On the afternoon of June 30, a video posted by a number of Gongyi citizens on social media showed a rocket emitting black smoke during the flight, and then falling and catching fire.
Subsequently, Beijing Tianbing Technology Co., Ltd. issued a statement on the situation, claiming that the rocket that fell this time was the Tianlong-3 liquid launch vehicle independently developed by Tianbing Technology.
Fortunately, there were no casualties in this test, which is a blessing in misfortune, so what is the origin of this heavenly soldier technology? How can there be a rocket with such a large thrust?
Founded in 2019, Tianbing Technology is a private commercial aerospace company in China, mainly committed to the research and development of a new generation of liquid rocket engines and medium and large liquid launch vehicles, and has undertaken about one-third of the domestic commercial satellite launch orders.
Tianbing Technology currently has more than 400 employees, most of its core team from China Aerospace Science and Technology, China Aerospace Science and Industry and other national aerospace groups, very competitive in the field of commercial aerospace, the company has been shortlisted for the national satellite Internet constellation launch mission, in 2023 was rated as a Chinese unicorn enterprise, in early 2024 on the Hurun Research Institute "2024 Global Unicorn" China's commercial aerospace list.
Kang Yonglai, the founder and chairman of Tianbing Technology, used to be the director of the launch vehicle general research office, deputy chief engineer and chief engineer of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, and was once the youngest director and overall deputy chief engineer in the history of the institute.
He has presided over the overall demonstration and design of the Dongfeng-17 hypersonic missile and the Long March 11 launch vehicle, and has been engaged in the development and project management of launch vehicle technology for nearly 20 years.
Kang Yonglai previously said that commercial rockets are essentially means of transportation, and their core is to make rockets larger, reduce costs through industrialized means, and operate rockets as a manufacturing industry to achieve large quantities, low cost and high reliability.
In April 2023, Tianbing Technology's Tianlong-2 Yao-1 carrier rocket was successfully launched, accurately sending the "Love Space Science" remote sensing satellite into the predetermined orbit, creating eight new records such as the world's first successful launch vehicle for the first time in private aerospace and the world's leading orbit accuracy.
A year later, the Tianlong-3, which has a carrying capacity eight times that of the Tianlong-2 and uses a high-thrust reusable liquid rocket engine, was quickly launched.
Tianlong-3 is a large-scale liquid launch vehicle tailored by Tianbing Technology for the construction of the mainland satellite Internet constellation, and its product performance is comparable to SpaceX's Falcon 9, with a diameter of 3.8 meters, a take-off mass of 590 tons, a low-earth orbit capacity of 17 tons, and a sun-synchronous orbit capacity of 14 tons.
As we know, the Falcon 9 rocket has a two-stage design, with the first stage consisting of nine Falcon boosters, which are mainly responsible for sending the rocket out of the atmosphere.
When the first stage is separated, it is precisely lowered by thruster recovery technology for subsequent reuse. The second stage of the Falcon 9 is a separate engine, which is used to push the payload into the required orbital altitude and speed.
By reusing rockets, SpaceX reduces the cost of space missions and provides a more sustainable and cost-effective way for future space exploration.
Similar to the Falcon 9, the power system of Tianlong-3 uses nine self-developed 110-ton thrust liquid oxygen kerosene rocket engines TH-12 (Tianhuo XII), which is a high-thrust, reusable liquid rocket engine specially designed to meet the "low-cost, high-reliability, high-frequency" launch needs of China's satellite Internet.
Previously, TH-12 has successfully completed dozens of delivery tests, which was supposed to verify the collaborative working ability and system stability of nine TH-12 engines in this test run, and the thrust has also increased by 2 times compared with the previous maximum thrust test of China's aerospace, once successful, it can create a record for the maximum thrust of the mainland's launch vehicle at this stage, and has more than 30 commercial launches per year within three years after the first flight, becoming the most cost-effective rocket in the global launch market.
It's a pity that the structure of the connection between the rocket body and the test bench failed to withstand the huge thrust and vibration in the high temperature and high pressure environment, and the structural failure problem occurred, which was really a failure.
In fact, it is not uncommon for rockets to explode in the test stage, such as the Falcon 9, which is the target of Tianlong 3.
In 2013, a Falcon 9 rocket exploded on the spot when it landed in an unstable landing attitude during a first-stage rocket recovery test at sea.
On August 23, 2014, during a test flight in Texas, USA, a three-engine Falcon 9R rocket of SpaceX was severely deflected during a land-based first-stage rocket recovery test, and finally exploded in the air.
▲The wreckage of the rocket floating in the sea after the explosion during the first stage rocket test of the Falcon 9 rocket in 2014
On June 28, 2015, a Falcon 9 aboard the Dragon spacecraft lifted off from Cape Canaveral Air Force Base in Florida, and two minutes after launch, the rocket exploded in the air and the wreckage fell into the Atlantic Ocean, ruining the planned resupply mission for the International Space Station.
On September 1, 2016, the Falcon 9 exploded during a routine static ignition test before launch, destroying a brand new Falcon 9 rocket and the $200 million Spacecom Amos-6 communications satellite.
In April 2019, the SpaceX Crew Dragon spacecraft exploded violently during a static ignition test, and the spacecraft was directly destroyed.
Since the first few tests were almost all explosions, some people joked that SpaceX's fancy explosion once a year has become a fine tradition.
Even SpaceX itself made a special issue of "Explosion Highlights", which collected almost all of SpaceX's failure at the moment of launch mission and rocket recovery, but SpaceX did not give up, but improved step by step, and finally gradually achieved successful recovery on land and at sea.
Failures like this are no strangers to China's aerospace. On February 15, 1996, at 3 a.m., the Long March-3B carrier rocket carrying Indonesia's "Palapa" satellite, which had been pinned on by the mainland, suddenly deviated less than 22 seconds after being launched from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center, and then exploded in the air.
The runaway rocket crashed into a hillside about 1,850 meters away from the launch tower and exploded, causing the rocket and the satellite on board to be completely burned, and because the rocket exploded near the cooperation building and hotel where the technicians were temporarily staying, the tragedy caused 6 deaths and 57 injuries to the base staff who had not yet entered the underground bunker.
On August 18 of the same year, the launch of the Long March-3A rocket failed again and failed to put the satellite into the intended orbit.
In just six months, there were two failures, and the Chinese astronauts who did not believe in evil spent a year, did a lot of hard and heavy work, completed a total of 122 tests in 12 categories, and finally brought 44 items with a total of 256 improvement measures, which became the "talisman" for the successful launch of the Long March-3B.
It is true that the explosion of the Tianlong-3 rocket must have been an accident, because the normal test process is that the rocket is fixed on the test bench and ignites all nine rocket engines in parallel to simulate the state of flight, but according to the on-site test run, the rocket was not firmly fixed, and the rocket was not dragged, so that the rocket flew unexpectedly. (Some netizens also said: "The fixture is made according to the technical indicators, and flying out shows that the thrust far exceeds the technical indicators, which is a good thing.") ”）
But an accident is an accident, and there is no need to wash the floor. Tianbing Technology itself also said that the follow-up should complete the fault zeroing work as soon as possible, which is to admit mistakes and stand up when beaten. But as Musk said, there is no innovation without failure, and if you don't experience failure, it means that you are not innovative enough.
The road ahead has always been bumpy, and failure is a pain that mankind must experience in the history of conquering the sky and space. The failure of this launch test is not terrible, and if there is a problem, we can just change it.
I still hope that Tianbing Technology will find out the cause as soon as possible, get out of the shadow of failure, and continue to return to the great journey of conquering the sky!