China's Long March 6C Lifts Seven Satellites, Including GalaxySpace's First Export CubeSat

China sent seven satellites into orbit on Tuesday morning, according to China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp, the country's leading space contractor. The 43-metre-tall Long March 6C carrier rocket lifted off at 11:21 am from the Taiyuan Satellite Launch Center, in a mountainous part of Shanxi province, and placed the satellites into their preset orbital positions, the state-owned conglomerate said.

The two-stage Long March 6C was developed by the Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology. It is 3.35 metres in diameter and is propelled by three engines burning liquid oxygen and kerosene. With a liftoff weight of 215 metric tons, it can carry about 2.4 tons to a typical sun-synchronous orbit 500 kilometres up, or 4 tons to a low-Earth orbit 300 kilometres above the ground.

Three of the satellites on this flight — AirSat 14, AirSat 15 and the Lingzhi-09 Thai CubeSat — were developed and built by GalaxySpace, a commercial space firm based in Beijing. The Lingzhi-09 Thai CubeSat is GalaxySpace's first export of a complete satellite and ground system to a foreign user, and, according to the company, the first time a Chinese commercial space enterprise has delivered a full package covering satellite development, launch and in-orbit delivery to a Southeast Asian nation.

AirSat 14 and 15 were built for AirSat, a satellite operator headquartered in Jinan, Shandong province. They carry high-resolution synthetic aperture radars, which build images using radio waves rather than light and so can see through cloud and at night, along with dedicated space-based cloud payloads. The two satellites are tasked with forming an integrated space-based information platform, and GalaxySpace describes the mission as a key breakthrough for it in space-based computing.

GalaxySpace has launched more than 10 synthetic aperture radar satellites to date, bringing the total number of satellites it has independently developed to 49.