“Flight anomaly” is what official response to the giant fireball in the sky.

Last night at Wenchang, a Long March 7A lifted off at 20:02 carrying 中星4B.

Around T+85s, during first-stage flight near Max-Q, the rocket disintegrated into a bright fireball.

Xinhua later confirmed a “flight anomaly” and total mission failure. Cause “under investigation.”

Low-numbered ChinaSat satellites are not the ordinary broadcast birds — they are the ones repeatedly assessed as military communications assets.

Amateur footage of the explosion spread fast. Mainland video platforms then started scrubbing it.

This is the first failure of the 7A since its 2020 debut failure, after a long string of successes. It is also China’s fourth orbital launch failure of 2026.

The gap between the dry official wording (“飞行异常”) and the actual night-sky fireball is the point.

State media kept it minimal. Public videos of the event did not last long on domestic platforms.

Space is hard. Propaganda is harder when the rocket turns into a fireball in front of personal cameras and the payload is the kind they don’t like talking about.

Our advice, just livestream the whole thing, they should understand, failure is the mother of success.