Private firm in Beijing makes history after successful mission

A private Chinese company used its own carrier rocket to send two satellites and several experimental payloads into space on Thursday, marking the first orbital mission carried out by the country's private-sector space industry.

The SQX-1 Y1 solid-fuel carrier rocket, the first in the SQX-1 series, blasted off at 1:00 pm from a launchpad at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Northwest China's Gobi Desert.

Nearly 15 minutes after ignition, the 25-meter-tall rocket successfully placed the two satellites — one from State-owned defense conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Industry Corp and the other from the Beijing Institute of Technology — into a low-Earth orbit about 300 kilometers above the ground.

The mission's success is considered by experts to be a new milestone in China's space industry as it showed that after previous failed attempts, a Chinese private enterprise has finally succeeded in conducting an orbital launch — a threshold for any serious newcomer in the global space sphere that had only been crossed by the United States' SpaceX before Thursday.