China's Space Program News Thread

[taxiya]

Think of ESA as a partner who lacks launch capability and a space capsule, but otherwise can come close to NASA in most other basic infrastructural, production and mission equipment capabilities.

But NASA can do everything that ESA can offer and do better. Using blatant words, ESA is useless and useful to NASA as much as Roscosmos is to CNSA. The key point here is NOT what these secondary partners can exclusively provide, it is what they can do to share the burden both money and time/labor wise.

 

[siegecrossbow]

But NASA can do everything that ESA can offer and do better. Using blatant words, ESA is useless and useful to NASA as much as Roscosmos is to CNSA. The key point here is NOT what these secondary partners can exclusively provide, it is what they can do to share the burden both money and time/labor wise.

ESA has landed on Titan, which NASA hasn’t accomplished.

 

[Richard Santos]

But NASA can do everything that ESA can offer and do better. Using blatant words, ESA is useless and useful to NASA as much as Roscosmos is to CNSA. The key point here is NOT what these secondary partners can exclusively provide, it is what they can do to share the burden both money and time/labor wise.

no, maybe NASA CAN do everything better (i don’t think NASA actually can, the Europeans are definitely ahead in many aspects of space science. space travel is not all for showing off, really heavy weight basic as well as applied science should come into play), but ESA CAN do many things more than good enough, and when the ESA funds them, NASA gets them without having to fund it itself.

to put it bluntly, for a space program whose main objective is to show off, a partner who doesn’t offer anything it can’t do itself would be of limited value. but for a space program whose main objective is to do a lot of science, a partner who doesn’t offer anything it can’t do itself would still offer great value in enabling it to do more science per launch than it could afford to fund itself.

 

[Richard Santos]

the differences between the collaboration between ESA and NASA on the one hand, and the proposed one between rusocosmos and CNSA are:

1. ESA has a formidable space scientific capability that does not exactly overlap American space science capability. I don’t think Rosocomos offer much space science capability.

2. ESA offers an array of manufacturing capabilities that equal or surpass what US can immediately deploy. The US is not necessarily interested in investing the capability of it can trade fir its products with the ESA. Russia may offer a limited number of manufacturing capability that the chinese do not have. But china is always interested in matching other’s capabilities and Russia may not be interested in giving it away.

3. ESA’s capacity to fund its contribution to collaborative efforts dwarves that of Russia.

4. Both ESA and Rosocosmos had a recent track record of mission failures, but Rosocosmos’s failure tend to be of a more basic and elementary nature, so the underlying quality of its contribution is more open to doubt.

 

[Nutrient]

I doubt russia would have any serious Intent to really contribute.

Let's not minimize the potential Russian contribution. In the International Space Station, Russia's Zarya module ("Dawn") provides all the life support, the navigation, and the propulsion needed to keep the station in orbit. Without the US bits, the ISS would still be a working space station. Without Zarya, ISS would be dead.

So it would be presumptious to disregard the Russian contribution to a moon colony. As @plawolf mentioned, their decades of experience in low or zero g will be valuable. Their life support hardware has proven to be extremely reliable, and that will be important when the lunar base is 300,000 km from help. As the first nation into space, Russia has more knowledge about living off Earth than anyone else.

 

[Richard Santos]

Russia’s Zarya module was constructed not by Russia but by the late soviet union before it dissolved as an additional module for the Mir space station. Russia’s contribution was to repurpose inherited hardware for use in the ISS. Given the very spotty track record of Russian space endeavor with anything that was even partially developed after the dissolution of the USSR, I would not suppose Russia to be capable of developing a reliable follow on the Zarya today.

Also, keep in mind the only real collaborative joint space effort between china and russia up to today, the Fobos-Grunt mars mission, failed spectacularly because multiple elementary failures of Russian upper stage. Having many elementary systems fail does not lend confidence to Russian ability to make anything complex work with a reasonable number of tries.

The russian inability to get simple things it has done many times before working during actually mission contrasts sharply with the meticulous Chinese approach, which test the hell out of everything and then succeeds in acoompolishing multiple envelope pushing features simultaneously on the first try in space

One might say this culture difference is likely to make any serious collaborative effort between Rosocosmos and CNSA a marriage made in hell.

 

[taxiya]

ESA has landed on Titan, which NASA hasn’t accomplished.

Yet NASA has landed on Mars multiple times while ESA crashed on it. I don't think we should go to the path of comparing piece by piece, but focus on the capabilities which is that ESA does not have something that NASA can not live without.

 

[Nutrient]

Let's not forget launch rate. With Russia's involvement, twice as many launches will be possible than China could probably do by itself. The extra launches will be very important for supplying a large lunar base.

 

[anzha]

Russia’s Zarya module was constructed not by Russia but by the late soviet union before it dissolved as an additional module for the Mir space station.

This is not exactly correct. The design for Zarya was inherited from the Soviet Union. However, the US paid for the Russians to build a new one between 1994 & 1998.

 

[Richard Santos]

BTW, the russian space culture of not testing throughly before hand and accepting many mission failures actually dates to the very beginning of the Soviet Space program. So it is not something that even if Rosocomos shape up in the next 5 years, it is likely to completely move away from.