A Chinese rocket carrying a satellite into orbit exploded seconds after liftoff on Monday, August 10, in a rare failure for a launch vehicle considered essential to Beijing's space program.
The Long March 7A broke apart in a huge fireball just 85 seconds after lifting off from the Wenchang Space Launch Center on the island of Hainan. A video captured the moment.
Unlike previous, successful launches, the incident appeared to be downplayed by Chinese state media, with few mentions of the explosion.
The state news agency Xinhua confirmed the failure three hours after launch, saying the rocket had experienced an anomaly during flight. Xinhua said the cause was under investigation but gave no further details.
On Chinese social media, videos of the launch were largely limited to state-produced content, while clips posted by users appeared to have been removed or pushed down in search results on popular platforms such as Xiaohongshu and Douyin.
China's space ambitions
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has said he wants China to become the world's leading space science nation by 2050, and the country is locked in intense competition with the United States on several fronts, including reusable launch technology, lunar research and satellite launches.
Elon Musk, the founder of SpaceX, who has seen several of his own rockets explode after launch, posted on X that rockets were incredibly difficult.
A rocket with one prior failure
The Long March 7A is a satellite-launch rocket designed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, a subsidiary of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the main state contractor for China's space program.
Monday's launch would have been the Long March 7A's 18th mission. The rocket had failed only once before, during its maiden flight in 2020. A second attempt in March 2021 succeeded, with images at the time showing crowds gathered to watch the launch.
Wenchang, home to one of China's main rocket launch centers, is known for space tourism. Tourists and residents regularly gather at the Wenchang Space Launch Observation Center and other vantage points to watch launches.
In a video posted online after the failed launch, exclamations of surprise could be heard as the rocket appeared to disintegrate in the air shortly after 8pm.
Satellite lost in the failure
The rocket was carrying the Zhongxing-4B, also known as ChinaSat-4B, which Chinese state media said would provide radio, television and other communications services to users around the world.
Second launch postponed
Following the Long March 7A failure, the highly anticipated launch of the Zhuque-3 rocket, planned for Tuesday morning at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, was postponed, according to Yicai, a Shanghai-based financial news outlet citing reliable sources.
The Zhuque-3, developed by the private Chinese rocket company LandSpace, is China's first serious attempt at building a reusable launch rocket. It flew for the first time in December 2025, but its first stage caught fire before falling near the planned recovery site.
Last month, China successfully recovered the rocket's first stage during a follow-up test, a breakthrough for the country's reusable rocket program. In that test, the first stage returned to a floating platform about six minutes after the first and second stages separated, according to the state broadcaster CCTV.
China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said in a social media post at the time that the mission marked a historic breakthrough in China's reusable rocket technology and laid a solid foundation for accelerating improvements to the country's access to space.
Not designed for reuse
Unlike the Zhuque-3, the Long March 7A is a three-stage rocket that was not designed to be reused.
The rocket is nearly 60 meters long, with four booster engines, and is capable of sending seven metric tons of payload to geostationary transfer orbit, an altitude of roughly 35,405 kilometers above Earth's surface.
