China's Space Program Thread II

[tacoburger]

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Here's some more details about Space pioneer if anyone is interested.

Key points
Their factory can produce 500 rocket engines and around 30 rockets a year. Not sure if they mean the TL-2 or TL-3, they seem like they're talking about the TL-2, but 500 rocket engines means that the TL-2 is using 16 engines and that's wayyyyy too much. And I have seen other sources stating that they're planning for 30 launches of the TL-3 a year so it's probably the TL-3
They think that they can land and reuse a rocket by 2026

 

[tacoburger]

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By comparison, Landspace's factory is expected to produce 30 rockets and 300 engines every year. 10 engines per rocket, so that's likely the ZQ-3 too.

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Space-Cirling's factory on the other hand is expected to produce 50 engines in 2024, though that's phase 1 of the factory and production rates are expected to ramp up.

Honestly I have no idea why they need to build so many rockets or engines. All of this rockets are reusable, so when you can reuse the same rocket a dozen times, that factory becomes kind of useless. If you have 30 rockets sitting around and all of them can be used at least 10 times each, you would need 300+ flights to fully make use of them all. If you were launching a multiple times a day maybe, since there's always gonna be some downtime in-between refitting the rocket and preparing it for flight. But then the issue of payload comes into play.

 

[tacoburger]

Anyway anyone has any concrete numbers on how many engines and rockets the other private companies are expected to produce, galactic energy, Ispace, deep blue aerospace? I'm expecting similar numbers from them.

I don't expect most of this companies to survive long term, but assuming that 2-3 make it and they each can make dozens of rockets a year and each rocket can be reused a dozen times and of course the Long March series and you could get near to a thousand launches a year by the end of the decade.

At that point payload and the launch pad becomes for of an issue than the rocket. Can China produce enough satellites for this rockets and can the Hainan commercial launch site support this launch rate? Even the entire Guowang constellation will get launched entirely within a year at those numbers. China will probably have to think of entirely new mega-constellations, like maybe a 10,000+ LEO SAR satellite network that can basically scan the entire globe 24/7.

Is there any other commercial space port being built other than the Hainan commercial space port? I don't think that any space port in the world can handle such a rapid launch rate if all this works out.

 

[Michael90]

Anyway 2024 will be a very busy year for China's private sector. There will be at least 3 new rockets launching in 2024, maybe more.

Space Pioneer: The Tianlong 3 will be capable of putting 17 tons into LEO
Galactic energy: The Pallas-1 will be capable of putting 5 tons into LEO
Deep blue aerospace: The Nebula-1 will be capable of 1 tons to LEO

And they are all designed to be reusable. And of course Landspace and space pioneer will be ramping up the launch rates of their existing rockets.

All the pieces are there. The last 8 years was just for laying the groundwork, development of the engines, training the staff, building up the infrastructure. The mega constellations will be ready to launch, all the factories built, Wenchang launch center will be ready next year too. 2024 will be be when they finally can start ramping up their launch rate and focusing fully on making their rockets reusable.

Hopefully we will see a massive increase in launches and a development towards reusability in a short period of time. That will be the test of this private companies, to see how fast that they can develop. I wonder how fast will it take for them to get towards Spacex level of reusability and launch rate, 1/2/3/4 years? I think it will be faster than most people expect, computing power that was so necessary to land a rocket has only increased since 2016 and all of this rockets are designed from the start to be reusable, even more so than the original Falcon 9 and they have the benefit of hindsight and lessons learned from SpaceX.

It would be amazing if all of this companies had the maiden launch of their rockets in 2024 and by 2025 they managed to reliability land their rockets. We would have in the span of few years, China going from having zero reusable rockets, to having more than America, and suddenly more than doubling the the amount of payload that they can send into space.

Yes ambitions and realisation are two different things. Let's see if they can manage to launch all those new rockets successfully next year. If they can pull it off it would be a huge boost to China's space industry and might push launch rates to at least over 100 launches a year going forward

 

[Michael90]

Please drop your holy bible of private company is better than SOE. The world largest mobile operator is China Mobile, the larget commercial bank is ICBC

You made some good points on that post of yours. However on this one we can argue that its also becasue the Chinese government maintains a monopoly on those sectors for the state owned companies and prohibits private companies or individuals from getting involved in those industries. So it's normal that state owned banks like ICBC and China mobile will be the largest in the world due to China's sheer size and they enjoying a quasi monopoly with zero competition in their industry. In fact all the 3 Chinese state owned banks who enjoy a monopoly in China are some of the largest in the world due to this reason. It will be the same if China gives its state owned companies a monopoly as well in other industries like internet or tech industry. Imagine China formed a state owned company and outlawed private companies from tech or internet or auto industry then you wont have any alibaba, tencent, ByteDance,DIDI, Shein, BYD, GEELY etc etc. They will be dominated by one or two large state owned companies as well. So i don't think that's a fair comparison for judging the performance of private entreprises vis a vis state owned ones when they don't compete at all together or on the same playing field. It's like China's space industry before 2014 where the state owned companies like CASC enjoyed a monopoly with zero private participation/competion. Of course they will be huge. The Chinese government wanted some competition and shake up of China's space industry after seeing SpaceX rise in the US. Which proved to be a good decision since private companies and private capital brings more vibrant ideas and projects which orherwise could have been kept under wraps without ever seeing the day. So it's a good thing as well.
There are advantages and disadvantages for both systems depends on what the country leans towards more as well.

