Long March 5

Just under 57 metres tall on a five metre core with four 3.35 metre boosters, 851,800 kilograms on the pad. The 10,620 kilonewtons at liftoff comes from eight YF-100 booster engines at 1,200 kilonewtons each plus two YF-77 on the core at 518 each. The 9,600 kilonewton figure that circulates is the boosters alone and leaves the core out.

The 25 tonne low orbit figure belongs to the 5B, the variant that deletes the upper stage entirely and flies its five metre core all the way to orbit under a large fairing. That is what threw the Tiangong modules up. The standard two-stage 5 has no published low orbit figure at all, because it was built for high energy injections: about 14 tonnes to geostationary transfer, and rather less to the Moon. Quoting one number for both is the most common error made about this vehicle, and the reference orbit for the 25 tonnes is itself vague across sources.

The second flight, on 2 July 2017, failed on a YF-77 oxidiser turbopump and took Shijian-18 with it. For a national programme with no alternative heavy lifter that was not one lost payload but a stop order on everything queued behind it. The stand-down ran twenty-eight months, and Chang'e 5, the Mars mission and the station all waited it out.

Eighteen flights across both variants, seventeen successes. That is a decent record and a thin one. A flight rate this low means every Chinese flagship mission is a single point of failure riding a vehicle that has not yet accumulated enough launches to know its own reliability, which is a structural weakness that only cadence fixes.

It is also the one vehicle in this section with no usable primary source. CALT, CNSA and CASC publish nothing fetchable about it, so every figure here comes from outside observers reading Chinese state media, and two of the best of those disagree about which column the payload numbers belong in. Treat the precision accordingly.