BEIJING: Footage released Sunday by the China Manned Space Agency captures astronauts conducting research and daily work aboard China’s Tiangong space station, including a rice-growing trial aiming for a harvest in orbit. Behind these orbital achievements lies the enduring Long March spirit. Borrowing its name from the Red Army’s epic expedition, China’s Long March rocket series embodies that pioneering grit, carrying space hardware into orbit while pushing forward reusable rocket innovation.
These scenes reflect how far China’s space capabilities have developed, from crewed flight to a space station in orbit and efforts to master reusable rockets.
The name has become one of the most recognizable in Chinese aerospace sector, supporting crewed missions, launching BeiDou navigation satellite constellations, lunar and Mars exploration, and space station construction, Wang Yanan, editor-in-chief of Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Sunday. Decades of development and successive breakthroughs have made the rocket program itself a technological Long March spanning generations, he said.
The year 2026 marks the 90th anniversary of the victory of the Long March, the epic military trek from 1934 to 1936 that broke through the encirclement of Kuomintang forces. Some participants marched as far as 12,500 kilometers, helping lay the foundation for the eventual victory of the Chinese revolution, according to the Xinhua News Agency.
The rockets bearing its name reached another milestone on October 10, when a Long March-12 placed the 27th batch of low-Earth orbit internet satellites into their planned orbit. It was the Long March family’s 671st launch, Xinhua reported. The first came on April 24, 1970, when a Long March-1 rocket carried Dongfanghong-1, China’s first artificial satellite, into space.
That first flight followed years of work under difficult conditions. China began developing the launcher in the 1960s to send Dongfanghong-1 into orbit, when its industrial base was weak and access to key technologies was tightly restricted from abroad, according to Xinhua.
“Naming the launch vehicle ‘Long March’ meant that, like the Red Army on the Long March, it would overcome every difficulty and ultimately achieve victory,” Han Houjian, who worked on the Long March-1’s overall design, recalled, according to Xinhua.
At a media briefing on September 21, Long Lehao, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and a launch vehicle expert at China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, traced the name to a proposal by pioneering Chinese scientist Qian Xuesen on May 31, 1966.
The name “Long March” conveyed the idea that developing China’s launch vehicles was a new Long March toward the stars, Long said, quoting Qian. “Just as the Red Army had endured countless hardships on its 12,500-kilometer trek, China’s rocket developers would have to overcome formidable obstacles, with the same conviction that their efforts would ultimately lead to success,” he added.
Since the first launch, the family has progressed from carrying one satellite at a time to deploying 41 in a single mission. It has also expanded the range of spacecraft it can launch and advanced from expendable vehicles toward reusable designs, Long said.
These advances give the name a meaning beyond historical remembrance, Kang Guohua, a senior member of the Chinese Society of Astronautics and a professor of aerospace engineering at Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, told the Global Times on Sunday. Just as the Red Army fought to break through encirclement, China’s space program has repeatedly had to find a way through external restrictions, he said. –The Daily Mail-Global Times news exchange item
