falling insulation foam to a fuel leak in the altitude control system of the second stage.

Early this month a powerful Chinese rocket crashed after an 'accidental launch' during a ground test due to structural failure, its company Space Pioneer said.

Space Pioneer, also known as Beijing Tianbing Technology, said that the Tianlong-3 rocket unexpectedly launched during a static-fire test at a facility in Gongyi county in Henan province on July 1.

The nine engines of the rocket, stated to be the most powerful in the country, were fired and lifted off because of a 'structural failure at the connection between the rocket body and the test platform', the company said.

Space Pioneer is one of a number of private aerospace companies that are developing medium-lift, reusable rockets to help China assemble its own satellite constellations comparable to SpaceX's Starlink.