A Chinese company plans to launch a rocket into orbit this year

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 for OneSpace but also for China, for it was the first in that country of any rocket built by a private space company rather than a government agency. It was also the world’s first flight of a rocket intended to pave the way for a commercial, solid-fuelled orbital launcher.

Solid fuel is easier and cheaper to handle than the liquid variety, which requires tanks and pumps, and its higher density means that rockets which use it can be made smaller than their liquid-fuelled brethren of equivalent lifting capability. Fine-tuning the flight of a solid-fuelled rocket is harder, though, because the supply of fuel to the motor cannot easily be regulated. For that reason American space companies have followed the liquid-fuelled path trodden by government space agencies around the world. The relative disadvantages of solid fuel do, however, diminish as rockets get smaller. And since OneSpace is not planning to hoist into orbit the multi-tonne loads carried by, say, the Falcon Heavy lifter of SpaceX, America’s leading private space company, the firm hopes that the simplicity of solid fuel will offset its disadvantages.

OS-X was assembled in the laboratory where its remnants now reside. But OS-M, the next generation, will be built in a factory now nearing completion in Chongqing. These solid-fuelled rockets will be 20 metres tall and are destined for orbit. They will be able to launch payloads of up to 205kg—a load the firm hopes eventually to increase to 750kg by adding four booster rockets to the main one.

OneSpace’s target is the rapidly growing market for small, short-lived satellites that will observe Earth’s surface for various purposes. At the moment these devices, which weigh only a kilogram or two, are launched mainly as makeweights on missions whose principle purpose is to put a large satellite into space. Demand for small-satellite launches is now so great, though, that businesses can be built on it. Rocket Lab, an American firm, has recently begun offering dedicated small-satellite launches, using a liquid-fuelled rocket. OneSpace hopes the first OS-M should be launched before the end of the year.

The firm, which was founded in August 2015, owes its birth to government policies, promulgated a year earlier, that permitted private capital to enter the space industry—previously a state monopoly. It is backed by several Chinese venture-capital firms, including Legend Star, Zhengxuan Capital and the Hongtai Fund. It says it has already signed a number of contracts to launch small satellites for Chinese customers. It may not, though, keep its lead for long. Several other firms, including LandSpace and LinkSpace in Beijing, and ExPace, in Wuhan, have similar plans and are pressing it hard.

It seems, then, that in the small-satellite-launch market the Chinese are coming in earnest. With luck, at least from the customer’s point of view, OneSpace and its modern fire arrows are about to ignite a private space race.