Tag: YF-77

The Long March 5 rocket takes off at 1243 GMT (8:43 a.m. EDT) on Thursday. Credit: Xinhua China’s heavy-lift Long March 5 rocket fired into space on a successful inaugural flight Thursday, debuting a brand new launcher that can carry twice the payload of any other Chinese booster and setting a keystone for the country’s…

China is ready to debut a heavy-lifting rocket rivaling the biggest boosters in the world Thursday, paving the way for a backlog of missions to loft massive space station modules, send deep space probes to the moon and Mars, and perhaps deploy commercial satellites. The Long March 5 rocket is bigger than anything else in…