The Plan on Paper
How does a country go from 67 orbital attempts in one year to a planned hundred the next? For China, the answer arrived on paper: a blue book that the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation put out on Feb. 26, 2024, projecting about 100 space launch missions for the year, which would set a national record, as reported by Liu Shiyao of People’s Daily. The document doubled as a mission list, and it was crowded.
The China Space Station had entered its normal operation stage, and 2024 was to bring it two cargo spacecraft missions, two crewed spaceflights and two return missions. Beyond low Earth orbit sat the more historically pointed entries: Queqiao-2, a relay satellite to link the far side of the moon with Earth, and Chang’e-6, a probe tasked with collecting samples from the lunar far side, the first mission of its kind in human history.
New Rockets, New Launch Site
Intriguingly, the manifest leaned on hardware making its debut. Two newly developed carriers, the Long March-6C and the Long March-12, were slated for maiden flights, while an ocean salinity detection satellite on CASC’s task list promised high-resolution, high-precision measurements of the seas. The commercial side had its own milestone coming: China’s first commercial spacecraft launch site was expected to host its first launch in 2024, and the country planned to accelerate construction and networking of multiple satellite constellations.
The prior year set the bar. Across 2023, China ran 67 space launch missions, ranking second worldwide, and lifted 221 spacecraft into orbit, a Chinese record at the time. The Long March series flew 47 times at a 100 percent success rate, pushing past 500 cumulative launches, with commercial rockets accounting for the other 20 flights. The blue book credited orderly, high-density operations with a high success rate and rapidly rising spacecraft development capability.
What the Record Serves
What researchers and officials found in the rearview was breadth as much as volume. The review pointed to sustained breakthroughs across carrier rockets, human spaceflight, moon and deep space missions, plus communications, navigation, remote sensing and scientific experimentation, along with stronger capabilities to access, explore and use space. On the applications side, an increasingly complete system built on satellite communications, remote sensing and navigation-positioning supported national strategies, the “dual carbon” goals and wide swaths of the economy.
The diplomacy section read like the launch schedule’s softer twin: seminars, shared data, joint technical work, application services and space culture education, framed as advancing the Belt and Road Initiative and, in the document’s phrasing, a community bound by a shared future. The hard numbers behind the messaging: roughly 100 planned launches in 2024, up from 67 attempts and 221 spacecraft delivered the year before.
