Beijing - China plans to develop a new range of heavy-duty carrier rockets for its busy space programme and commercial satellite launching, state media said on Wednesday. The Long March-5 rockets are designed to carry payloads of up to 25 tons into near-Earth orbits, up from the current limit of 9 tons, the official China Daily newspaper quoted space officials as saying.
"They are designed to launch space stations or heavyweight satellites, which the current Long March 3-A rockets cannot handle," the newspaper said.
The diameter will increase from 3.35 metres to 5 metres for the new rockets to be built in the northern city of Tianjin, it said.
"They are expected to meet the demands of space technology development and peaceful use of space for the next 30 to 50 years," it quoted Wu Yansheng, president of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, as saying.
"It will also give China the same launch capabilities as developed countries," Wu said, referring to the international market for commercial satellite launches.
The Long March-5 rockets will be launched from a new space centre in the southern island province of Hainan from 2013.
Officials did not give the estimated cost of building the new launch centre or the carrier rocket centre in Tianjin, the newspaper said.
Research and tests on key technology for the rockets were already completed, it said.
The port city of Tianjin was chosen because it would allow the Long March-5s to be shipped along the Chinese coast to Hainan, since the rockets will be too big to transport by rail to the three current inland launch centres, it said.
China has launched 103 Long March carrier rockets since in April 1970, with only seven failures and a 100-percent success rate since October 1997.
The rockets carried China's first manned space mission, Shenzhou V, in 2003.
Last week a Long March-3A launched Chang'e-I, China's first lunar satellite.
Western analysts believe the Long March rocket technology for the rockets has dual use in space and military fields.
