China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
sorry for continuing the off-topic, but when Starship becomes operational, the number of launches will reduce drastically. What we should be talking about is mass-to-orbit, anything else is tooting our own horn.
At this point, I think china needs to develop a completely new revolutionary approach to launch satellites to space. That approach is to shoot the satellites up to space with a launcher. You can picture it like shooting a bullet up to the air. This is a game changer. There are people who floated this idea already.
So maybe China should be focusing on a starship type delivery system to try and catch up? Any companies in China doing that?
You mean a Space Gun? This idea has been around for a while and has been investigated seriously. Unfortunately it's not really a great idea from an engineering perspective, at least with current technology, so those attempts mostly fizzled out. This doesn't look likely to change any time soon so you'll have to live with rockets for the foreseeable future.
I think it's mostly for developing world or very rural areas of developed world. For areas already well served by fiber optic landline there's not really much point I think.
I don't think these starlink constellation are only for internet purpose. They are ISR. In a few years, those 200 max payload spacex launches could be sending actual weapons(missiles or lasers) into space. It is a stepping stone for something bigger.
It meant more and also faster delivery of weapons to space.
It meant more and also faster delivery of weapons to space.
But sounds like small market, because who in the developing world can afford it? You have to pay for the local modem and satellite dish and the subscription fees. All non-trivial costs.
They are not trivial costs sure but they're much cheaper than paying to put up base stations and fiber optic lines. Further just like the developed world, the developing world has income inequality. Just because not everybody can afford it doesn't mean nobody can afford it. Also you might be overestimating the price of these things, look up Starlink prices online and you'll see that it's not like it costs millions of dollars. The developing world also has a decent sized smartphone market so it's not like there's no precedent for this kind of thing.
This is to say nothing of geopolitical benefits of having such a constellation under sovereign control. See: Ukraine War and Starlink in Iran.