Kaituozhe (rocket family)
Chinese solid fueled launch vehicle based on the road mobile DF-21 IRBM
The Kaituozhe (Chinese: 开拓者; pinyin: kāi tuò zhě; lit. 'pioneer') or KT rocket family is a series of launch vehicles built by the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
Kaituozhe-1
Kaituozhe-1 (KT-1) was a small, solid fueled launch vehicle based on the road mobile DF-21 IRBM with an additional upper stage (in total 4 stages). It was 13.6 meters in length and 1.4 meters in diameter, with launch mass of 20t. It was possible to launch KT-1 both from a truck-based platform or from airborne platform. It had a 100 kg to LEO payload capacity. It was possibly the launch vehicle for a Chinese ASAT system that was tested against an old Chinese weather satellite in 2007.
The vehicle has performed two flights, the first on 15 September 2002 and the second 16 September 2003. The first flight failed to place a 50 kg satellite into polar orbit due to a second stage malfunction. The second flight was also a failure, however Chinese officials declared some success citing the guidance systems, fairing separation and satellite-launcher separation as successful.
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This entry incorporates text from “Kaituozhe (rocket family)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.