Cosmic Penguin

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Astronomy & spaceflight weeb penguin. In a relationship w/ Space Shuttle Discovery. Space Launch System & Orion did nothing wrong. Chinese spaceflight news hunter.
Twitterhttps://www.twitter.com/Cosmic_Penguin

Hi!

If you come across this account, please note that I am still thinking of how to make good use of my account since it doesn't seems most major spaceflight players' official accounts have migrated to here.

If you know of any tools that can still automatically repost my Twitter tweets to here, please let me know and I'll restart this reposting service immediately.

Thanks! 😉

Sorry to everyone following my account - I did not have time during my 3 weeks trip to Japan mid-late August to manually repost my Chinese spaceflight thread posts to here from Twitter(X), and I'm still readjusting back-to-normal.

But rest assured that the missing posts will be moved to here soon!

I suddenly remembered CASC has officially reported a "20 m resolution high-orbit radar satellite" going to be launched this year (GEO?). It hasn't yet, but it sharing a name w/ other SAR EO satellites & being "land probing" too seems to put this as a real possibility.

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1616035599999471616

Andrew Jones on Twitter

“China launch plans: CASC has released its 2023 "Blue book," updating it plans to 60+ launches, meaning 80+ planned all in. Only 1 Tianzhou because increased capacity, 200+ spacecraft, 20m SAR sat to GEO, and much more... also a CZ-9 update (1/4)”

Twitter
The cover says it's LM-3B s/n Y92 launching a certain "Ludi Tance-4A". The "LTDC" part stands for "Land Probing" and was used as a different name for L-Band radar satellites L-SAR-01A & B launched Jan. & Feb. 2022 as "LTDC-1A/B". Which points to an interesting possibility for "LTDC-4A"...
The other one is surprising though, on August 11, 17:00 - 21:00 UTC @ Xichang. The zone is run-of-the-mill for LM-3B launches towards GTO, but no good candidates for the thing on top exists, and when someone floated a "launch day mail cover" for this one a huge surprise is found!
There might also be another Jilin-1 EO satellite on board: https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1686236308505849857
China 'N Asia Spaceflight 🚀𝕏 🛰️ on Twitter

“GALACTIC-ENERGY's CEO reposted CHANG-GUANG's Weibo post, suggesting the ~230kg Jilin-1 KF02A will be launched by CERES-1 Y7”

Twitter
This is based on the drop zones' relative locations & official reports of flight 7 being in this month, <20 days since last! It seems to be a share-ride with these 2 satellites giving a perfect match for launch dates: https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1687536126305914880
China 'N Asia Spaceflight 🚀𝕏 🛰️ on Twitter

“Two MINOSPACE satellites: 40kg MN30-3 and 100kg MN100-2, are planned for launch from Jiuquan on August 10 https://t.co/jBNfEGTIHY”

Twitter

There's lack of solid info, but it does seem that besides one that should launch in a day, there are another 2 from China w/t the next 4 days. One of them, August 10 03:00 - 08:00 UTC @ Jiuquan, can be tentatively ID-ed w/ the 7th Galactic Energy Ceres-1:

https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1675015956916236289

China 'N Asia Spaceflight 🚀𝕏 🛰️ on Twitter

“GALACTIC-ENERGY releases the mission patch of the 7th launch of CERES-1: mission "Lucky 7" Probably sea launch?”

Twitter

LMAO imagine any LSP in this world building 300 rocket engines for use every year…

(SpaceX reuses their engines so I’m sure they don’t need 300 Merlins/year these days, nor 300 Raptors in the future)

https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1688548104176635904

China 'N Asia Spaceflight 🚀𝕏 🛰️ on Twitter

“ORIENSPACE signs contract with Wuxi government to build a rocket engine manufacturing facility able to assemble 300 Yuanli-85 kerolox engines annually.”

Twitter

Not surprising TBH, maybe they will have more luck sending it to the ISS…

https://twitter.com/AJ_FI/status/1688505451015548929

Andrew Jones on Twitter

“Indian equipment for China’s Tiangong space station faces export delay https://t.co/zJu4sePJkq”

Twitter