Some of the stuff here has hit the western press:
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China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
By your definition of copy, Falcon 9 is merely a copy of any single stick rocket that came before it, Falcon heavy is a copy of Delta Heavy., their multiple engine bundle configuration is a copy of the Soviet N-1. Your knowledge of space industry only started from 2010.
By looking at what you are saying, it is clear that you are merely a troll trying to trash this forum.
It is early stages again for the Long march 9, a frustration for some to be sure, because a few years ago it seemed that finalization of design had occurred. But I think the mission profile and economics have changed because of what SpaceX is doing. China also does not have an unlimited supply of rocket engineers, especially those designated for high priority projects.
Most likely China's best and brightest are being tasked right now with rolling out the Long March 10 to realize a manned lunar landing before 2030. Meanwhile, they are waiting to see the progress of Starship development, and make a decision later on, say after 2027 when the talent pool can be re-tasked to building the Long March 9.
Most likely China's best and brightest are being tasked right now with rolling out the Long March 10 to realize a manned lunar landing before 2030. Meanwhile, they are waiting to see the progress of Starship development, and make a decision later on, say after 2027 when the talent pool can be re-tasked to building the Long March 9.
The redesign of LM-9 is right and necessary. The old design was obsolete. If you are going down the wrong path, you don't keep going down that path, spending more and more time and resources on a dead end. There is a thing called a sunk cost. China's space program should be commended for recognizing this and switching gears. Right now their main issue is not competing with the Starship... if they can even get something like the Falcon 9, putting an object into space using a reusable rocket, then that would be a nice win. If they can suck private capital into the project to shoulder some of the funding, then even better. If the launch cost is similar or lower than the Falcon 9, then they are in the game.
At the end of the day though, right now Space X's advantage is their speed of iteration more than anything else. Starship launch blew up, but it hardly phased Space X because they are planning to launch again in a few months. So one rocket explosion only sets them behind by a few months. Compared to the Challenger explosion of early 1986... the Space Shuttle didn't fly again until 1989. Or even the unmanned LM-5, when it exploded in 2017, it was two-and-a half years before the next attempt. When every launch is so critical and a failure is a matter of years lost, then your space development will be too slow. If you can just keep churning out rockets at a low cost and fire them away like candy, then you will learn very fast and progress quickly too.
At the end of the day though, right now Space X's advantage is their speed of iteration more than anything else. Starship launch blew up, but it hardly phased Space X because they are planning to launch again in a few months. So one rocket explosion only sets them behind by a few months. Compared to the Challenger explosion of early 1986... the Space Shuttle didn't fly again until 1989. Or even the unmanned LM-5, when it exploded in 2017, it was two-and-a half years before the next attempt. When every launch is so critical and a failure is a matter of years lost, then your space development will be too slow. If you can just keep churning out rockets at a low cost and fire them away like candy, then you will learn very fast and progress quickly too.
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As a human being, I hope that the starship will succeed as quickly as possible; but as a Chinese, I don't want it to go too fast. This schizophrenia bothers me sometimes.
Quickie
Colonel
There are still big unknowns of building a rocket as large as the Soviet N-1 and the even larger Starship/Booster launcher where so many powerful engines are bundled together to achieve the kind of mind-blowing thrust required for such a huge rocket. No one knows if the shockwave and vibration at the start of the launch were what caused the 3 engines to fail even before the rocket started to lift off from the pad, something which is contrary to what most observers suspected which is ricocheting debris damaging the Raptor engines due to the rocket down-blast. The former is a much bigger potential problem where things are not so clearcut as to whether it would require extensive engineering changes to deal with it and how long that would take.
IMO it's not a foregone conclusion that the potential shockwave and vibration problem for a Rocket that powerful is necessarily something surmountable, at least without requiring a redesign from scratch to a smaller starship/booster launcher configuration.
kwaigonegin
Colonel
Looks like spacex is doing agile and everyone else still stuck in waterfall.
Because SpaceX has money to burn, literally.
And? Government space agencies have money as well.
Producing results is what matters. As long as they produce results, SpaceX could feed dollars as fuel into their engines for all they care
The ones who have a valid excuse is the small private space companies which operate with strict budgets and are constantly monitored by investors. They need to first successfully launch a couple of times before they prove to their investors that they are competent and capable enough for investors to give them more leeway to start burning money by being SpaceX-like agile
Btw even for SpaceX, if you know its history you would know that it was very close to bankruptcy at the start. NASA trusted it, and is now reaping rewards from that decision
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I didn't know that single stick rockets could land under their own power? It's so obvious that China is falling behind so hard that it isn't funny. They're struggling to catch up to the Falcon 9/Falcon heavy while Spacex forges ahead with Starship. Failure to innovate. Sad but this is reality. Anything else is cope. Starship is one thing, but they can't even catch up to the Falcon 9. Spacex was tiny and had a lot less funding when they made the Falcon 9... There's really no excuse, China has way more engineers and money to burn even back in the early 2010s, they just didn't consider the notion, so they didn't put in any funding or attention into developing the concept until Spacex gave them a big shock, so they had to start from scratch
Old dinosaurs can't think outside the box. And that is core to innovation, progressive slow incremental technological development in one thing, but when you innovate you think outside of the box. This lack of innovation isn't excusive to China. I remember an old interview with Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck, he said that he went to ESA a decade ago and floated the idea of a rocket engine whose pumps were powered by electrical batteries, he got laughed out of the room, they didn't even consider his idea. Today the Electron is probably the 2nd most successful smallsat launcher after the Falcon 9 and ESA is considering their own smallsat rocket launcher with electric powered pumps.
Why give excuses like this? Doesn't China have even more money? Don't they have more engineers? It wasn't like Spacex was this titan when they developed the Faclon 9, just a few years before that they were on the verge of bankruptcy and had a just few hundred employees. All this excuses reek of failure.