Along the sun-drenched golden shores of Haiyang in eastern China's Shandong province near the Yellow Sea, China is aiming for the home of the Dongfang Spaceport to be China’s premier commercial aerospace sea-launch hub.
The synergy defining Haiyang's industrial rise was underscored on September 10, 2026, when China successfully launched a Long March 4B carrier rocket from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center far away in the Gobi Desert. Blasting off at 5:00 p.m. Beijing time, the rocket cleanly delivered six new payloads, including the Remote Sensing 53-01 through 03 satellites and the Remote Sensing 56-01 through 03 satellites, into their predetermined orbits, marking a flawless mission and the 666th flight of the Long March rocket family.
Developed by the Fifth Academy of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), the satellites will spearhead scientific experiments, land and resource surveys, crop yield estimations, and disaster prevention. Meanwhile, the Long March 4B itself—a room-temperature liquid three-stage rocket developed by CASC’s Eighth Academy capable of lifting 2.5 tons into a 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit—exemplifies the reliable backbone driving China's rapid cadence of space exploration.
Back on the shores of Haiyang, the Dongfang Spaceport represents a parallel breakthrough in streamlining how China gets to space from a location closer to China's population centers. Prior to 2019, Haiyang was best known for its Communist history and textile manufacturing, but lacked a high-tech economic anchor until the nation's first successful sea launch demonstrated the immense potential of maritime rocketry. Traditional space launches often suffered from fragmented supply chains, where rockets, satellites, and launch platforms were built and managed thousands of miles apart, dragging prep times out to nearly a month. Haiyang solved this bottleneck by folding an entire aerospace ecosystem into a single six-kilometer-long avenue that may provide more ample efficiency than flying rockets out of the Gobi Desert.
By stacking manufacturing zones, technical support areas, and marine launch facilities side by side, the spaceport compressed a month-long logistics nightmare into a window of under seven days, achieving an integrated loop of local manufacturing, rocket-satellite mating, and immediate dispatch. To date, the Dongfang Spaceport has safely supported 34 sea-launch and testing missions across nine different rocket models, injecting 33.5 billion yuan in investments, attracting 41 aerospace enterprises, and placing 166 satellites into orbit. The August 5 sea launch of the Smart Dragon-3 rocket carrying the Dongfang Heyan constellation further cemented this "star-rocket-ship" closed-loop model.
Beyond hardware and heavy industry, the spaceport has unlocked a massive public tourism market by turning rocket science into a tangible, hands-on experience. The 300-million-yuan Dongfang Spaceport Aerospace Science Popularization Museum has emerged as a national pilgrimage site for youth education, drawing roughly 100,000 visitors annually. Complete with 5D theaters, Mars rover driving simulators, and interactive rocket-building labs, the facility welcomed waves of student groups during the recent summer launch windows. By opening up viewing platforms along the coast and pairing aerospace education with local cultural landmarks, Haiyang converts temporary launch telemetry pulses into long-term economic waves.
As Shandong province targets a commercial aerospace scale of 50 billion yuan by 2027 with a capacity to produce 100 rockets and 150 commercial satellites annually, Haiyang's evolution from a simple seaside launch point into an advanced industrial organizer mirrors the broader ascent of China's new quality productive forces. Whether through sea-borne commercial boosters off the coast of Shandong or precision orbital placements dispatched from inland launch centers, China's aerospace sector is rewriting the destiny of its regional economies while reaching deeper into the stars.
