This is a result of the fact that China's space centers are all located in the middle of the country, away from the coast where it would be much safer as the boosters would simply fall in the ocean, like they do off the coast of Florida. The reason for this is because they didn't want other countries seeing what they were doing. If they did put their lunch sites on the coast, it would have been easy for people like us, and others, to have intelligence ships out in international waters monitoring the launches. Now Russia can get away with this because where they've placed their launch sites, inside their country, they still have places where no one lives and therefore no one will ever get hit by a giant rocket booster falling from the sky. Unfortunately, considering that most lunches have to go toward the East, China has no large empty spaces that can act as it were the ocean.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

Neat... about 50 years back I made my first rocket... 4' long and set off by electonic ignition. I had expected it to lift off like the movies... I was really surprised to see it disappear in a split second. I thought it would slowly lift off... no such luck.

Dik

Gotta love those Chinese.

Why-O-why did that camera guy stop filming just before it hit! Dang it!

That color smoke.. bad ju ju.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com

As we now know NO2

Cheers

Greg Locock


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CRAZY! Launched from control room with high N2O content?

what do you make of the white pieces falling off after lift-off ? Looks like ice coming from the payload fairing ??

another day in paradise, or is paradise one day closer ?

hydrazine and nitrogen tetroxide

ugh.

Jay Maechtlen
http://www.laserpubs.com/techcomm

'Merica isn't perfect, but conservatives and liberals agree that dropping space junk randomly on citizens is not a nice thing to do.
China also drops space junk on other countries (like in Africa).
The Chinese people are awesome, but their gov't officials are cold.

1. If only they felt that way about bombs.
2. National Goverment officials in general act on 'them' for 'us', so I would generally expect cold from all of them.

Yes, I was wondering about that stuff falling off as well. The ice theory is a bit weak as this was the payload which I wouldn't have expected to be that cold as you wouldn't think that it was filled with cryogenic propellant.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

What's falling off are the thermal tiles. That's why they're all symmetric and all the same size and shape. Once the lead tile(s) came off the wind could begin removing the rest easily.

Keith Cress
kcress - http://www.flaminsystems.com