China To Debut Large Reusable Rockets In 2025 and 2026 (spacenews.com) 43
Andrew Jones reports via SpaceNews: The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) plans to launch four-meter and five-meter-diameter reusable rockets for the first time in 2025 and 2026 respectively, Wang Wei, a deputy to the National People's Congress, told China News Service March 4. The reports do not clearly identify the two rockets. CASC is known to be developing a new, 5.0m-diameter crew launch vehicle, known as the Long March 10. A single stick version would be used to launch a new-generation crew spacecraft to low Earth orbit and could potentially fly in 2025. A three-core variant will launch the "Mengzhou" crew spacecraft into trans-lunar orbit.
The rocket is key to China's plans to put astronauts on the moon before 2030. The Long March 10 lunar variant will be 92 meters long and be able to launch 27 tons into trans-lunar orbit. The 4.0-meter-diameter launcher could be a rocket earlier proposed by CASC's Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). That rocket would be able to launch up to 6,500 kg of payload to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). It would notably use engines developed by the commercial engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian.
CASC's first move to develop a reusable rocket centered on making a recoverable version of the Long March 8. That plan appears to have been abandoned. SAST also plans to debut the 3.8m-diameter Long March 12 later this year from a new commercial launch site. While the Long March 10 has specific, defined uses for lunar and human spaceflight, the second reusable rocket would appear to be in competition with China's commercial rocket companies. While this suggests duplication of effort, it also fits into a national strategy to develop reusable rockets and support commercial ecosystems. The moves would greatly boost China's options for launch and access to space. It would also provide new capacity needed to help construction planned low Earth orbit megaconstellations.
The rocket is key to China's plans to put astronauts on the moon before 2030. The Long March 10 lunar variant will be 92 meters long and be able to launch 27 tons into trans-lunar orbit. The 4.0-meter-diameter launcher could be a rocket earlier proposed by CASC's Shanghai Academy of Spaceflight Technology (SAST). That rocket would be able to launch up to 6,500 kg of payload to 700-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit (SSO). It would notably use engines developed by the commercial engine maker Jiuzhou Yunjian.
CASC's first move to develop a reusable rocket centered on making a recoverable version of the Long March 8. That plan appears to have been abandoned. SAST also plans to debut the 3.8m-diameter Long March 12 later this year from a new commercial launch site. While the Long March 10 has specific, defined uses for lunar and human spaceflight, the second reusable rocket would appear to be in competition with China's commercial rocket companies. While this suggests duplication of effort, it also fits into a national strategy to develop reusable rockets and support commercial ecosystems. The moves would greatly boost China's options for launch and access to space. It would also provide new capacity needed to help construction planned low Earth orbit megaconstellations.
Cold War version 2.0 (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing drove the USA to explore space like seeing the Soviets get there first. That was Cold War version 1.0. It appears that the USA will only go to the moon again if there is a possibility that China could get there while the USA is stuck sending people to low Earth orbit.
It's a bit sad that we need to see such competition play out to get the USA federal government to take space exploration seriously again but I guess that's just human nature.
Re: Cold War version 2.0 (Score:3)
Human nature? No. It's American's nature.
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You deserve a + mod point.
I have been reading the Scientific American archives, and one of the leading threads throughout 1900 until the 1930's is the passiveness of the US legislation. If there had been no citizen movement, the US would not have had a merchant fleet before WWII started.
If concerned citizens had not pressed their legislators, the US would not have had a big fleet at the start of WWII.
I think there are other examples, but the gist is definitely that the US legislation always is very behin
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No, it's complacency, and that's human nature.
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Chinese rockets? They'll be reused once and then kill whoever is on the ground the second time.
Remember, everything China does, is propaganda. Everything is tofu dreg garbage being built.
Re:Cold War version 2.0 (Score:5, Interesting)
And in real world, corruption is horrible but it has limits. You can only have so much corruption before The Party has to react because people start to demand it too much. So while there's indeed a lot of crappy buildings, bridges, and so on in PRC, most of them tend to be fine. Shanghai skyline features some pretty amazing feats of engineering by any measure, and they've been there for quite a while now for example. And while our propaganda apparatus really doesn't like to talk about it, Chinese space program has been showing very promising results in last few years.
