What would be the benefits of placing a datacenter in the space?
China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
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Perhaps that's true. But Landspaсe could have written a few lines about the reasons for the delay, and the situation would have been much clearer.
They never acknowledged that the launch would happen on 29th or 1st in the first place, so they couldn't have announced a delay!
The original is from Hellospace and they did more detailled articles on each of the main space industrial clusters:
As well as a national overview:
Beside a nice overview of the discovery of the Shenzhou-20 anomaly and the following decision making through November, this has important informations:
Shenzhou-23 will be delivered 2 months ahead of schedule (March 2026->January 2026), the preparation and testing of Shenzhou-24 will also be accelerated but it will not be able to be delivered until next summer (originally it was to be delivered in September 2026), there will therefore probably be 1-3 month gap where there will be no "launch on need" capability, although it is not excluded that the launch of SZ-23 could be slightly postponed to reduce that gap (Note: since Shenzhou-22 was launched in late November, it can still return in June and still be within its nominal lifespan)
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NOTAM has been updated to reflect timing, December 3rd at 4:00 UTC.
This is a major step in getting the Chang'e 7 signals to and from the orbiter and other craft. China does have a good deep space telemetry setup, this will continue to expand it.
This is basically known by now, but officials confirmed that the SZ-20 will return unmanned. Andrew Jones did a great piece on the process of deciding to return in the certain timespan and pacing they did, as well as wind testing of potential disaster scenarios, and the unique steps China takes to ensure taikonaut safety.
Also globally, in space news (this is relevant here because China helped majorly push this to pace), November 2025 will go on record as the month the most payloads were launched into space, with 31 launches. There were more orbital launches than days, interestingly enough.
So ZQ-3 will launch tomorrow?
Yep. I mean I guess it could be scrubbed again but I doubt that. The NOTAM is in place, looks primed and ready to go.
Seems like the rumors of the rocket being moved off the pad are false.
We have the flight sequence sheet from the ZQ-3 launch, I am going to look this over a bit and then edit the post to add more comments, interesting though.
Edit: Alright so after looking through it, it is pretty much similar to the Falcon 9/New Glenn style in terms of timing. There are differences though.
For reference, and putting this in text, here is the schedule for the ZQ-3.
That is a rough translation along with some other jargon I added to clean it up.
I actually took some notes watching a Starlink launch, it was one of the 6-xx series, so here that is.
Zhuque-3's MECO occurs sooner than the Falcon 9 and New Glenn. This just means a lower staging velocity, usually. Sequential MECO is a new one, from what I understand, both New Glenn and Falcon 9 shut down the main engines at the same time. This seems to indicate Zhuque-3 will have sequential main engine cutoff, which could be for many reasons. One would be to control maximum G-loads near the end of the burn, as fewer engines equals lower acceleration. Another reason could be the mixture ratio or the propellent optimization. I do know that the Saturn V had a pattern where the outer engines shut down at first, then the center followed. Could be something like this.
Stage separation and second-stage ignition is pretty much in line with what I expect. The payload is kept shrouded for longer on the Zhuque-3 versus a Starlink launch, that could be for any reason though, so not going to speculate. For reference though, Falcon 9 usually discards around the 3 minute mark. Booster profile looks standard to me, within seconds to tens of seconds of what I see from the Falcon 9. There is a slight difference in relationship to SECO, where the Zhuque-3 is going to have SECO at 8:19, 11 seconds before the booster touches down, and the Falcon 9 has SECO-1 17 seconds after booster lands. Slight difference but nothing really to note.
The thing I actually like is that LandSpace is being much more transparent about their sequence versus Blue Origin and SpaceX. The notices I have seen from them never mention passivation phases (though they do it as well). Wishing them the best.
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