China says Long March 7A rocket launch failed after flight anomaly

BEIJING - China said a Long March 7A rocket carrying the ChinaSat-4B satellite failed after an in-flight anomaly following liftoff from the Wenchang space launch site in the southern island province of Hainan on Monday.

The rocket blasted off at 8:02 p.m. Beijing time (1202 GMT), state news agency Xinhua said, adding that the mission was unsuccessful and the cause was under analysis and investigation.

China's National Space Administration did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

SpaceX founder and CEO Elon Musk, commenting on a post about the failed launch on X, wrote "rockets are insanely hard." Many private and state-owned Chinese firms are racing to close the gap with SpaceX.

"I hope they have a speedy recovery," he added.

Jonathan McDowell, an honorary professor at Durham University and a member of the Center for Space Environmentalism, said launch video showed the rocket was completely destroyed at relatively low altitude and speed, meaning neither the satellite nor debris reached orbit.

Monday's failure was the Long March 7A's first since its maiden flight in March 2020, when an in-flight malfunction caused the mission to fail.

The rocket returned to flight successfully a year later and completed over a dozen successful flights before Monday's mission, based on Chinese launch records.

Part of the same series as ChinaSat-4a

A report by China National Radio, later removed from a page hosted by the Baidu search engine, identified the payload as Zhongxing-4B, or ChinaSat-4B, and the launcher as the Long March 7 modified rocket, another name for the Long March 7A.

The satellite is part of the same series as ChinaSat-4A, launched in 2024, according to an assessment by Reuters of the available evidence. China described that satellite as providing voice, data, radio and television transmission services.

Such high-orbit communications satellites can relay broadcast programming and telecommunications over large areas, including remote locations beyond the reach of terrestrial networks, but it was not immediately clear whether ChinaSat-4B had the same role, customers or capabilities.

The Long March 7A is a medium-lift rocket designed for high-orbit missions.

Impact on other missions

The findings of the investigation will determine whether the failure is confined to the Long March 7A or prompts wider checks of shared components, manufacturing or launch-site operations.

Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting, called the accident "not a great development" for the Long March 7A program, but said "the damage seems limited" based on the information publicly available.

The vehicle is used mainly to send communications satellites to high orbit, rather than to deploy China's large groups of satellites in low Earth orbit, meaning the failure should not meaningfully affect the pace of those launches, he said.

China is preparing for the Chang'e-7 lunar mission at Wenchang. Chinese authorities have officially said Chang'e-7 is planned for launch in the second half of 2026, but launch observers have identified a possible window late this month. The mission's Long March 5 rocket and spacecraft are at the site.

Chang'e-7 will explore the Moon's south pole, including permanently shadowed craters that may contain water ice.

It will use a Long March 5, a larger rocket that is different from the Long March 7A. Curcio said he did not expect the Long March 7A failure to have a meaningful impact on the Chang'e-7 launch schedule. — Reuters