China's Space Program Thread II

[antiterror13]

You can have solid fuel rockets for ICBM work. Or keep a small number of hypergolic rockets in service if you don't want the skillset to die off. Having them take up half the number of annual chinese launches just means that you have an inefficient supply lines, ground support system and production lines have to support two very different kinds of rockets. And this is about talent too. Spacex famously poached a ton of it's employees from NASA. Lots of private chinese rocket companies are former CNSA/CALT employees. If they worked on hypergolics exclusively, then they will more or less be have to relearn a lot of shit when they join a private rocket company that is working on cryogenic rocket systems. Or there's some young super talented engineer that's assigned to produce dead end decades old hypergolic engines instead of working and improving on state of the art staged combustion engines.

You can literally make this argument for anything. Why don't we send soldiers to fight with sticks and stones? They're basically free. That's basically what all of American oldspace was saying too, they stuck with decades old rocket designs because "Cheap, easy and a hint of corruption", but at least they still worked with cryogenic engine systems instead of fucking hypergolic. And look at the state of ULA and NASA now. Completely outcompleted and driven out of the market.

You can easily make any amount of aurgments that Spacex could have stuck with the Falcon 1 for another decade, pushed for the smallsat market. Or that they could have sat on the Falcon 9/Falcon heavy for another decade and focused on Starlink and dominated the market. Instead they are always pushing the envelope and basically creating entire new markets. Even back in 2016 before the Falcon 9 landed, Elon was already talking about the ITS for landing on more than a 100 tons on Mars.

Isn't that the whole point of the virtuous cycle? Invest and push for modern rocket engines, more production lines means more economy of scale, which means cheaper rockets, which means more launches, which means more production lines, cheaper rockets and more and more talented minds working on improving them. I don't see that happening when half the launches are two decades old hypergolic rockets that are basically an dead end technology at this point. And it's not slowing down either, there's still going to be dozens of hypergolics launches until ??? 2030 maybe?

why you are so "hostile" to hypergolic rocket? thats only one factor from many and many. Is that the only one you know out of thin air ? It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as catches mice .... and China space programs definitely catch a lot of big mice so what are you on about of something not that important.

For your info, just in case you didn't know Chinese space program also use LOX/kerosene engine, so there is no lack of technology ..... just some other reasons why they decided to still use older hypergolic rocket which nothing wrong at all

 

[gelgoog]

I think they will be replaced in due time. They already have two launch sites using LOX/Kerosene, and it is a matter of time until they replace the launchers at the other two launch sites.

 

[YVHunter]

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.

are you an expert on this subject? what are your credentials? do you have experience in the space industry? do you have a deep understanding of China's space industry, technological foundation, strategy, and challenges? it's easy to sit in your armchair and pontificate saying "China should do this", "China should do that", you are like a football fan who has never coached nor played the game yet constantly swears that he could do better as manager

 

[tacoburger]

You make it sound like that China as a nation had sufficient space launch technological reserves and industry to be the first mover on this.

Not first mover for sure. But enough to not be completely blindsided and having to scramble to completely change the LM9's design so much. And pls, is that going to be the excuse forever. "we have almost equal technology to America, a bigger economy and lots more engineers and scientists but still going to lack behind forever."

The word "innovation" should be understood as "mastering the actual technological and industrial preceding domains before moving onto a subsequent new step".

No wonder China is falling behind so hard. America has a program specifically designed to investigate for far out concepts that are decades away from use. Nuclear rockets, 100km telescopes, Mars helicopters, they give small teams a few millions and at least write out the basic technical concepts and viability. If technology ever improves to that point, at least they have some basic designs and analysis to fall back on.

 

[Blitzo]

Not first mover for sure. But enough to not be completely blindsided and having to scramble to completely change the LM9's design so much.

I don't think they are completely blind sided -- they were looking into iterations of the current design since 2021.
And apart from China, no other space faring nation is looking at reusable super heavies at all. If anything, China's response to the prospect of reusable super heavies is fairly nimble among its international peers.

And pls, is that going to be the excuse forever. "we have almost equal technology to America, a bigger economy and lots more engineers and scientists but still going to lack behind forever."

No wonder China is falling behind so hard. America has a program specifically designed to investigate for far out concepts that are decades away from use. Nuclear rockets, 100km telescopes, Mars helicopters, they give small teams a few millions and at least write out the basic technical concepts and viability. If technology ever improves to that point, at least they have some basic designs and analysis to fall back on.

