Long March 2F
Chinese launch vehicle
The Long March 2F (LM-2F; Chinese: 长征二号F火箭), also known as Chang Zheng 2F (CZ-2F), is a Chinese human-rated two-stage hypergolic-fuelled medium-lift launch vehicle, part of the Long March 2 rocket family. Launching the Shenzhou spacecraft on all 22 flights of the Shenzhou program, it is one of three in-service orbital rockets worldwide to have launched multiple crews, alongside Russia's Soyuz-2 and the US Falcon 9.
The Long March 2F is a two-stage version of the Long March 2E rocket, which in turn was based on the Long March 2C launch vehicle. The entire family is based on the Soviet R-2. The rocket is entirely fuelled by the hypergolic mixture of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide. The first stage is powered by four YF-20B engines, as well as four boosters each with one such engine; the second stage uses one YF-24 engine.
It is launched from complex SLS at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center. The Long March 2F made its maiden flight on 19 November 1999, with the Shenzhou 1 spacecraft. After the flight of Shenzhou 3, Chinese President Jiang Zemin named the rocket Shenjian (神箭, lit. 'Divine Arrow').
On 15 October 2003, a Long March 2F launched Shenzhou 5, China's maiden crewed mission and achieved its first human spaceflight.
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This entry incorporates text from “Long March 2F” 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.