Today (June 30), an accident occurred in Gongyi, Henan, China's largest liquid launch vehicle of private rocket company Tianbing Technology, the recyclable Tianlong-3, when the whole system hot test was carried out at the test site, the rocket body that should have been left on the earth flew directly into the sky, and then fell in the mountains and forests 1.5 kilometers away and exploded and caught fire. Fortunately, local residents were notified of the evacuation before the test, and no casualties have been reported so far.
In the video taken by netizens, it can be seen that the rocket flew diagonally into the sky with black smoke, began to fall at a height of several hundred meters, and then crashed sideways out of sight. Another netizen took pictures of the rocket exploding and catching fire when it landed, and thick smoke billowed out.
Tianbing-3 is benchmarked against Musk's Falcon 9 of SpaceX, with a height of 71 meters, a diameter of 3.8 meters, a take-off mass of 590 tons, and a payload of 17 tons into low-earth orbit, and a carrying capacity of 14 tons in sun-synchronous orbit.
The difference is that Tianlong-3 uses liquid oxygen kerosene, 9 Tianhuo 12 rocket engines with a sea level thrust of 109 tons each, a vacuum of 135 tons, which can be adjusted between 40% and 110%, with deep throttling and vector adjustment functions, and can be re-ignited in multiple modes, so it has the ability to be reused.
Tianlong-3 was originally scheduled to go to the Wenchang launch site in Hainan in early September for its first flight, and the "nine-machine parallel" whole-system hot test should be the last test before the first flight.
At present, Tianbing Technology has not announced the cause of the failure, some people say that the thrust is not calculated well, it is too big, resulting in the failure of the tethered system structure. If this is the case, it means that there is still potential for rocket engines, and bad things can turn into good things.
After all, the Raptor engine of Musk's starship has been upgraded for many years to increase the engine thrust from about 200 tons to 270 tons. Of course, this is probably very unlikely, and the exact reason for this should soon be known.
So you can imagine why Musk's Starship has not been approved for a long time before launch, and it needs to go through so many procedures. If a rocket with such a lethal power really falls in a populated area, the consequences are completely unimaginable.