I think you must be very new to watching China's space industry, because your expectations for where China should be right now seems to not understand how far behind China was in relation to the US (and indeed other space powers like Russia, EU) even as recent as 2-3 decades ago.

China does have quite a lot of big picture projects that they have proposed and investigated -- but those are only very recent, because in case you didn't notice, it was only until recently that China's economy and technological mastery of various space related industries and domains began to approach that of the US (and even then it isn't unreasonable to say that they are still behind in many respects).


Innovation isn't the same as being ambitious.
Innovation is the outcome that can only arise after you have mastered all of the antecedent technologies and industries first before you can seriously investigate and develop more "innovative" products.


You seem to have a mismatch of understanding between where you believe China is at in terms of mastering relevant technologies and industries, and where China is actually at in reality.
Technological and industry mastery isn't something you can "ambition" you way out of -- instead what you need is years and decades of cumulative R&D, testing and launch infrastructure development, production infrastructure development, and above all the curation of a large mass of skilled and experienced human resources to draw upon, all of which in turn needs decades and decades of consistent and high amounts of funding and education.

China is beginning to approach a stage where they can start doing that, but as I said, it is very recent that the sort of near critical mass is being achieved.

 

[tacoburger]

are you an expert on this subject? what are your credentials? do you have experience in the space industry? do you have a deep understanding of China's space industry, technological foundation, strategy, and challenges? it's easy to sit in your armchair and pontificate saying "China should do this", "China should do that", you are like a football fan who has never coached nor played the game yet constantly swears that he could do better as manager

I don't have to do that because that's basically the exact situation between SpaceX and NASA/ULA. Old dinosaurs that refuse to innovate and push the envelope. China's decision to stick by hypergolics is basically a 1:1 parrell to NASA's decision to reuse shuttle hardware for their SLS instead of moving on to more modern rocket systems. It's not just wasting resources, it's a symptom of complacency and their unwillingness to push the envelope.

I think they will be replaced in due time. They already have two launch sites using LOX/Kerosene, and it is a matter of time until they replace the launchers at the other two launch sites.

And while they're not being replaced, they're eating up manpower, money and resources on a dead end technology, instead of all that money and brainpower going towards other more productive developments like modern rockets production or innovations.

why you are so "hostile" to hypergolic rocket? thats only one factor from many and many

Because they make up half of China's total annual launches? That's hundreds of millions of dollars, hundreds of engineers, massive factories being used for a complete dead end technology. Imagine if they used all those resources to expand modern rocket production lines, or forgo a single long march 3 launch and threw the money at a team of researchers to figure out technical needs of a reusable rocket back in 2010. I won't be complaining if they took up a handful of launches a year. And at this rate, it's going to be the mid 2030s before they're phased out.

It doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white as long as catches mice

Well this analogy is more like "The black cat is on the verge of death due to old age, but instead of letting it die, you're spending millions to prolong it's life, starving the young white cat so badly that it can't grow up properly".

You seem to have a mismatch of understanding between where you believe China is at in terms of mastering relevant technologies and industries, and where China is actually at in reality.

We're at the stage where China has fully matured their cryogenic rocket systems for almost a decade but the number of hypergolic rocket systems are still growing and outnumber them.

Technological and industry mastery isn't something you can "ambition" you way out of -- instead what you need is years and decades of cumulative R&D, testing and launch infrastructure development, production infrastructure development, and above all the curation of a large mass of skilled and experienced human resources to draw upon, all of which in turn needs decades and decades of consistent and high amounts of funding and education.

And yet SpaceX jumped from falcon 1 to falcon 9 to Starship so fast... And they were a tiny fraction of their size back in the early 2010s. By this dinosaur logic, they would still be improving and working on the falcon 1.

 

[Blitzo]

We're at the stage where China has fully matured their cryogenic rocket systems for almost a decade but the number of hypergolic rocket systems are still growing and outnumber them.

Yes, because real world demands of cost, industry and infrastructure and launch demands requires more than just a successful launch but rather requires whole of system investments and advancements to scale to.

And yet SpaceX jumped from falcon 1 to falcon 9 to Starship so fast... And they were a tiny fraction of their size back in the early 2010s. By this dinosaur logic, they would still be improving and working on the falcon 1.

