History
2023:5 consecutive successful satellite launches
On January 9, 2023, the Chinese rocket and space company Galactic Energy made another launch of its Ceres-1 carrier. For the first time, a private company from China managed to make five successful starts in a row.
The missile was launched from the Jiuquan Cosmodrome in the Gobi Desert in northwestern China at 13:04 Beijing time (at 08:04 Moscow time). Five spacecraft of various purposes acted as payloads. This is, in particular, the Tianqi-13 satellite, which will become part of the Tianqi group. The project, which began in 2018, provides for the formation of a system of 38 communication devices in low Earth orbit. They will provide Internet services to Chinese commercial customers, including in hard-to-reach regions.
The two satellites in the payload belong to the Tianmu meteorological system. Another device - Nantong Zhongxue - was created at Nantong High School and launched as part of an educational initiative. The fifth satellite was the SciTech-1 scientific mission apparatus, the details of which were not disclosed.
The launch comes less than two months after Galactic Energy sent five Jilin 1 family Earth optical remote sensing satellites into orbit in November 2022. Overall, the company guaranteed eight to ten Ceres-1-series missile launches. Achieving five consecutive successful starts by a private aerospace company in China is expected to improve the industry's outlook and boost the confidence of related sectors such as banks and insurance structures. In recent years, China's private commercial space sector has been growing rapidly, and market participants are striving to ensure the reliability of launches at a relatively low cost.[1]