So if you're hoping that Chinese corruption makes China not competitive, you're not living in a real world. Chinese corruption is priced in. No one is claiming that Long March 5 doesn't work, because we have observed it working very well for a while. We know they're able to lift space station modules into orbit, because we've watched them do it. We know their space station works, because we observe it. Notably after ISS is decommissioned in 2031, theirs will likely be the only manned space station in orbit unless Russians decide to decouple their part of ISS and keep it in orbit as well. Their lunar lander program had some setbacks, but overall has been a great success.
So if you think that these successes which we have observed are fake or AI or "lunar landing didn't happen because shit tier concrete is often used because of corruption in PRC", you need a reality check. When it comes to their space program, they've demonstrated very undeniable results that are the diametric opposite of "tofu dreg garbage".
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corruption is horrible but it has limits
In the immortal words of Data,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Thank you, sir. I needed that.
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Have you considered using logic instead of emotional response? Because it's quite obvious that corruption has limits. The highest it can go is the generating capacity of whatever is being corrupted, because corruption in itself is not productive. Lowest it can go is zero.
So now that you have the maximum and the minimum, all you need is to approximate where in between corruption lies. In case of overall corruption on national level in relationship to space program, you can observe the probably inputs vs obse
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In China, corruption knows no limits.
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And that is why like all nations where corruption known no limits, it has collapsed about a year after "corruption without limits" consumed everything.
So we're talking about PRC, a nation that is #2 economy in the world where primary complaint is that it floods the markets with too many goods made so efficiently, that no one else can compete at a price point. And impossibility for a nation with "corruption without limits", because while you can conceal a lot of corruption domestically, it's much less viable
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You're making a distinction without a difference. And an stupid point when corruption is as total as it could possibly get, from bottom to top.
Everything China does is based on theft and corruption, their entire economy is based on lies. All those "efficiently made" products are based entirely on stolen technology and effective slave labor, and backed by a graft system that goes from the very bottom to the tippy top, to one man, and government agencies that lie in all things. Their public finance system,
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Fun part: from my point of view, everything you said about China applies to US. Because I'm Finnish, and my level of corruption is so much lower than US's.
Reality is, US is a perfectly functional state, because you have correctly priced in your corruption. As has PRC. Because corruption in itself is not massively destructive. It's incorrectly priced in corruption that is. Notably, just like PRC, corruption also depends on a specific region. Need to do business in NYC? Better price that in at a lot higher ra
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You're just a CCP shill, or a complete fool. No one should believe a word you say.
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Considering that I have a 50 center spamming pretty much every other message I post for last three years or so because I pointed out certain problems with PRC's situation, it's always funny when I get people who are so emotionally invested into hating PRC that they can't give it credit when credit is actually due.
Hint: that's how you lose.
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emotionally invested into hating PRC that they can't give it credit when credit is actually due.
I will when it's due. You're just a useful idiot.
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So be it. I can take a house to the water. I can't make it drink.
Meanwhile https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]
Something to think about when you get over the "PRC so weak, so corrupt, can't do shit" horse. How many critical US technologies cannot be built without PRC parts.
Hint: Still can't significantly increase production of 155mm artillery shells, two years into Ukraine war. Because some of the parts come from China. Including... cellulose needed for modern smokeless gun powder. They started slow walking ex
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The number of critical technologies that can't be built without Chinese manufacturing (and vice versa) is irrelevant. It still has not one damned thing to do with China's total corruption.
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How do you manage to become a global critical producer of critical technologies if you're so corrupt when everything is falling apart.
Try to disengage emotional circuits and let logic run its course instead. It's hard, but at least try.
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I already explained how. You can do all that while being totally corrupt. If you have absolute control over your people and are morally corrupt to the core, you can steal everything, crush all dissent, and enslave a massive population to create a juggernaut manufacturing power.
Now do it with a far smaller population of free peoples, with their consent, through cooperation, without copying and stealing from others. That's real power.
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NASA and the old guard contractors are the slow, high cost approach to space.
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NASA cut Chinese space bureaucracy off a couple of decades ago after there were credible allegations/some evidence that some of the space technology being shared made it into PLA strategic ballistic missiles. This stalled PRC's space program for a while, but the point is that they made it to where they are today without access to NASA's resources, and with minimal access to Russian ones.
And that's a major achievement.
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Everything's propaganda at some point.
Long way to go (Score:1)
Starship is 9.0 meters diameter, They are about a decade away from where Starship is today, assuming they won't be bankrupt by this useless rocket they're making.
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Bankrupt? China is a dictatorship, the accounting books are sent to proverbial Siberia if Xi doesn't like them.
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No. If Xi doesn't like them he kills the messenger.
