They may look like waffle-makers, but China's new rocket fins are cooking up something even more special: the ability to guide rockets to a safe zone after launch.
The country's latest launch of a Long March 2C rocket, from Xichang, China, on July 26 local time (July 25 EDT), included grid fins designed to do a better job of protecting populated areas away from the launch site. The fins appear similar to those that SpaceX rockets use to steer themselves down for landing and later reuse, although the Chinese fins aren't intended to make the rocket reusable.
A new video released by China Central Television (CCTV) shows the fins deploying hundreds of miles above Earth, with our planet gently spinning in the background as the rocket flies.
Related: Watch China Land on the Moon's Far Side in This Awesome Video!
The rocket didn't land upright, if the footage is any indication, but it did touch down about where designers said they expected it to, according to a statement from the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, the prime contractor for the country's space work.
"The distance of the landing site from the theoretical site is within five kilometers [3.1 miles]; to be more specific, it is in a range of two to three kilometers [1.2 to 1.9 miles]," Mou Yu, chief designer of the Long March 2C, said in the statement.
Many of China's rocket facilities are within close range of populated areas, making launch debris a more pressing concern there than it is at the more isolated launch sites in the United States and the former Soviet Union. China, a recent SpaceNews article observed, chose to build its launchpads inland despite this risk because of national security concerns.
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