 

[tacoburger]

Yes ambitions and realisation are two different things. Let's see if they can manage to launch all those new rockets successfully next year. If they can pull it off it would be a huge boost to China's space industry and might push launch rates to at least over 100 launches a year going forward

That's the benefits of having so many companies I guess, one of them will succeed. And yeah the launch rate is going to ramp up massively over the next few years, even if it goes badly at the start and a few of this companies stumble through some growing pains.


What is the status on the Guowang constellation btw? The private space sector is ramping up, the commercial space port will be ready next year, but when will mass production of the Guowang satellites actually happen and how many can be produced annually? We just saw a test launch, but when will the first actual mass produced batch make it's way into orbit. And of course when can customers start buying downlink terminals and subscriptions too.

 

[taxiya]

Yes ambitions and realisation are two different things. Let's see if they can manage to launch all those new rockets successfully next year. If they can pull it off it would be a huge boost to China's space industry and might push launch rates to at least over 100 launches a year going forward

If SpaceX has exploded many rockets it is unfair to use "launch all successfully" as a benchmark on Chinese startups as any indications.

 

[taxiya]

You made some good points on that post of yours. However on this one we can argue that its also becasue the Chinese government maintains a monopoly on those sectors for the state owned companies and prohibits private companies or individuals from getting involved in those industries.

You started on wrong assumptions. Chinese government does not forbid anyone doing their own business. Put it this way, if I have a kitchen to fix, I hire my son to do it. Is my not hiring you forbiding you a business? Let me put this straight, me (the government) choosing my own man (SOE) to do my own work is totally my right, nobody else. It is just in China up till now, only the state is rich enough to afford all satellites. Even the so called "private" satellites are owned by various state institutes and SOEs. There is NOT a single Chinese satellite in orbit owned by a real private entity so far. If you are interested go and check the share holders of companies owning those SSO optical constallations.

You and a lot of people are also confusing of SpaceX' emergence with private space company. US space industry was always private, never state owned like China. SpaceX is just a new comer after Boeing or LM. NASA owns the majority of the launches up to 2000s, but it has to hire private companies to do the actual job ever since the Apollo program. SpaceX' emergence does not fundamentally changed anything since 1950s regarding how the space business is run in the US.

In terms of monopoly, it is true that Chinese state maintains monopoly on many things including space business. That will remain so long as China is still PRC, it is not a choice of business model, it is what PRC is. So arguing or advocating or suggesting otherwise is political rather than technological or business matter. This is why I started my first post.

 

[gadgetcool5]

You started on wrong assumptions. Chinese government does not forbid anyone doing their own business. Put it this way, if I have a kitchen to fix, I hire my son to do it. Is my not hiring you forbiding you a business? Let me put this straight, me (the government) choosing my own man (SOE) to do my own work is totally my right, nobody else. It is just in China up till now, only the state is rich enough to afford all satellites. Even the so called "private" satellites are owned by various state institutes and SOEs. There is NOT a single Chinese satellite in orbit owned by a real private entity so far. If you are interested go and check the share holders of companies owning those SSO optical constallations.

Do you have a source for the above? For example, I see i-Space characterized as a "private" company on all mainstream sources and there is a VC site listing its rounds of funding. Where can you see a list of actual owners?

 

[sunnymaxi]

Gravity 2 Plan First Flight in 2025

On November 26, the 2023 China (Wenchang) Commercial Space Summit Forum was held in Wenchang, hosted by the Wenchang International Space City Administration and hosted by Hainan Space City Industrial Investment Holding Co., Ltd. At the forum, Oriental Space and Hainan Wenchang International Space City officially signed a launch vehicle launch and recovery Hainan base project, and conducted in-depth cooperation around the launch and recovery of the "Gravity 2" recyclable liquid launch vehicle to serve large-scale constellation networks and high-orbit rockets. Launch requirements.

Gravity 2 has a take-off weight of 927 tons, a take-off thrust of 1,420 tons, a low-Earth orbit carrying capacity of 25.6 tons, a 500-kilometer sun-synchronous orbit carrying capacity of 19.1 tons, and a geosynchronous transfer orbit of 7.7 tons. It plans to fly for the first time in 2025..



Source - China Aerospace on Weibo