That makes SpaceX the exception not the norm.
Take SpaceX out of the equation, and China's pace of advancement in spacefaring technologies is among the world's fastest and most agile.


Based on where China's mastery of antecedent technology and industry were, additional ambition and additional money in the last decade would likely have helped somewhat to advance faster, but certainly not at the pace of advancement of SpaceX, and before Spacex in the last few years, no one expected them to be able to do what they did.

So your argument seems to be "why wasn't China able to keep up with SpaceX" which is ridiculous to ask when literally no one else has including players with more capable industry and technological mastery.
Instead, if we look at "how has China responded to SpaceX," it seems they're moving quite dynamically and ambitiously compared to the other players, especially considering where its industry and technological mastery is at.

 

[birdlikefood]

Mainly Falcon 9 and Falcon heavy clones...

And still files dozens of two decade old hypergolic designs. That's hundreds of engineers and technicians, ground support systems, hundreds of millions of yuan a year spent on a dead end technology.

Most of those examples are just repeating things that have already been done.

Yes.

So the same reasoning that NASA, boeing and ULA have fallen into. "We are using old space shuttle hardware because of costs, let's waste billions and many of our talented engineers on obsolete hardware instead of actually developing something new" China isn't a small country, modern rocket engines are a mature tech, they could have easily pushed for expanding production lines to provide more than enough engines for use without having to split production lines and complicate logistics by using an toxic dead end fuel system.

If SpaceX had used this same line of logic, they would still be launching their Falcon 1. Or they wouldn't have even started work on starship and continued with the Faclon 9 for another two decades. ULA fell into the same trap and continued using the same general hardware for decades instead of aggressively pushing the envelope.

Is there any reliable calculation data for the capacity of low-earth orbit satellites? After all, this kind of thing cannot be estimated by perceptual cognition.

 

[tankphobia]

Is there any reliable calculation data for the capacity of low-earth orbit satellites? After all, this kind of thing cannot be estimated by perceptual cognition.

I think at least for starlink esq world wide uplink satellites, there should be a upper limit to what you can throw up there as they share a similar orbital height. Currently it's basically a wild west in terms of who can put up how many, only limited by launch capacity. It's only a matter of time until there are tens of thousands of such satellites in orbit.

So in that case I do understand if there is some sort of urgency for those first come first serve sort of orbits.

However once you reach a higher orbit the carrying capacity increases so much that it probably doesn't matter, since surface area scales with radius via square power, you can always just boost to a higher orbit.

 

[Kalec]

The slide is too blurred to see any figure in it but here is the source said on the ground.

长征九号最新PPT中三种构型的运载能力：
▲三级基本型：不回收状态LTO运力50吨，一级复用的LTO运力35吨，2033年前后首飞。
▲两级近地型：不回收状态LEO运力150吨，一级复用的LEO运力100吨，2030年代末首飞？
▲星舰化两级全复用型：LEO运力80吨，2040年代首飞？将作为航班化天地往返运输系统的组成部分。

PS：根据今早吴艳华的报告口述，该方案的长征九号火箭，一二级明确采用200吨级全流量分级燃烧循环液氧甲烷发动机，三级则采用氢氧动力。

The capacity of three configurations in the latest prestentation of Long March 9:
▲ Three-stage basic type: 50 tons of LTO capacity in non-recovery state, 35 tons of LTO capacity in first stage reuse, first flight around 2033.
▲ Two-stage LEO type: 150 tons of LEO capacity in non-recovered state, 100 tons of LEO capacity in first stage reuse, first flight in late 2030s?
▲ Starship-based two-stage fully resuable type: LEO capacity 80 tons, first flight in 2040s? It will be used as an integral part of the flight-based round-trip transportation system between space (or near-space?) and earth.

According to the dictation of Wu Yanhua's report this morning, the Long March 9 rocket of this program, the first and second stages clearly use 200-ton full-flow staged-combustion-cycle liquid oxygen methane engines, while the third stage is hydrogen-oxygen powered.

Personal thought:

Wu Yanhua is the deputy of CNSA, his word also carry as much official weight as you would expect. And the starship clone is placed to fly somewhere around 2044, so I doubt it will eventually be a thing after two decades. IIRC it is the first time we get any idea on launch capacity on reusable variant?



Source:

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