China's Space Program Thread II

[MortyandRick]

Belittling quantifiable achievements by SpaceX and others should not be sexy.

Is it belittling or being objective ? They send a lot of starlink satellites into LEO and that is a fact.

Raptor v3 and v4 being quite good wrt to thrust, twr, and isp is non deniable. New booster recovery system engineering, stainless steel based construction and its optimization, heat resistant tile manufacturing and optimization, stage separation system, and others. These innovations came through heavy investment, building skillset of thousands of workers and engineers, and it build very broad and deep institutional skills and experience. It is therefore more than likely that the starship program will be optimized further to launch large sized payloads and male it a reliable super heavy platform.

So you're assuming v4 will be successful even though it has not been used yet.

Recreating this is impossible in China because the risk tolerance is minimal. Too much scrutiny.

And you're assuming China can't do it. Any evidence to back this up?

 

[Wrought]

Belittling quantifiable achievements by SpaceX and others should not be sexy. Raptor v3 and v4 being quite good wrt to thrust, twr, and isp is non deniable. New booster recovery system engineering, stainless steel based construction and its optimization, heat resistant tile manufacturing and optimization, stage separation system, and others. These innovations came through heavy investment, building skillset of thousands of workers and engineers, and it build very broad and deep institutional skills and experience. It is therefore more than likely that the starship program will be optimized further to launch large sized payloads and male it a reliable super heavy platform. Recreating this is impossible in China because the risk tolerance is minimal. Too much scrutiny. Its like West getting off guard by the rapid dominance of Chinese EVs across the large swath of world. They could never imagine battery being this cheap and ev taking off economically. China shouldn’t get lazy thinking that Starship program wont be successful.

Nothing you said has any relevance to anything I said. Indiscriminate nukes don't care about your technical achievements.

 

[iewgnem]

Belittling quantifiable achievements by SpaceX and others should not be sexy. Raptor v3 and v4 being quite good wrt to thrust, twr, and isp is non deniable. New booster recovery system engineering, stainless steel based construction and its optimization, heat resistant tile manufacturing and optimization, stage separation system, and others. These innovations came through heavy investment, building skillset of thousands of workers and engineers, and it build very broad and deep institutional skills and experience. It is therefore more than likely that the starship program will be optimized further to launch large sized payloads and male it a reliable super heavy platform. Recreating this is impossible in China because the risk tolerance is minimal. Too much scrutiny. Its like West getting off guard by the rapid dominance of Chinese EVs across the large swath of world. They could never imagine battery being this cheap and ev taking off economically. China shouldn’t get lazy thinking that Starship program wont be successful.

Spaceflight is a system engineering problem, not a component engineering problem, and system engineering start at foundational architecture. There might be thousands of very capable workers at SpaceX engineering some impressive components, but at end of the day they report to Elon, its Elon that calls the shots at the system level, and Elon is, shall we say, not thousands of capable engineers.

The rocket equation doesn't care about your aspirations, the reason NASA is forcing them to redesign the entire Artemis architecture right now is a direct result of believing marketing can overcome physics.

If you dig into the refill math, they also wouldn't need to ask for redesign if Starship can actually put Elon's claimed amount to orbit.

As for China, do you realize at this point it will take about 20 fully expended full mass (that is 70 ton LEO) LM10 missions just to catch up to how much SpaceX already spent on 11 suborbital Starship stacks? That's the consequence of letting one car saleman call the shot on space system engineering, that is something China won't do.

 

[tankphobia]

I'll add to that Golden Dome like system cannot deal with concentrated launch, it is fundamentally a spread out system where only a tiny fraction of interceptors can respond to launches from any one geolocation. Theoretically even DPRK can defeat such a system by launching all their missiles from one place, to defend against that you'll need ten times as many interceptors again. They can even add to that mix something that can fake the infrared signature of ICBM, it doesn't need to fake it for long as the response window for boost phase interception is very short.

I think people here are under selling the numbers game a bit. Physics is fundamentally against a Golden dome esq system in orbit ABM system. To achieve optimal interception time those satellites will need to be placed in low earth orbit, probably same height as starlink. Now satellites are not stationary and orbits around the earth, so to achieve consistent coverage over a area you will require an utterly ridiculous amount of satellites, likely 10k+ . This is on top of maintenance (low orbit means frequent replacement), all for the chance that you will block maybe a dozen ICBMs at the most optimal outcome.

There's also nothing stopping China from coducting a exoatmospheric nuclear detonation based emp to create a giant hole in this network for follow up attacks either.

If you wanted absolute foolproof ABM with money to burn just revive the sentinel program and station ground based nike nuclear intecptors. Far more feasible.

 

[AndrewS]

I think people here are under selling the numbers game a bit. Physics is fundamentally against a Golden dome esq system in orbit ABM system. To achieve optimal interception time those satellites will need to be placed in low earth orbit, probably same height as starlink. Now satellites are not stationary and orbits around the earth, so to achieve consistent coverage over a area you will require an utterly ridiculous amount of satellites, likely 10k+ . This is on top of maintenance (low orbit means frequent replacement), all for the chance that you will block maybe a dozen ICBMs at the most optimal outcome.

