Orienspace launches Gravity-1 rocket with 9 satellites from sea platform
Orienspace's solid-fuel Gravity-1 rocket carried nine satellites to orbit from a sea launch platform off Shanghai.
what happened
Orienspace's Gravity-1 rocket lifted off at 02:54 UTC (10:54 a.m. Beijing time) on July 22 from a sea launch platform in the East China Sea off Shanghai, carrying nine satellites to sun-synchronous orbit on a share-ride mission, per Launch Library and Sina Finance. The payloads included the Dongpo 13-14 and Dongpo 17-20 satellites, Xiguang-2 01, Tianyi 49, and the Zidingxiang-3 satellite. It was Gravity-1's third flight overall and its first launch from the Yangtze River Delta region.
why it matters
Gravity-1 is billed as the world's most powerful all-solid-fuel launcher, and this was Orienspace's first commercial sea launch near Shanghai rather than its usual Yellow Sea site off Haiyang, widening the pool of Chinese commercial launch locations serving the country's Earth-observation smallsat sector.
signal-to-noise
quick facts
- Companies
- Orienspace
- Category
- launch
- Impact
- noise
- SNR
- 4 / 5
- Event date
- 2026-07-22
- Published
- 2026-07-22 05:33 UTC