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noiselaunch2026-07-23

CASC launches Tianlian II-06 data relay satellite on Long March-3B

CASC

A Long March-3B carried China's Tianlian II-06 relay satellite into orbit from Xichang despite a lightning strike, per Xinhua and SpaceNews.

Image: news.cgtn.com
// sources · 3 attached
  1. [1]mainstream pressenglish.news.cn↗
  2. [2]mainstream press · corroborationnews.cgtn.com↗
  3. [3]trade press · corroborationspacenews.com↗

what happened

A Long March-3B rocket launched China's Tianlian II-06 data relay satellite from Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 8 p.m. Beijing time on July 23, per Xinhua and CGTN. Lightning struck the rocket about 30 seconds into flight, per SpaceNews; CASC's own statement did not mention the strike and reported the mission a complete success. Tianlian II-06 will provide data relay and telemetry, tracking and command services for crewed spacecraft, the Tiangong space station, and medium- and low-Earth-orbit resource satellites; the satellite reached its planned orbit, and the flight was the 658th Long March mission overall.

why it matters

Routine cadence entry under the site's launch policy: Tianlian is China's TDRS-equivalent relay network underpinning Tiangong operations, and each addition extends the ground-station-independent communications backbone that Chinese crewed and commercial missions on Long March vehicles depend on.

signal-to-noise

WIDELY REPORTED
4/5
leadtier 3 of 5 on its owncorrob+1 earned from 1 rulemixone source class (mainstream)
calculation
3base tier 3 from lead source class "mainstream" (Xinhua) english.news.cn+12 distinct sources (>=2)
= 4current score, recomputed by the engine on every change
movements
3→42026-07-24 · Dispute is erroneous, not a genuine editorial conflict: it was auto-generated by crossfeeding last_flight_date, a field not on the code's recognized monotonic-counter list (flights_total, flights_successful, sats_launched_total, launches_total), so the gate treated this item's fresh 2026-07-23 flight date as contradicting the registry's pre-event 2026-06-16 snapshot for Long March-3B rather than recognizing it as superseded-by-date. Both sides describe the same vehicle's most recent flight at different points in time, not a genuine same-metric conflict. Resolving the dispute and rescoring with the identical, unchanged source list.
scorer v2how scores work →

quick facts

Companies
CASC
Category
launch
Impact
noise
SNR
4 / 5
Event date
2026-07-23
Published
2026-07-24 09:26 UTC
#launch#china

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