China's Space Program News Thread
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SinoSoldier
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I thought the 921 rocket was replacing the CZ-9 concept?
It's not a matter of being the first to Mars, rather it's about which country has the most staying power off planet. The spanish and Portuguese may have been the first to discover the americas but it was the spanish and the english and french who had the most long lasting colonies in north America
I respectfully disagree. There are plenty of proposals to do that and more without requiring 20 tons on a single launch.
You could use inflatable habitation modules for example (TransHab).
You could also, you know, dig a hole and make that the base. Or you could simply find a cave in the Moon and inhabit that.
Also with a rocket like the Falcon 9 Heavy you can launch a payload like that to the Moon.
You just need to refuel it in orbit for it to get there.
If you expect to bring everything from Earth the lunar colony program will be a failure just like Roanoke colony in the Americas.
You have to live off the fat of the land. Everything possible should be made of lunar materials.
You should only bring tools, parts, and the bare minimum from Earth.
With regards to the other comments, it was not the huge tributary fleet of Admiral Zheng He who made the Age of Discovery, but tiny carracks doing trade from Europe. Zheng He had larger ships and he failed. You don't huge ships. You need large enough ships.
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Well to be fair, Zheng He and the Treasure fleets didn't fail vis-a-vis colonising the world due to having overly large ships, but rather due to changes in imperial policy. Zheng He's ships were more for projecting Ming Dynasty power and glory rather than for profit which was what sustained western colonisers. And it was because of a lack of funding that the Americans stopped sending humans to the moon and scrapped plans for a lunar colony.
In this respect, China space exploration mission has the lofty goal of making humanity an interstellar species for science; will a lunar colony sustain itself? That remains to be seen, but it is promising especially since the moon has water and helium 3 research.
I'm unsure if it's suggesting that "only" CZ-9 will be developed in the future going forwards, or if he's suggesting that CZ-9 will be developed specifically for the mission of developing a moon base.
It's very possible that 921 ends up being developed for initial manned missions (and potentially iterated into reusable variants for terrestial/orbital launches) while CZ-9 is built for larger scale payloads to build more permanent and larger scale bases on the moon.
Typically people who propose super-heavy rockets like CZ-9 (China) or Ares V, SLS (US) want to use it either for Mars missions or for expanded lunar bases. But the thing is with refueling in orbit you don't need those kinds of rockets for a lunar base, and for extended Mars missions you can use nuclear powered propulsion or solar-electric propulsion using ion engines with for example argon as a reaction mass.
This is not even a new idea. Chelomei's bureau's plans for a Soviet Mars mission used those kinds of propulsion.
In the US Ernst Stuhlinger proposed a solar-electric Mars mission in 1957.
You assemble the ship in orbit and then you fly to Mars.
The Soviets did nuclear thermal space propulsion research.
As did the US with NERVA and Dumbo. In the 1990s the US funded a research study called Project Timberwind which was a nuclear powered rocket which used TRISO nuclear fuel in hydrogen fuel to increase performance even further. The technology is not that dissimilar from the HTR-PM pebble bed nuclear reactor the Chinese are already working on. They predicted a 4x increase in payload with it as a second stage.
The size of the rocket is less important than a lot of people think. They basically want to redo the technologies the Apollo program discarded. Their rocket is the equivalent of the direct ascent rocket discarded as too costly in the 1960s i.e. the NOVA rocket.
These rockets are so expensive they would be launched once every couple of years. Plus they are all expendable. It is old tech pushed by Mike Griffin when he was NASA President as Ares V and being followed by the US, Russians, and Chinese. It is a colossal waste of money.
This is not even a new idea. Chelomei's bureau's plans for a Soviet Mars mission used those kinds of propulsion.
In the US Ernst Stuhlinger proposed a solar-electric Mars mission in 1957.
You assemble the ship in orbit and then you fly to Mars.
The Soviets did nuclear thermal space propulsion research.
As did the US with NERVA and Dumbo. In the 1990s the US funded a research study called Project Timberwind which was a nuclear powered rocket which used TRISO nuclear fuel in hydrogen fuel to increase performance even further. The technology is not that dissimilar from the HTR-PM pebble bed nuclear reactor the Chinese are already working on. They predicted a 4x increase in payload with it as a second stage.
The size of the rocket is less important than a lot of people think. They basically want to redo the technologies the Apollo program discarded. Their rocket is the equivalent of the direct ascent rocket discarded as too costly in the 1960s i.e. the NOVA rocket.
These rockets are so expensive they would be launched once every couple of years. Plus they are all expendable. It is old tech pushed by Mike Griffin when he was NASA President as Ares V and being followed by the US, Russians, and Chinese. It is a colossal waste of money.
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