This Week in Launch: A busy week for launches out of Asia

While it looks like a light week for launches from SpaceX, over in the Pacific Ocean, China will be busy launching several rockets from around its country. Also, Japan will chime in with a rare H-II launch.

This week’s launches:

• January 8 (Monday)
  • ULA Vulcan Peregrine Mission One, 2:18 A.M. [LAUNCHED]
    • SLC-41, Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida
• January 9 (Tuesday)
  • CASC Long March 2C Einstein Probe, 2:20 A.M. ET
    • LC-3, Xichang Satellite Launch Center, China
  • CAS Space Kinetica 1 Third Flight, 9:00 P.M. ET
    • Site 130, Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center, China
  • SpaceX Falcon 9 Starlink Group 7-10, 9:00 P.M. PT
    • SLC-4E, Vandenberg Space Force Base, California
• January 10 (Wednesday)
  • MHI H-IIA 202 IGS-Optical 8, 11:00 P.M. ET
    • LA-Y1, Tanegashima Space Center, Japan
• January 11 (Thursday)
  • OrienSpace Gravity-1 Maiden Flight, 1:00 A.M. ET
    • DeFu-15002 Barge, China Coastal Waters

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ULA debuts Vulcan with perfect flight

Early Monday morning ULA conducted a nearly perfect countdown and launch of its new Vulcan rocket. While the development timeline was far from ideal, you can’t say that ULA doesn’t ensure it always puts its best foot forward in getting the rocket off successfully, every time.

While many parts of Vulcan’s launch system have flown before, including the solid rocket motors, upper stage engines, payload fairings, and more subsystems. The biggest part, the two Blue Origin BE-4 engines, were brand new to space. According to ULA’s Launch Conductor Dillon Rice, the two engines performed great and delivered the Centaur V exactly where it was suppose to go.

While ULA launched Astrobotic‘s Peregrine lander directly down the center of its launch corridor, the lander ran into problems shortly after deployment. So far it looks like some sort of anomaly has caused teams to not be able to orient the lander. Teams fear this is with the propulsion system, which would likely mean an end to any hope of Peregrine attempting a soft landing on the Moon.

Can we compare China’s launch record to SpaceX?

Last year, the US launched a total of 109 successful rockets to space, 96 of those were from SpaceX in the form of Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy rockets. The only nation that came close to competing with SpaceX was China as a whole nation with 66 successful launches.

However, China is not a private company but a country that boasts the world’s largest population and second largest economy by GDP. Even if you just look at the numbers, SpaceX is a single company launching three different rockets, while China has a frenzy of private companies and government agencies launching a large number of different rocket variations. How can these two stats be compared?

Simply, they can’t. That would be like comparing the sales of a regional chain of car dealerships to a local used car lot. Now when that used car lot starts to outperform the regional chain, that’s an impressive stat to look at.

Was this relevant to any story this week? No, but I appreciate you reading it and hope it provokes some sort of thought about the global space race going on at the moment.