SOUNDING ROCKETS

Our knowledge of the sounding rocket program in China is fragmentary and incomplete. When the satellite project was canceled in 1958, engineers set to work on the modest but nonetheless challenging objective of building a sounding rocket (Chapter 2). Directed by Wang Xiji, they made two successful launches with the T – 7M in February and September 1960, reaching 8-km altitude. Later saw the development of meteorological sounding rockets called the He Ping (“peace”) series, a two-stage solid-fuel rocket. He Ping 2 was 6.645 m tall, weighed 331 kg, and was able to reach 72 km. Its first flight took place in 1967, serial production began the

following year, and 49 He Ping 2s were launched from 1970 to 1973. The He Ping 6 series began to fly from Jiuquan in 1971, with a final round of nine launches as high as 90 km in 1979. The third series of sounding rockets was called Zhinui (Weaver Girl), beginning in 1988 from Haikou, Hainan. The Zhinui came in two series: the 1 and the 3. The Weaver Girl 3 rocket was 4.87 m tall, weighed 285 kg, has a payload of 45 kg, and can reach 147 km. By 1997, there had been 22 launches [6].

Sounding rockets resumed in 2008 with the launch of a sounding rocket in connection with the Meridian space weather monitoring project. A second launching was reported on 9th May 2011, the rocket identified as the solid-fuel Tianying 3C, also part of the Meridian program, designed to measure the micro-constituents of the atmosphere, electric fields, ion density, and electron temperatures up to 200 km. Its performance was reported as an altitude of 220 km with an experimental package of 50 kg. According to the program for the future development of Chinese space science, Roadmap 2050 (Chapter 10), China had done far too little work with sounding rockets since the 1980s and was now lagging in such critical areas as payload mass, data processing, and the ability to develop serial production.