China's Space Program Thread II

[Strangelove]

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China releases first Mars global color images obtained from country’s first Red Planet exploration mission

By Global Times Published: Apr 24, 2023 02:47 PM

An orthographic projection of the eastern and western hemispheres of Mars. Photo: CNSA

China on Monday released the first Mars global images obtained from its first Mars exploration mission, providing an improved quality base map for future scientific and exploration tasks on the Red Planet, the China National Space Administration (CNSA) announced at the opening ceremony of this year's Space Day of China.

The color images, jointly issued by CNSA and the Chinese Academy of Sciences, included an orthographic projection, Robinson projection, the Mercator projection, and azimuthal projection of the eastern and western hemispheres of Mars with a spatial resolution of 76 meters.

The image maps will provide an improved quality base map for Mars exploration projects and scientific research, the CNSA said, and data obtained by the Tianwen mission will make key contributions to humanity's in-depth knowledge of the planet.

The medium-resolution camera onboard Tianwen-1, has performed 284 orbital remote sensing imaging from November 2021 to July 2022, so as to achieve global coverage of the Martian surface. Some 14,757 images have been acquired by the ground-based application system, which were then processed to obtain the global color image map of Mars.

What's more, China's research teams have identified a large number of geographical entities near the landing site of Tianwen through high-resolution images, and the International Astronomical Union has named 22 of them, according to relevant rules, after villages in China, with historical and cultural values and a population of less than 100,000. Through this way, China's presence is permanently engraved on Mars' surface.

Tianwen-1, China's first Mars mission probe, embarked on its journey on July 23, 2020, and after 202 days of travel, it arrived at the Mars orbits.

On May 15, 2021, the land rover Zhurong landed in designated spot on the Martian surface and started its trek. It has completed its 90-Martian-day scientific exploration task and kept working for another 268 Martian days, and remains in hibernation mode.

As of June 29, 2022, the Mars orbiter has carried out global remote sensing for over 1,000 days, and it is still carrying on its mission in fine conditions.

China's first Mars mission, which was tasked to achieve Mars orbiting, landing and roving in one go, has been completed successfully.

The 13 payloads carried by the mission have accumulated 1800GB of scientific data and formed standard data products.

Over the past two years, Tianwen-1 has obtained first-hand detection data and achieved notable scientific research results, which analysts believed would be continued with further multi-dimensional exploration missions being carried out.

 

[tacoburger]

Long march 9 must still be in development hell, having to change designs from a Saturn 9 class rocket, to a scaled up Falcon 9 to a fully resuable Starship design. Honestly, it would be a miracle if it can make it's first flight by 2035, considering the amount of changes and how slow the chinese space program moves.

Who knows, by then, you could have Starship launching daily, taking hundreds of thousands of tons of payload into orbit per year. Space is limited in orbit... China can easily be shut off from entire orbital bands due to "first come first served" as hundreds of thousands of American satellites take up most of the desirable orbits leaving little room for newcomers, or taking up most of the desirable sites on the Moon's poles.

Just goes to show the price of not innovating, moving so slow and trying to save face by avoiding failure. I do hope that China at least tries to take more risk and adopts a faster pace moving forward, not dragging their feet and trying their best to keep outdated rockets in service for another decade or just mindless trying to copy everything that America/Spacex does.

 

[BoraTas]

I wonder how much time they could have saved if they went with a single stick cluster first stage to begin with...


I suppose if they can do a successful test flight from the outset and it more "before" rather than "after" 2033 then they might not lag behind Starship in an insurmountable way, if they can mass produce them properly.

The most important thing is getting the first stage reusable. It is much easier compared to the second stage (Mach 5 speed and 70 km altitude vs Mach 26 speed and 250 km altitude) and saves most of the money. Decreasing the full mass to dry mass ratio in the second stage comes with a severe payload penalty.

I once read a post by an ex-space systems senior engineer. He was stating that NASA considered a reusable rocket in past. But it was found that landing a first stage at its launch point comes with a ~60% payload penalty and it is actually cheaper to just use a smaller expendable rocket.

The prices are for late-2022. The graph from the guy I mentioned.

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This will be even worse for re-usable second stages. Provided that you are using all of the capability of the rocket, reusability currently only reduces prices if all boosters are recovered at a location other than the launch point (such as SpaceX's ASDS). The Starship is Mars travel specific, and that's why I repeatedly say I will be watching its market performance.

 

[CrazyHorse]

Told y'all so, it will be a double event.

On specification, basically nothing changed compared with the previous slide on Friday, except for an additional Starship design for two stage reusability.

The slide states that they are aiming for two flight tests around 2033, so the approval could be imminent or has already be made if one recalls earlier statement from Long Lehao on "the first test will come around in ten years after approval.“

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It would be nice if they didn’t blatantly copy starship for the last design.

 

[tacoburger]

It would be nice if they didn’t blatantly copy starship for the last design.

China has a massive innovation problem, especially with their space program. They are the only modern space program that is still flying hypergolic rockets, not just one or two, but dozens of them every year. That's hundreds of engineers and technicians, ground support systems, hundreds of millions of yuan a year spent on a dead end technology.

