China has spent recent years launching a steady stream of rockets to put satellites into orbit, and some of those launches have crossed into Taiwan's air defense identification zone, prompting Taiwan's Ministry of National Defense to issue public notices each time it happens. Early on the morning of August 19, Taiwan tried something of its own. The National Chung-Shan Institute of Science and Technology, the island's top defense research body, test launched a satellite launch vehicle from Mudan Township in Pingtung County. The rocket veered off course and crashed in a spiraling arc. It came down close enough to a nearby village to unsettle some residents, though no one was hurt. China's rockets are aimed at keeping pace with the United States in space. What was Taiwan's rocket for?
A Special Defense Budget Left The Kirin Project On Hold
The August 19 launch was the institute's first ever test of a satellite launch vehicle, carried out under a program known internally as the Kirin Project (麒麟專案). The program's own history raises an obvious question: it had been stalled for some time before this test, so why restart it now? On launch day, institute president Lee Shih-chiang (李世強) personally oversaw the operation on site, a detail worth noting given that Defense Minister Wellington Koo (顧立雄) picked Lee by name to lead the institute. That alone signals the Kirin Project is no routine program.
The Kirin Project's actual goal is to build a launch vehicle capable of putting small satellites into low Earth orbit at an altitude of 500 kilometers, raising the question of whether Taiwan is trying to build its own version of SpaceX's mass deployment of low orbit satellites. Working in step with the National Space Organization's long term space technology roadmap, the Ministry of National Defense set out under the Kirin Project name to develop a launch vehicle able to carry microsatellites weighing 50 to 200 kilograms to that same 500 kilometer orbit. Between 2018 and 2022, the ministry budgeted roughly $392 million for the effort, spread across five years of research and development.
That timeline collided with a separate priority. In 2021, the defense ministry rolled out a five year, roughly $7.44 billion special budget to strengthen naval and air combat capability, with 2026 marking its final year of execution. The special budget was built to rapidly acquire precision missiles, highly capable naval vessels and wartime weapon systems for coast guard ships. To meet that timeline, the institute poured nearly all of its production capacity into finishing three weapons programs, the Hsiung Sheng missile, the Wan Chien missile and an unmanned attack vehicle, all of which have already been delivered to Taiwan's armed forces. The same budget also covered the land based Sky Bow III air defense system, a field air defense system built around a land launched version of the Sky Sword II missile, and the Hsiung Feng family of anti-ship missiles, including the Hsiung Feng II, Hsiung Feng III and an extended range version of the Hsiung Feng III.
With nearly every production line tied up meeting that special budget's tight deadlines, the Kirin Project was quietly shelved. It only came back to life as the special budget neared completion, restarted under the leadership of Defense Minister Koo and institute president Lee, driven partly by the special budget's approaching end and partly by pressure from higher up the chain of command to get it moving again.
Four Times The Size Of Taiwan's Biggest Missile, And Trouble Within Seconds
According to people familiar with the launch, the rocket flew a nearly vertical profile, with an intended launch angle of 80 degrees, but something went wrong just four seconds after liftoff. The rocket had four stages, and the first stage alone carried roughly 20 times the explosive yield of the institute's Chiang Kung missile. Every time the institute redesigns a rocket engine, it normally runs an ignition test inside a blast resistant building first, but a rocket carrying this much explosive potential could not realistically be tested that way.
The Chiang Kung missile itself made an impression when it was first shown publicly at a defense exhibition specifically because of its unusually large size, bigger than anything else the institute had built before. This new launch vehicle is roughly four times the size of that missile, which gives some sense of just how difficult the engineering challenge was. Following the failed test, the program has been paused while engineers redesign the rocket. As for outside help, a person familiar with the effort said space technology is notoriously difficult to transfer between countries, so Taiwan has no plans to partner with anyone else on it; today, only Russia and North Korea share space technology with each other, and only because of their particular relationship.
Untested Territory, Guided By NASA's Old Data And A New Self Destruct Plan
People familiar with the program note that NASA declassified a batch of information during the Obama administration that turned out to be valuable to space programs around the world, and that SpaceX itself built much of its own program by studying NASA's past failures. The institute naturally drew on the same material. But there is only so much research can tell you, one source said; building a rocket this large means the institute could only find its blind spots by actually flying it.
Engineers' biggest worry going in was whether the rocket's four stages could separate cleanly at different altitudes. The self destruct system built for this first test was never designed to blow the rocket apart in midair. A solid rocket motor burns at more than 2,800 degrees Celsius once ignited, and the institute had never tested a rocket this large before; if it kept burning while falling to the ground, the result could have been a serious disaster. Instead, the self destruct logic was built to detect any anomaly within the first 21 seconds after launch, block ignition of the second stage, and let the first stage simply keep burning until its fuel ran out.
Before the launch, engineers had already calculated the distance between the Jiupeng base (九鵬基地) and the settlements around it, and loaded the first stage with only a third of its originally planned explosive charge, while leaving the other three stages at full planned capacity, precisely to reduce the risk if the rocket came down nearby. That precaution is why the wreckage neither burned nor exploded on impact: the first stage's fuel had already been consumed by the time it hit the ground.
Why Taiwan Is Building Its Own Rocket At All
SpaceX itself failed repeatedly before Elon Musk's company found success, raising the question of whether the institute's own failed test banked a similar kind of experience. People close to the program say the telemetry data collected during the flight is "genuinely precious." After the crash, the institute immediately sent drones to search for the wreckage and found the rocket's nozzle largely intact, though recovery efforts have been complicated by the site's location in old growth forest and heavy rain on the day of the crash. Even without recovering more hardware, officials say the data already gathered is enough to identify what went wrong, though retrieving additional wreckage would still help.
Today, the institute and the National Space Organization divide the work between them: the institute builds the launch vehicle, the space organization builds the satellite, and the two sides combine their work so that the institute's rocket can carry the space organization's satellite into orbit. As for why Taiwan is taking on a project this ambitious in the first place, a source with knowledge of military and government thinking said Taiwan needs the ability to launch its own satellites on short notice in an emergency. Sending a satellite to the United States for launch is normally cheaper, and Taiwan has no intention of deploying a SpaceX scale constellation of low orbit satellites. What Taiwan actually needs is the ability to guarantee that it still has its own satellites operating in the right orbits during a crisis, keeping communications open for the area around Taiwan and preventing a total blockade.
A National Strategy Built On Two Agencies Working In Tandem
President Lai Ching-te laid out three priorities in his inauguration speech: looking ahead with an eye toward sustainability, competing in space and exploring the oceans, and positioning Taiwan globally, effectively elevating space technology to a national strategic priority. When Lai visited the National Space Organization in May 2025, he told staff there that the space program is a central pillar of national policy going forward, and that they should feel free to keep researching, producing and investing, because the country needs their work and the government will back them. He described it as building a "national team," one meant to keep pushing forward together in the race for space.
Taiwan's ambitions in space are clearly still moving forward, with the defense institute and the space organization each handling their part of the work. The Kirin Project's first test failed, but it did so while breaking genuinely new ground: Taiwan had never built a rocket this large entirely on its own before, and the test still yielded valuable data in the process. If a future launch succeeds, it could become one more source of resilience for Taiwan in wartime.
