This kind of ranking is kind of useless when involving China because China is the only one in the world that the whole industry is state owned so far and in the foreseeable future. Not only that, most of the clients of such assets for civilian purpose are state agencies or SOEs, so it is not possible to separate the "commercial" from state because the state is doing the commercial part of work that is done in the west. Even if some assets are opened for "commercial" use, the output may be downgraded to hide the true capability. The key difference is that in the west a commercial company launches a sat for money, they will publish their real capability, but a Chinese SOE will only give their spec on a need-to-know base that is good enough to get a customer but nothing more.
China's Space Program News Thread
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Lol yep... and even then, China's still number 2 overall... possibly number 1 (I'm not looking at it atm and don't want to count it).
And all that's just the surface reported and public stuff. They don't include how capable a country is at using satellites to track something as small as a UAV and something traveling as deep as a submarine. Or the algorithms that can locate and autotrack all the ships and planes deemed worth taking note of
Not just that but also the encrypted communications etc. This list may only be on public remote sensing of various kinds but China's sat leads in those fields are undoubtedly first if it's not exclusive only to China e.g. quantum comms.
I remember this one, the locating and identification of Japanese ships near a Japanese harbor in some minutes by Chinese Sat.
I remember this one, the locating and identification of Japanese ships in some minutes by Chinese Sat.
I can't understand why some people ever doubted this. It's 99% code 1% making your hardware compatible with whatever engineering solution you came up with. I'd be shocked if the US and Russia haven't long been totally capable of this. How anyone can think that a carrier battle group has half a chance at "hiding". Really it's only a question of coverage and making your sats hardy enough to overcome passive and active attacks on them.
I once read on secretprojects a member comment on WZ-8, claiming that the WZ-8 must land for its film and collected data to be detached from the vehicle, after it lands and technicians can physically retrieve the stored data for intel. The logic behind this reasoning was because the WZ-8 has landing gears and is clearly designed to land rather be expendable. So this is the calibre of some minds out there. Maybe it becomes obvious why some military watchers are simply too conservatively stubborn even if many are outrageously gullible in every way. Or maybe they're just that technically ignorant. We live in an age where I can quickly relay GB worth of information across the globe wirelessly (not even necessarily using the internet) and billion dollar drone systems can't relay some targeting info because it's Chy-Nah!
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Did you hope the same thing before Falcon 9's first successful landing on the launch pad? Or you knew it will succeed long before Elon Musk knew? Do you think all the US space success today (SpaceX included) are out of thin air without all sorts of trails and failures? Even the success today is based on the knowledge of failure.
Don't act as if you are a prophet.
Frankly I thought it had low chances of success. But I did not think it was a waste of money.
I thought it had low chances of success because of the difficulties of throttling with that engine.
But it was hardly something completely never done since the DC-X proved the avionics for doing something like that were doable.
Do not compare the difficulty of Falcon 9 reentry and landing with this vehicle. It is worlds apart.
A lot of people have proposed similar ideas. For example.
This was a German proposal for a TSTO HTHL vehicle. Looks familiar?
Get the first stage to work and then we'll talk.
Heck, just prove the turboramjet or whatever engine is on that first stage works on a cruise missile even.
The US considered this sort of aircraft in the 1950s after World War II ended. That was called the Aerospaceplane.
The whole idea comes from the antipodal bomber concept nicknamed the Silbervogel by Eugen Sänger in Nazi Germany.
The US have tried making it work every couple of decades.
Ever heard of the Orient Express aka NASP? That was the last time they tried this.
The materials for an aircraft which can cruise at those high Mach regimes don't exist yet.
Perhaps Russia scratched the surface of the problem of the engines with the Zircon. Perhaps. But it is one thing to make a disposable one use vehicle and quite another to make an aircraft which can operate at those regimes all the time. Huge hurdles.
Just think about it. People have been trying to make this work for about as long as they have tried to make nuclear fusion work. Billions have been spent on it with little to show for it. The Soviets couldn't get it to work either. Try reading about the Keldysh bomber or the Spiral 50-50.
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The whole idea of having the first stage accelerate to Mach 5+ or even higher (some claim Mach 8+ others get into fantasy territory and claim Mach 20+) in the atmosphere is kind of ludicrous to begin with.
No one has managed to do a single air breathing engine which can go through all that flight envelope to begin with. Even Zircon seems to be using a rocket booster first stage to get it to speed before the scramjet engine starts up. This means you need another set of engines just to get up to speed before the scramjet can work. Plus possibly another set of fuel tanks. Then you need an airframe which can withstand all that heat. It is bonkers. It is the Rube Goldberg way to get into space.
It is much, much easier to make a two stage VTVL vehicle for space launch. And you will have a lot more payload. You won't have as many gravity losses. You just need rocket engines which are way easier to design. HTHL is pure aerospace engineer fluff and most people who work on the sector recognize it as such. Including people who worked at Rockwell on both NASP and the Space Shuttle. I know this because I have talked with those people.
No one has managed to do a single air breathing engine which can go through all that flight envelope to begin with. Even Zircon seems to be using a rocket booster first stage to get it to speed before the scramjet engine starts up. This means you need another set of engines just to get up to speed before the scramjet can work. Plus possibly another set of fuel tanks. Then you need an airframe which can withstand all that heat. It is bonkers. It is the Rube Goldberg way to get into space.
It is much, much easier to make a two stage VTVL vehicle for space launch. And you will have a lot more payload. You won't have as many gravity losses. You just need rocket engines which are way easier to design. HTHL is pure aerospace engineer fluff and most people who work on the sector recognize it as such. Including people who worked at Rockwell on both NASP and the Space Shuttle. I know this because I have talked with those people.
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