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July 24th, 2:50 a.m.
The Pioneer spacecraft ascended from the Qiongzhou Xinyuan Space Launch Center. The launch took place at the darkest moment of the entire day, with the tail flame of the liquid oxygen and methane engine illuminating the clouds, even eclipsing the moon's brilliance.
The reason for choosing this time for the launch was because of the recent spell of extremely poor weather, and the launch schedule was extremely tight:
On July 23rd, two New Yuan No. 3 rockets sent two service modules into space, costing approximately 1.5 billion and 3.5 billion RMB respectively. The latter was particularly expensive because it carried the most advanced optical remote sensing system. The space agency dismantled an entire Practice Eighteen Backup Star system and fitted it onto the module, along with a series of deep space exploration instruments. It was extremely costly.
