China launches Gravity-1 rocket from sea
Wire desk byline Sourced from Xinhua, Dawn, Arab News, Anadolu and Minute Mirror. Translated and abridged by the GSRRA Desk.
A Gravity-1 carrier rocket carrying a wide-field satellite and two experimental satellites blasts off from waters off the coast of Haiyang, east China’s Shandong Province, Oct. 11, 2025. The rocket blasted off at 10:20 a.m. (Beijing Time), placing three satellites into their designated orbits. The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center conducted the offshore mission. The Gravity-1 carrier rocket made its debut flight in January 2024. (Photo by Guo Jinqi/Xinhua)
China sent a Gravity-1 carrier rocket into space from waters off the coast of Haiyang, east China’s Shandong Province, on Saturday.
The rocket blasted off at 10:20 a.m. (Beijing Time), placing three satellites into their designated orbits. The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center conducted the offshore mission.
A wide-field satellite and two experimental satellites were onboard the carrier rocket.
The Gravity-1 carrier rocket has a low-Earth-orbit payload capacity of 6.5 tonnes and is capable of delivering a 4.2-tonne payload to a 500-km sun-synchronous orbit, according to Xu Guoguang, chief designer and commander of the rocket.
The series of rockets can deploy more than 10 satellites in a single mission, offering generous payload volume, sea or land-launch compatibility, and rapid-response capability, said Xu.
During this launch mission, the Gravity-1 Y2 carrier rocket executed a roughly 40-degree yaw manoeuvre, swinging its trajectory from southeast to due south within seconds, Xu noted.
Powered by a solid-propellant core stage augmented by four solid strap-on boosters, the carrier rocket remarkably enhanced both stability and adaptability under heaving sea conditions.
The Gravity-1 Y1 carrier rocket successfully completed its maiden flight on Jan. 11, 2024, setting a new record as the world’s most powerful solid-fuel rocket and China’s highest-capacity commercial launch vehicle developed by a private enterprise.
The mission expanded the country’s capability in deploying diversified medium and low-orbit satellites on a large scale, further broadening China’s carrier rocket family.
Compared with the Gravity-1 Y1 mission, the Y2 flight demonstrates marked gains in quality, stability and consistency, delivering a demonstrably more reliable vehicle.
The Gravity family of carrier rockets, developed independently by the Chinese commercial aerospace company OrienSpace, is a standardized series of medium-to-heavy lift rockets designed expressly to meet the surging demands for large-scale networking and network replenishment of various types of satellites. ■
A Gravity-1 carrier rocket carrying a wide-field satellite and two experimental satellites blasts off from waters off the coast of Haiyang, east China’s Shandong Province, Oct. 11, 2025. The rocket blasted off at 10:20 a.m. (Beijing Time), placing three satellites into their designated orbits. The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center conducted the offshore mission.
The Gravity-1 carrier rocket made its debut flight in January 2024. (Photo by Guo Jinqi/Xinhua)
A Gravity-1 carrier rocket carrying a wide-field satellite and two experimental satellites blasts off from waters off the coast of Haiyang, east China’s Shandong Province, Oct. 11, 2025. The rocket blasted off at 10:20 a.m. (Beijing Time), placing three satellites into their designated orbits. The Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center conducted the offshore mission.
The Gravity-1 carrier rocket made its debut flight in January 2024.
Reference Link:- https://english.news.cn/20251011/dfeb93bc433e45a4b3b6f8d454727d4e/c.html;
Zamir Ahmed Awan is the founder and Chair of the Global Silk Route Research Alliance, a think tank in Islamabad. He studied engineering at Shanghai University in the 1980s, and years later he went back to China as Pakistan's science counsellor in Beijing, from 2010 until 2016, working on science and higher education cooperation between the two countries.…