There's also nothing stopping China from coducting a exoatmospheric nuclear detonation based emp to create a giant hole in this network for follow up attacks either.

If you wanted absolute foolproof ABM with money to burn just revive the sentinel program and station ground based nike nuclear intecptors. Far more feasible.

Brilliant Pebbles planned for 10,000 interceptors, with hundreds over the USSR at any time.
Each pebble was expected to be less than 40kg, so that's 400 tonnes in total.

These days, even larger constellations are feasible, given the launch costs of reusable rockets.

The cost of the interceptors is another question however

 

[AF-1]

Many pages filled with content unrelated to thread topic, whats the point of doing this all, one of the top threads became a garbage...

 

[TheRathalos]

Brilliant Pebbles planned for 10,000 interceptors, with hundreds over the USSR at any time.
Each pebble was expected to be less than 40kg, so that's 400 tonnes in total.

These days, even larger constellations are feasible, given the launch costs of reusable rockets.

The cost of the interceptors is another question however

For reference China's low earth orbit upmass capability (emphasis on capability, this isn't what was sent but what could have been sent if every launchers were used to its maximum capability) in 2024 was 430 tons, in 2025 it's currently 530 tons and, if all the planned launches up until the end of the year go well (realistically, maybe 2/3 will happen), one could expect it to reach 730 tons.

Based on the past 6 months and realistic launch plans, If there suddenly was a need to launch a mass produced payload in low earth orbit, with only expendable launches, I believe CASC and other chinese companies could conservatively launch >1,000 tons in 2026.

(For comparison, US upmass capability in 2025 will probably reach ~3,100 tons, and maybe 4,500-5,000 tons can be realistically expected in 2026)

So launch certainly isn't the problem at all for a Brillant Pebble type system. There are many other more important problems.
A Starship-like launch system does open opportunities for some other ABM systems, such as high orbit high power directed energy systems which wouldn't clutter LEO, but it's massively overkill for a Kinetic kill vehicle constellation.
----
Zenkspace seems to be testing their portable launch pad, considering the core team are former Space Pionneer pros who worked on Tianlong 2, and looking at the design of the pad it's very likely they're launching from Jiuquan's LC-120 launch site.

TL-2 pad & LC-120 for comparison

 

[enroger]

I think people here are under selling the numbers game a bit. Physics is fundamentally against a Golden dome esq system in orbit ABM system. To achieve optimal interception time those satellites will need to be placed in low earth orbit, probably same height as starlink. Now satellites are not stationary and orbits around the earth, so to achieve consistent coverage over a area you will require an utterly ridiculous amount of satellites, likely 10k+ . This is on top of maintenance (low orbit means frequent replacement), all for the chance that you will block maybe a dozen ICBMs at the most optimal outcome.

There's also nothing stopping China from coducting a exoatmospheric nuclear detonation based emp to create a giant hole in this network for follow up attacks either.

If you wanted absolute foolproof ABM with money to burn just revive the sentinel program and station ground based nike nuclear intecptors. Far more feasible.

This is why I think ABM role is a smoke screen, what the Americans are truly after is a space blockade system, this is where the real danger is at. They want to achieve dominance by blocking access to space.

 

[ZachL111]

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Andrew Jones reported a new Chinese launch company, called FSTSpace. Great graphics, I can do some more research tomorrow into more on their launch date filing and testing.

 

[AndrewS]

For reference China's low earth orbit upmass capability (emphasis on capability, this isn't what was sent but what could have been sent if every launchers were used to its maximum capability) in 2024 was 430 tons, in 2025 it's currently 530 tons and, if all the planned launches up until the end of the year go well (realistically, maybe 2/3 will happen), one could expect it to reach 730 tons.

Based on the past 6 months and realistic launch plans, If there suddenly was a need to launch a mass produced payload in low earth orbit, with only expendable launches, I believe CASC and other chinese companies could conservatively launch >1,000 tons in 2026.

(For comparison, US upmass capability in 2025 will probably reach ~3,100 tons, and maybe 4,500-5,000 tons can be realistically expected in 2026)

So launch certainly isn't the problem at all for a Brillant Pebble type system. There are many other more important problems.
A Starship-like launch system does open opportunities for some other ABM systems, such as high orbit high power directed energy systems which wouldn't clutter LEO, but it's massively overkill for a Kinetic kill vehicle constellation.
----
Zenkspace seems to be testing their portable launch pad, considering the core team are former Space Pionneer pros who worked on Tianlong 2, and looking at the design of the pad it's very likely they're launching from Jiuquan's LC-120 launch site.
View attachment 165023View attachment 165024View attachment 165022
TL-2 pad & LC-120 for comparison
View attachment 165025
View attachment 165026

I think the 2027 figures for both the US and China will be a lot higher.

For example, the Landspace Zhuque-3 plan is one per week in 2027. So that would be 900+ tonnes of payload, just from Landspace.