The viral video of a Chinese rocket exploding

The viral video of a Chinese rocket exploding

Michael Bay (director of Armaggedon, Pearl Harbor and Transformers among other titles) would have loved it. The director, a fan of explosions, would have admired the staging of a Chinese rocket that explodes upon landing, because the failure is filmed so dramatically that you can’t help but tip your hat to everyone involved, even if things didn’t go as planned.

The star of the show is a Nebula-1 launch vehicle, a reusable rockettwo-stage and fueled by kerosene manufactured by the Chinese company Deep Blue Aerospace. It is about 20 meters high and has a diameter of 3 meters.

As part of a high-altitude vertical flight test, the rocket took off from its launch pad at the Ejin Banner spaceport in Inner Mongolia, activated its three Thunder-R engines, flew at an altitude of about five kilometers without problems and descended again.

But that’s when the video gives way to an action movie sequence. As the rocket levitates toward the pad and deploys its landing gear, we see a drone camera spiraling down from above. It pirouettes around its target in epic dives until it zooms in for the star shot: the rocket maintains its position a few meters above the ground, before falling and exploding in a fireball, which is just when the slow motion begins. . Of cinema. So much so that he has published it on his own X account.

Deep Blue Aerospace published a detailed statement about what you learned from the testsomething surprising considering usual practice: the statement is very transparent.

According to the company, it completed 10 of its 11 primary objectives, achieving a landing accuracy of less than one meter. “After the test, a preliminary retrospective analysis of the test process data revealed that during the final landing and stopping section, the engine thrust servo tracking control command was abnormal, causing the height of landing of the rocket body exceeds the design range and the rocket body – the statement says -. The technical team of Deep Blue Aerospace to complete ‘return to zero’ mission as soon as possible to lay a solid foundation for the success of subsequent recovery flight tests. Based on the summary of this test and the elimination of technical glitches, Deep Blue Aerospace will again conduct a high-altitude vertical recovery mission in November.”