THE first rockets were Chinese. In the 1230s the armies of the Song dynasty, who were fighting Mongol invaders, started launching “fire arrows” propelled by gunpowder some 300 metres into enemy lines. When the Song’s artillerymen realised that these arrows continued to fly straight even after their fiery exhaust had burned away their feathers, they removed the fletching and the rocket was born.
Almost eight hundred years later Shu Chang, the head of a company called OneSpace, is trying to build on that historical tradition—though not for military purposes. The charred and twisted remnants of OS-X, the firm’s first launch, are strewn across the floor of its laboratory in Daxing, a suburb of Beijing. The launch took place in May, from an undisclosed location in the north-west. OS-X, nine metres tall, climbed to an altitude of 40km and travelled 287km downrange. It remained airborne for five minutes before crashing into desert sands.
This lift-off was a first not only...Continue reading
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