​China’s Zhuque-2 rocket, owned by private company LandSpace, could have become the first methane-fueled rocket to reach orbit, but a second-stage failure sent the rocket and 14 satellites on board flying off course. be bereaved.

Zhuque-2 is an interesting presence in the orbital launcher landscape. First, the rocket is part of the portfolio of the private company Landspace, which is not necessarily the first, because in recent years we have seen several private initiatives from China attempt orbital launches (iSpace, OneSpace or Galactic Energy), although the vast majority launches in China are carried out with the help of Chang Zheng rockets CASC (China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation), an institution included in the portfolio of the state.

Second, the Zhuque-2 rocket uses a first stage with TQ-12 engines that run on methane and liquid oxygen. If the launch was successful, Zhuque-2 would be the first rocket to go into orbit on methane. Thus, it is only the first rocket to reach space, as it reached an altitude of more than 100 km before making a destructive return through the atmosphere.

The launch took place two days ago on December 14 at 08:30 UTC from the Jiuquan Spaceport. The rocket has two stages: a first stage with 4 TQ-12 engines and a second stage with 2 engines of the same type, and a set of additional engines of lower power (TQ-11) to complete the launch to orbit after the engines shut down the main.

The TQ-12 engines seem to have worked flawlessly, but the TQ-11 engines had a problem, so that 14 satellites did not reach orbit and were lost on re-entry somewhere over the Indian Ocean. It was the 5th failed launch this year out of 175 orbital launch attempts since 2022.

Zhuque-2 is the second Landspace rocket after the first launch of Zhuque-1 (a three-stage solid rocket) also failed in 2018. Landspace said it is already working on a new version of the Zhuque-2, which will have a reusable first stage. The current version can climb to low Earth orbit weighing 6 tons (altitude 200 km) or 4 tons to low heliosynchronous orbit (altitude 500 km).

Landspace isn’t the only Chinese company looking to launch a methane rocket: iSpace is currently working on a rocket called the Hyperbola-2, which also has a first stage powered by liquid methane engines, and outside of China we have SpaceX, which hopes before Starship’s first test flight next year, as well as Blue Origin’s methane-fueled BE-4 engines to be used on the Vulcan (United Launch Alliance) and New Glenn (Blue Origin) rockets.

Methane does not have significantly better characteristics than kerosene (the most popular rocket fuel today), but because it contains fewer carbon atoms in the molecular structure, it means that methane engines have less residue after work and can be more efficiently prepared for a new flight. .

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