Orienspace launches first private rocket in East China Sea

Orienspace, a private Chinese rocket maker, conducted the third flight of its Gravity 1 carrier rocket on Wednesday morning.

The 30-meter-tall rocket blasted off at 10:54 am from a launch service ship off the coast of Shanghai and placed its payloads — nine satellites and a piece of experimental equipment — into their preset orbital positions.

This is the first time that a private Chinese rocket has been launched from the East China Sea, and also marks the closest space launch to Shanghai to date.

Before the mission, the first and only rocket launch from the East China Sea took place in April 2022, when the State-owned industry giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp used a Long March 11 rocket to deploy five Earth-observation satellites.

The Gravity 1 rocket consists of three core stages and four boosters, all powered by solid-propellant engine and equipped with flexible swinging nozzles.

The model is now the world's biggest and mightiest solid-propellant launch vehicle and also the most powerful in all of Chinese private rockets.

The rocket made its debut launch from the Yellow Sea in January 2024, blasting off from its launch service ship off the coast of Haiyang in Shandong province. It made Orienspace the fifth private Chinese company to have its own carrier rocket, following i-Space, Galactic Energy, Space Pioneer and LandSpace.

Its second flight happened in October 2025 from the same site in the Yellow Sea.

Designers said the Gravity 1 is capable of carrying a total of 30 lightweight satellites in a single flight. It can also bring a large, heavyweight satellite or even a small cargo spaceship to orbit.

Orienspace has established several production, assembly and testing complexes in Haiyang, enabling the company to conveniently move rockets on launch service ships, according to executives.

Six out of the nine satellites deployed during the mission were jointly developed by Beijing MinoSpace Technology, a private satellite maker, and Huantian Wisdom, a State-owned satellite operator in Sichuan province.

They will work together with two previously launched optical satellites and two synthetic aperture radar satellites to form a constellation consisting of four optical satellites and six radar satellites with the aim of full-range data acquisition and drastically improved spatial coverage capacity.

The satellite constellation is projected to support demand for remote sensing data across multiple sectors in Southwest China, including land surveying and mapping, emergency disaster relief, agriculture, forestry and water conservancy, according to a statement from Beijing MinoSpace Technology.