Xinhua reported this, as reported by Ukrinform.

“Kuaizhou-1A” carrying the spacecraft took off from the Jiuquan Cosmodrome in the Gobi Desert in northwestern China at 14:50 local time (08:00 Kiev time). All satellites entered their planned orbits.

The new Tianmu-1 spacecraft, numbers 15, 16, 17 and 18, will be part of the meteorological satellite group and will be used to collect data on the global atmosphere and provide commercial services in the field of meteorology.

The pre-launch of the Tianmu-1 satellites took place on Monday, December 25.

The next day, on Tuesday, China launched the Long March-11 rocket with three scientific satellites from its sea platform in the morning, and later in the afternoon, it sent two new spacecraft into space for the second time in the day. The BeiDou-3 satellite navigation system is from the Xichang Cosmodrome in southwestern Sichuan province.

The Kuaizhou-1A launch vehicle has a length of 19.4 m, a diameter of 1.4 m and a launch mass of 30 tons. It is a high-reliability, relatively inexpensive solid-fuel rocket designed to launch satellites weighing less than 300 kg into low Earth orbit.

Today’s mission was the 23rd flight of “Kuaizhou-1A”.

As Ukrinform reported, Lockheed Martin’s experimental communications satellite went into the wrong orbit due to problems with the upper stage of Firefly Aerospace’s Alpha launch vehicle.

Photo: “Xinhua”