Cosmic Penguin

Hmm...launch success has apparently been officially confirmed, T-0 was indeed 17:51 UTC...but the "thingy" has a new name - Shiyan 9! More on that later after I catch some sleep...it's 2:30 am here.

Official reports now gives the capabilities of the LM-7A as 7.0+ t to GTO, 5.0+ t to LTO & 5.5+ t to 200 x 5000 km x 0 deg. inc. equatorial orbit. 3-5 launches are currently planned yearly through to 2025.

It was also confirmed that the boosters & 1st stage separates in one piece (a la GSLV). This has long been suspected as it was mentioned in papers as a drop zone mitigation to bring the LM-7A to Xichang, but it looks this has been adopted for all LM-7A rockets.

As for Shiyan 9 = XJY-6-02, "spatial environment monitoring" is mentioned as the main new tech validation objective (looking at other sats? ). CAST reports the satellite assembly took just 8 months so there must be flight spares all around the place.