That all money and manpower could have been for any other of innovative ideas and development, or at the very least on expanding modern liquid fuelled engine production for better economy of scale and a better train workforce. But nope, for unknown reasons, but probably because for reliability or corruption or maybe because some old dinosaur in charge doesn't want to see his beloved hypergolics go away, there's more hypergolic launches than ever, even though China has fully matured and domestic modern kerosene/hydrogen rocket engines and the ability produce them at scale to replace hypergolic rockets.

The smart thing would have been to very quickly phase out hypergolic rockets and standardise all ground support systems, fuel production and production lines for modern kerosene/hydrogen engines for better economy of scale, logistics and training. But at the rate things are going, the Long march 3B, 4C and 2F are still going to be flying when the Long march 9 makes it's first flight. It's embarrassing and pathetic.

This unwillingness to change demonstrates just how assbackwards the chinese space program is. Just imagine how Spacex would have turned out if they didn't stop developing and producing their Falcon 1 even after getting their Falcon 9, splitting up production lines and engineers to work on an obvious dead end.

 

[taxiya]

It would be nice if they didn’t blatantly copy starship for the last design.

First of all, the slide is not representation of the product. The depiction is just a place holder.

Second of all, what is wrong of "copy"? All wheels in the world are round, nobody owns the right of a circle, if the shape and location of flaps are there because aerodynamic laws dictate then it should be there. It is not even a copy because nobody can own a physical law.

Please don't trash the forum.

 

[taxiya]

The most important thing is getting the first stage reusable. It is much easier compared to the second stage (Mach 5 speed and 70 km altitude vs Mach 26 speed and 250 km altitude) and saves most of the money. Decreasing the full mass to dry mass ratio in the second stage comes with a severe payload penalty.

I once read a post by an ex-space systems senior engineer. He was stating that NASA considered a reusable rocket in past. But it was found that landing a first stage at its launch point comes with a ~60% payload penalty and it is actually cheaper to just use a smaller expendable rocket.

The prices are for late-2022. The graph from the guy I mentioned.
View attachment 111528

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This will be even worse for re-usable second stages. Provided that you are using all of the capability of the rocket, reusability currently only reduces prices if all boosters are recovered at a location other than the launch point (such as SpaceX's ASDS). The Starship is Mars travel specific, and that's why I repeatedly say I will be watching its market performance.

Very interesting to see a professional calculation of re-usability.

 

[tacoburger]

First of all, the slide is not representation of the product. The depiction is just a place holder.

Second of all, what is wrong of "copy"? All wheels in the world are round, nobody owns the right of a circle, if the shape and location of flaps are there because aerodynamic laws dictate then it should be there. It is not even a copy because nobody can own a physical law.

Please don't trash the forum.

You don't copy because then you're second. And when you're second by a decade or two, you suddenly find that all the good orbits are filled to the brim with American satellites that don't leave much room for you, that the entire 3rd world is using starlink and all the good sites at the Moon's poles are claimed by America.

Maybe if China had bothered to innovate a little and didn't have such a love of hypergolic rockets, they wouldn't be so behind. The Long march 9's original design was a SLS clone anyway, so they really shouldn't have copied that design.

 

[taxiya]

You don't copy because then you're second. And when you're second by a decade or two, you suddenly find that all the orbits are filled to the brim with American satellites that don't leave much room for you, that the entire 3rd world is using starlink and all the good sites at the Moon's poles are claimed by America.

First of all, you should know that the word copy in my post and the post I replied to is about the shape of the second stage. That shape is just a cylinder with four flaps. They are dictated by the physical law, and there is NOT much room for anyone to innovate, it is like a wheel.

Now tell me, how would you innovate a wheel that is not round? What is even the purpose of such "innovation", bragging right?

Maybe if China had bothered to innovate a little and didn't have such a love of hypergolic rockets, they wouldn't be so behind. The Long march 9's original design was a Saturn V clone anyway, so they really shouldn't have copied that design.

So now you also own the patent of single stick configuration after owning the wheel? Why don't you declare that you own the universe?

 

[tacoburger]

First of all, you should know that the word copy in my post and the post I replied to is about the shape of the second stage. That shape is just a cylinder with four flaps. They are dictated by the physical law, and there is NOT much room for anyone to innovate, it is like a wheel.

Now tell me, how would you innovate a wheel that is not round? What is even the purpose of such "innovation", bragging right?

So now you also own the patent of single stick configuration after owning the wheel?

Why are you comparing basic fundamental concepts such as a wheel to the very open concept of reusable rockets? Long march 9 isn't just copying the shape. By this logic, Starship is copying some caveman's dick. Tell me, why is the LM9 using 200 ton methlox full stage combustion engines? The same kind of engines that Starship is using? Not to mention other rocket designs like Rocket Lab's fully reusable 2 stage rocket doesn't look anything like Starship anyway.

And again, China needs to forge it's own path. Just mucking around with decade old hypergolic rocket designs and copying whatever Spacex does isn't going to cut it.