China has successfully tested the Long March-5B Heavy Rocket on Tuesday, after the successful launch at 6 p.m. BJT (10:00 UTC) from the Wenchang Space Launch Site.
Long March-5B Heavy Rocket is the fourth variant of the Long March-5 (LM-5) series. With the letter B added to its name, the rocket has been modified to make it capable of sending the test model of China’s new manned spaceship.
In today’s launch, the heavy rocket carried the test model of China’s manned spaceship designed for the future space station.
What is a Heavy Rocket?
Heavy rockets are different from normal rockets due to their larger capacity. A heavy rocket can carry payloads of more than 20 tons like satellites, probes, and spaceships. The capacity is larger than 10 average-sized cars.
The LM-5B rocket has the biggest boost power in the Long March series. It can deliver no less than 22 tons of payload at a time to low-earth orbits (LEO). It’s main focus will be a 200 to 400 kilometer orbit near Earth.
Other rocket makers around the world also build heavy rockets, including the Falcon Heavy from SpaceX, the Ariane series from European Space Agency (ESA), and many more.
The redesign of the Heavy Rocket was focused mainly on safety measures and a more comfortable living condition for astronauts, the model is nine meters long and can hold as many as seven astronauts.
But in this mission, it carried no one since it’s only a test, according to the announcement the ship will stay in space for two days making multiple automatic orbit maneuvers.
The Long March-5B rocket is reported to have fallen down on the west coast of Africa, becoming one of the largest human-made objects ever to make an uncontrolled descent to Earth from space. The rocket has reported to fall down into the Atlantic Ocean but some of its debris made a hard fall on the ground as per the reports from Côte d’Ivoire describing metallic objects that apparently fell from the sky.
