Lights, camera, takeoff!

A growing number of Chinese shutterbugs are training their lenses on rocket launches as the country's space program develops, Zhao Lei reports.

Young mother Zhang Jingyi is willing to pay 50,000 yuan ($7,700) to a hotel owner in a coastal township about 3,000 kilometers to the south of Beijing, where she lives, to cover the cost of renovating the hotel's rooftop.

Zhang is not a real estate investor. Nor is she a property broker or private detective used to observing targets from on high. She's a freelance photographer who just wants a neat, clean platform in Longlou township in Hainan province for her newest hobby－taking pictures of soaring Chinese carrier rockets.

"The Gloria Longda Hotel's rooftop is the perfect place to take pictures of rocket launches because－except for the buildings inside the launch complex－it is nearest to the two launch towers," Zhang explains.

"Standing there, you can produce very clear photos of the rocket's front side. The problem is that the rooftop is in poor condition since it hadn't received proper maintenance and really looks like it belongs to an unfinished building. So, if the hotel manager agrees with my terms,I'll be glad to pay for the cost to improve it."

Her terms are plain and simple: The manager will reserve a place of her choice on the rooftop each time she comes to Longlou to photograph launches.

Longlou is a farming community with a population of about 26,000 in Wenchang city and is home to the Wenchang Space Launch Center, China's youngest and only coastal launch facility.

The center, which was first used in June 2016, is central to the nation's deep-space exploration programs and manned spaceflights because it's the only space facility in China capable of launching the Long March 5 heavy-lift carrier rocket, an essential part of those programs.

Several factors－the rapid growth of China's space industry and its rise in the international arena, recent achievements in lunar-and Mars-exploration programs, and space facilities becoming more open to the public－have attracted Chinese shutterbugs like Zhang and her friends to grab snapshots of the country's space endeavors, which are usually embodied by the spectacular scene of gigantic rockets lifting off.

During the past three spaceflights from the Wenchang center, Zhang and dozens of professional and amateur photographers packed Gloria Longda's rooftop, waiting for the moment when the rocket thundered skyward.

"The thought of taking pictures of rocket launches had occasionally come to my mind, but I didn't actually do it because I had been focused on photographing stars and wild animals around the world," Zhang says.

"At the end of 2019, some of my friends, who are freelance photographers, were commissioned by a carmaker in Beijing to take pictures of a Long March 5 launch in December that year because the company is an official partner of China's space agency, and it wanted to use the photos in its promotional materials."