On June 23, 2024, Continental completed the first 10-kilometer-class vertical take-off and landing flight test of a reusable launch vehicle at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, and the test mission was a complete success.
This is the largest vertical take-off and landing flight test of a reusable launch vehicle in China, and it is also the first application of the self-developed deep variable thrust liquid oxygen methane engine in the 10-kilometer return flight, laying a solid technical foundation for the first flight of the 4-meter reusable launch vehicle in 2025 as scheduled.
The flight test used a 3.8-meter-diameter rocket body, equipped with three 70-ton liquid oxygen methane engines and a full-scale landing buffer system. The rocket realizes a fixed-point vertical soft landing through take-off and ascent, thrust and descent, and comprehensively verifies the vertical take-off and landing configuration of the 3.8-meter diameter rocket body, the large-load landing buffer technology, the high-thrust strong variable-thrust reusable power technology, the high-precision navigation guidance and control technology and the health monitoring technology for return landing.
Among them, the large-load landing buffer system has achieved the first technical verification of "flight locking, air deployment, and ground contact energy absorption" in China. For the first time, the high-thrust strong variable-thrust reusable power system successfully verified the overall compatibility between the multi-engine parallel deep variable-thrust liquid oxygen methane engine and the launch vehicle. The return landing control system has the ability of autonomous online planning and adaptive interference compensation throughout the whole process, and realizes the fixed-point soft landing of "double zero state" (altitude and speed are close to zero at the same time) under strong interference, reaching the international advanced level.
The success of this flight test marks an important breakthrough in the development of the mainland's reusable carrier rocket.
Source: People's Daily