Chinese space firm unintentionally launches its new rocket
Chinese space firm unintentionally launches its new rocket
Space Pioneer had been prepping the vehicle for its debut launch later this summer.
The rocket was undergoing a static fire test of the stage, in which a vehicle is clamped to a test stand while its engines are ignited, when the booster broke free. According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand "due to a structural failure."
Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.
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The test stand is only about 5 km away from the city's downtown and less than a kilometer from a smaller village.
No NIMBY in The People's Republic (tm).
I'm pretty sure it's ridiculously hard to stop government projects in your backyard there. The best you can do is refuse to sell your land.
It won't matter if you do, unless you're a Party member. Example: the completion of the Three Gorges Dam was accompanied by forcing upwards of 30 million people to move. No compensation or new housing provided...just move somewhere else or you'll drown. Fascinating book based on his long term reporting (I think New York Times IIRC), "River Town" by Peter Hessler. He was there, he lived it.
Chinese don't own the land, the government is. And even if they own it, local officials can always call in the bulldozers midnight.
It‘s impossible. You can protest against mid sized manufacturers that pollute the environment but you cannot do anything whatsoever against directly state baked companies that do the real damage at which point you might rightfully ask yourself: „Why bother about the environment or safety whatsoever? The state says it takes care of it and I have no say in it anyway.“
These projects tend to bring a bunch of economic development along with it. Would be like Floridians rejecting Cape Canaveral or Texans trying to shut down SpaceX. Locals might not be thrilled, but developers and business leaders are ready for the rest of you to take the risk.
Yet those don’t have cities right next to the blast zone
Cape Canaveral is directly east of Orlando, with a bunch of vacation resort spots hugging the shore. The Florida coastline isn't exactly lightly developed.
From Apple Maps, it looks like it’s on a mostly undeveloped island, with the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away. I can’t tell how far away Orlando is, but much further.
Compared to this Chinese test site, it looks like population centers are 5x - 10x farther, plus you have an entire ocean to blow stuff up
the nearest town, Cape Canaveral, over ten miles away
The Falcon 9 that made an uncontrolled reentry in March of 2021 spread debris from Washington to Oregon.
Chinese Long March rocket failures have dropped parts into Indian states of Maharashtra and Gujarat.
Ten miles isn't far for a vehicle moving 17,500 mph during the 12 minutes or so necessary to break Earth's gravity well.
Not for long anyway.
The test facility was dangerously close to city resulting at minimum in an enormous amount of broken windows (clearly heard in the recorded videos) that were far from the closest homes. no doubt there was harm to people associated with large volumes of breaking windows.