China's Space Program Thread II

[iantsai]

The Mission Emblem for the Shenzhou-23 mission was released by CMSE today.

Notice: There was a flower of Hong Kong Bauhinia on this mission emblem, hinting that there will be an crew member from Hong Kong, because Hong Kong Bauhinia is the city flower of Hong Kong and the flower also appears on the regional flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.

 

[iantsai]

Design of the Tianwen-3 Martian Drilling and Sampling System.
(A) Unfolding Mechanism
(B) Advance Mechanism
(C) Drive Unit
(D) Sampling Drill

 

[TheRathalos]

The Mission Emblem for the Shenzhou-23 mission was released by CMSE today.

Notice: There was a flower of Hong Kong Bauhinia on this mission emblem, hinting that there will be an crew member from Hong Kong, because Hong Kong Bauhinia is the city flower of Hong Kong and the flower also appears on the regional flag of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region.


View attachment 174743

So now legal question
HK residents can't join the PLA, but all Chinese astronaut join the PLA by virtue of being astronaut in the PLAASF's PLAAC (even if they are recruited as civilians, like some of the group 3 astros).

Would that astronaut be the first "purely civilian" chinese astronaut, or a rare case of a permanent HK Resident in the PLA.

 

[PopularScience]

So now legal question
HK residents can't join the PLA, but all Chinese astronaut join the PLA by virtue of being astronaut in the PLAASF's PLAAC (even if they are recruited as civilians, like some of the group 3 astros).

Would that astronaut be the first "purely civilian" chinese astronaut, or a rare case of a permanent HK Resident in the PLA.

I thought the BAUU professor is the first civilian astronaut?

 

[TheRathalos]

I thought the BAUU professor is the first civilian astronaut?

Hmm, I had assumed all Group 3 astronauts of civilian background had to formally join the PLA but looking into it I can only find explicit mentions for the flight engineers of civilian background (Wang Haozhe, Wu Fei, Wang Jie, who joined the PLA following their selection and are now lieutnent colonel/colonel), it seems the payload specialist of civilian background (Zhang Hongzhang and indeed as you mentionned Gui Haichao) joined the PLAAC without joining the PLA?

 

[taxiya]

I think there's a discrepancy in the payload mass sent to Tianzhou. Which value is correct for Tianzhou-6?

Both are right. This link stated 7.4 as the capability.

Please, Log in or Register to view URLs content!

, 5.1+0.7 was the actually loading.

Many cargos are not dense. It is same reason that many rockets have capabilities by mass that may never be realized because of limitation of fairing.

 

[taxiya]

So now legal question
HK residents can't join the PLA,

Yes.

but all Chinese astronaut join the PLA by virtue of being astronaut in the PLAASF's PLAAC (even if they are recruited as civilians, like some of the group 3 astros).

No. Being selected to fly to the station does not necessarily mean being recruited by PLAAC.

Hmm, I had assumed all Group 3 astronauts of civilian background had to formally join the PLA but looking into it I can only find explicit mentions for the flight engineers of civilian background (Wang Haozhe, Wu Fei, Wang Jie, who joined the PLA following their selection and are now lieutnent colonel/colonel), it seems the payload specialist of civilian background (Zhang Hongzhang and indeed as you mentionned Gui Haichao) joined the PLAAC without joining the PLA?

There is no known legal requirement that astranout must be member of PLA. The civilian member of the crew is not necessarily member of PLAAC either. PLA does have civilian employees (文职) who are under the authority of PLA and does work for PLA but not member of PLA. So at most those civilian crews become 文职 if they continue working for the manned space program, or they just return to whatever they do before the selection. Either way they are not PLA.

Wang Haozhe, Wu Fei and Wang Jie were recruited by PLAAC because thay are member of CASC which is "military". There is a long tradition of certain civilian institutions that are adminstrated as military (军事化管理), people there are recruited, trained, administred and having equivlant security clearance as service men, only that they don't officially got ranks.

 

[Tomboy]

Latest rumor on CZ-10B is that it's been delayed to the latter half of this year, so forget a launch in may or even june. Which probably also mean the goal of achieving reuse on a booster is probably not going to happen by the end of this year.

 

[iantsai]

So now legal question
HK residents can't join the PLA, but all Chinese astronaut join the PLA by virtue of being astronaut in the PLAASF's PLAAC (even if they are recruited as civilians, like some of the group 3 astros).

Would that astronaut be the first "purely civilian" chinese astronaut, or a rare case of a permanent HK Resident in the PLA.

There is currently no formal rule requiring Chinese astronauts to be active-duty members of the PLA. It is simply the case that most existing astronauts are PLA servicemen/wemen. But there is at least one exception: Gui Haichao, who is a professor from BUAA and definitely civilian. Therefore, I think it would not be a problem for Ms. Lai, as a resident of the Hong Kong SAR and a non-military individual, to join the Shenzhou-23 crew.

After all, the civilianization of the space industry is a major trend, especially in an era when countries around the world are investing in reusable rocket technologies and the scale of space launches is expected to grow by several orders of magnitude in the coming decades. Certainly, more and more civilian astronauts will be sent into orbit. This is actually quite similar to the history of the US space activity. During the Apollo Program era, most American astronauts were military personnel, but gradually they shifted to civilian astronauts in the space shuttle era.

 

[Michael90]

Latest rumor on CZ-10B is that it's been delayed to the latter half of this year, so forget a launch in may or even june. Which probably also mean the goal of achieving reuse on a booster is probably not going to happen by the end of this year.

As I said before achieving reusability of space rockets is not easy at all. Many people act as if it is an easy thing to do and are frustrated China, russia or Europe haven’t chai ed that yet after over 10years of spacex pioneering that, they seem to look at spacex doing it easily and timing it’s easy not knowing the complexity involved . Afterall no other agency has been able to do it successfully muchblessscale it apart from space x . Blue origin just did it recently after years of effort . So people should be more patient about this.