From the Long March to space: A journey across 90 years

From the Xichang Satellite Launch Center in Sichuan, southwest China, Long March rockets continue to propel satellites and spacecraft into orbit. The name can be traced back to the Red Army's Long March in the 1930s, one of the most defining episodes of modern Chinese history. As China's space program grew over the decades, this name travelled alongside its rocket family.

The name was formally adopted back in 1966, when engineers set out to build the country's first satellite launch vehicle. It was an uphill battle. China's industrial foundation remained weak at that time, and access to foreign technology was extremely limited. Designers relied on simple tools, even hand-cranked calculators, to crunch all the complex mathematics needed for rocket design and flight planning.

On April 24 1970, the Long March -1 rocket put China's first satellite, Dongfanghong-1, into orbit. That launch marked China's arrival in the space age and gave this historic name fresh, new meaning. 

Since then, Long March rockets have taken on a wide range of missions: satellite deployments, crewed space flights, lunar expeditions and deep-space exploration. By October 10, 2026, the Long March family had completed 671 launches.

The story of Long March rockets is not just a list of milestones. It also includes painful, hard-won failures.

On July 2, 2017, the Long March-5 Y2 rocket malfunctioned roughly 346 seconds after liftoff. The engineering team had to pinpoint what went wrong and fix every flaw before the rocket could fly again.

Over the next two years, investigators dug into the root cause, refined the rocket's design, and ran endless ground tests. Then, on December 27, 2019, Long March-5 Y3 successfully reached orbit carrying the Shijian-20 satellite. Those two launches were separated by 908 days of relentless troubleshooting.

Han Houjian, former chief designer of Long March-1, once spoke about drawing strength from the Red Army's Long March. He stressed that staying anchored to a clear goal matters most when you hit hardship.

The Long March-5 team's ordeal offers a tangible example of that spirit in action. Progress came only by diagnosing failure, validating fixes, and proving the rocket was ready to fly again. The name inherited from history now stood for a new generation of engineers confronting their own set of daunting challenges.

The link between the Red Army's Long March and China's space program also lives in the story of the Xichang Satellite Launch Center. The Liangshan region where the site was built had been crossed by Red Army troops decades earlier.

After Long March-1's successful launch in 1970, a team of workers left the Gobi Desert and headed south to Liangshan to build the launch base. They built roads, bridges and other infrastructure under harsh conditions. The Changzheng Bridge over the Anning River, located within the Xichang Satellite Launch Center compound, still stands as a quiet reminder of the arduous early construction of Chinas space launch site.

The same land that witnessed the Red Army's arduous trek now became the cradle of China's space program, as workers laid its groundwork.

Decades on, the Long March series has evolved from an early experimental rocket project into a full fleet of launch vehicles tailored for different tasks in space. Behind every advance stand generations of researchers, engineers and ground crews who built China's space capabilities from the ground up.

While the rockets have taken on ever more ambitious roles, their name stays unchanged. First chosen to honor the Red Army's Long March, it still carries that legacy as China pushes further into deep space.