Chinese private firm launches first space rocket

BEIJING: A suborbital rocket was launched into space Thursday by a start-up in China´s burgeoning commercial aeronautics industry, as private firms snap at the heels of their dominant American rivals.

OneSpace, the Beijing-based company behind the launch, is one of dozens of Chinese rivals jostling for a slice of the global space industry, estimated to be worth about $339 billion by Bank of America Merrill Lynch and currently dominated by SpaceX and Blue Origin in the US. Its nine-metre (30-foot) “Chongqing Liangjiang Star” rocket took off from an undisclosed test field in China´s northwest and reached an altitude of 273 kilometres (170 miles) before falling back to Earth, the company said in a statement.

The launch aimed to demonstrate an early working model of the company´s OS-X series of rockets, designed to conduct research linked to suborbital flights. By the end of the decade OneSpace expects to build 20 of the OS-X rockets, which would be capable of placing a 100-kilo (220-pound) payload into an orbit 800 kilometres from the Earth´s surface, said company spokesman Chen Jianglan.