On a Monday evening over Hainan, what was meant to be a routine chapter in China's expanding space story became something else entirely — a Long March 7A rocket, carrying the ChinaSat-4B communications satellite toward high Earth orbit, erupted into a fireball less than ninety seconds after leaving the ground. The loss, witnessed by spectators and confirmed hours later by state media, is a rare and costly interruption to a program that had been building quiet confidence. Investigators now face the patient work of reconstructing those ninety seconds, searching for the moment where ambition and