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I'm sure they could send up a 9m diameter rocket and watch it explode if they wanted to.
China has a clear plan for their space programme, and is making steady progress. They can land stuff on the Moon and have mastered living in space for 6 months. They have a Mars sample return mission coming up. It's exciting stuff, space exploration is heating up again.
It's all about the engine (Score:5, Informative)
Most people think the hardest part of the rocket is the gigantic structure you can see, but this is basically just a big tin can. The bit that is really hard is the engine development, and on that SpaceX have a massive head start. They have been developing Raptor for a long time - much longer than starship - and it seems to be delivering quite well now - certainly none of the engines blew up on the last launch which was pretty amazing, but we don't know what the absolute performance is like, or whether there are any less obvious issues with them. There is also the question of whether they can be rapidly reused.
Even the BE4 which has taken an age to develop is quite a low performance engine compared to the Raptor (still a remarkable achievement, but essentially last generation's technology). The Chinese YF100 engine doesn't appear to be that advanced - basically an RD-170 clone - which while a very good workhorse engine is essentially a 1970s design. Whether this will have enough performance for a large reusable stack (they currently rely a lot on solid rocket boosters) or whether they are able to develop a more modern engine are very big questions. And unless they already have an engine in advanced development, none of this will happen very quickly.
Given that China has wanted to catch up on Jet Engine technology for a very long time, and still seem to be very far away from getting there, I'd take this sort of announcement with a huge grain of salt. What they might end up producing is something that is only rapidly reusable if you have a massive solid rocket motor factory next to the launch pad.
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They have the YF-102 which is smaller than the Raptor, but could be used in a similar configuration. There is a reusable version in the works too.
They also have the as-yet unflown YF-130, which produces about double what a Raptor 3 does, but has so far only been statically fired for testing.
I wouldn't rely on them remaining a fixed distance behind. Their space programme sets goals and delivers on them. Not just the US - Europe needs to push forward with development of things like jet engines and aircraft to
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The YF-130 is kerolox, which means it will have limited reusability. The power of a rocket engine is secondary to cost. Cost to maintain, reliability, cost of manufacture -- those are all a LOT more important than thrust or Isp. Isp doesn't matter, what matters is cost and reliability per Isp. Thrust and Isp only mattered decades ago when budgets were unlimited. If you have tiny but highly reliable and rapidly reusable engines you don't need to care about what their thrust it. It could be 1 gram of thrust b
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Does China really care about the cost though? Their space programme is unlikely to be looking for major cost savings when they send the first person to the Moon, for example.
Maybe they won't have anything like Starship for some time, but SpaceX's schedule is by no means a foregone conclusion either. Anyway, the point is that underestimating China's space programme is a bad idea. The US got to the Moon with 1960s technology, by throwing money at the problem (and brilliant engineering of course).
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Everyone cares about cost. Sure, they may spend money on a "plant the flag" mission, because it will win points internationally and politically. But after that, there will be other pet projects of the ruling class that will try to grab funds -- energy, military, satellite comm, AI, robotics, housing, farming/food production.
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The YF-130 is kerolox, which means it will have limited reusability.
The Merlin engine is keralox and it's getting up to around 20 reuses (so far) so that doesn't seem like a show-stopper.
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BE-4 and Raptor are doing different engine philosophy. Raptor engine is going with their usual smaller size engine but has very hot and very high pressure in the combustion chamber which allows them to use many engines in tandem. Blue Origin went the other direction of having very large combustion chamber ala F1 engine of Saturn rocket.
Quit crippling SpaceX (Score:2)
The FAA and friends need to quit crippling SpaceX with never ending red tape. You'd better believe the Chinese space programs do not have this kind of drag slowing down their development cadence.
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People do die in Telsas, but the fact is we have separate mental compartments for deaths of d
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Biden's DOJ is suing SpaceX for not hiring Chinese national who does not have green card or pass security check. Meanwhile SpaceX have to comply with ITART munition export regulation enforced by State Department. Yes, SpaceX rockets are technically ICBM capable of delivering nuclear warhead to anywhere on Earth, so it falls into ITAR. If SpaceX does what DOJ wants, they'll be in violation of ITAR and subject to significant sanction from DOS.
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His first 100 days was using his pen to let the CCP out of the penalty box on dozens of regs. Whereas Biden's administration is somewhat officious and harrassing to SpaceX.
he takes money from anyone (Score:1)
he's a wholesale political corruption outlet. he'll sell anything to anyone