this year, 10+ private rockets have launched. and all were successful. only 1 failure.
Private companies taking the charge.
This is the issue with only counting launches, we really shouldn't be doing that anymore. Most of those launches were tiny, only capable of putting a few hundred kilos in LEO. That will change in the coming years as more capable liquid fueled rockets come online, but saying "we did a dozen rocket launches" doesn't have the same bite as "those dozen rocket launches put less mass into orbit then a single Falcon 9 launch"
Before Spacex, for China and the Chinese government, space was basically some military satellite, GPS/Beidou and then just 'space experiments' that one could say 'glorified science experiment'.
Why are you acting like GPS/Beidou and military satellites aren't a big deal? The entire military depends on those two systems. All reusable rockets/Spacex is doing is lowering costs enough that instead of lifting a few hundred sats into LEO, you can afford to put tens of thousands of them in LEO.
But as it stands, the above is served fine enough by the various CZ rockets, even if they might be older and use hypergolics.
Not to mention, they likely are in fact, quite cheap for PRC to use and launch stuff with.
You can use this argument for
literally anything. Rocks are free and infinite and can kill someone as easily a bullet, why bother with expensive guns. Why bother developing 5th gen fighter jets, biplanes are literally millions of times cheaper. Why use machines, use free muscle power. But go ahead and argue that China should stick with 40 year old technologies, because it's cheaper. Even if it's suboptimal, going with the more expensive and more advanced stuff is good because it allows you to further develop the technology. The very first example of firearms were alot worse then just a simple crossbow, but of course the nations that stuck with it and developed it got it's return in investment back eventually.
I'm going to say that China's obsession with hypergolic really hurt it's development of modern cryogenic rockets and engines in the past few decades, if it's 2024 and they still can't let go of them.
SpaceX and reusable rockets didn't pop out of the blue. Reusable rockets are only possible with advanced cryogenic engines that can deep throttle and restart multiple times. Spacex can develop this kind of engines because America has a vast well of institutional knowledge about cryogenic rockets dating back decades.
Meanwhile we have China, who is one the OG space countries, having made orbit back in 1970, somehow taking until 2015 to launch it's first cryogenic rocket. This lack of experience hurts. Institutional knowledge takes decades to built up. You can't train and build up this kind of shit overnight. Imagine if China never bothered developing a 5th gen fighter until some American 6th gen fighter causes a scene and they suddenly have to go from 4th gen fighters to 6th fighters within a couple of years. Impossible. You have to build that shit up over time. Knowledge from the J-20 is going to be extremely helpful in building China's 6th gen fighter, the same way China's experince with cryogenic engines is going to help it make resauble rockets. The difference is that China has literally less than a decade worth of experince with cryogenic rockets, compared to America's 50+ years.
Oh and it's not just engines. Chilling and compressing the propellant and preventing leaks is another important technology that can't be learned with hypergolic, not to mention the speed and time you can prepare the rocket. One way that SpaceX has been able to squeeze so much performance out of the Falcon 9 is via optimization of this process.
That's what's happening. China has less then a decade of knowledge of cryogenic engines and rockets and suddenly it's tasked with the most advanced kind of cryogenic engines that needs advanced features like deep throttling, restarting and full flow staged combustion. No shit why it's progress is slow, it's like suddenly tasked with developing a 6th gen fighter a year after the J-20 had her first flight. Not helping is that the obsolete hypergolic rockets are still going strong even today, sucking up a good amount of funding and staff.
Oh and because cryogenic fuels and rocket push the envelope so far, they help to push technology in other areas. Metallurgy is one, alloys that run hotter and are ligthweight will always find a use elsewhere. Cooling and compressing cryogenic fuel has it's uses in various other industries. You know what other engines burn kersone/hydrogen/methane and oxygen? All of them. Controlling hydrogen leaks and the use of hydrogen as a fuel will have it's uses in the push for green hydrogen.
What engine burns hydrazine other then a handful of old rockets? What spin off technology does billions of dollars of funding that goes into hydrazine rockets every year produces?
Oh and cyrogenic rockets are just better in performance. It's just physics. You simply can't get good performance out of hydrazine. And sometimes, you just need to lift >8 tons in one payload, something that China had to develop her first heavy lift cryrogenic rocket for... in 2016... And thank god for that, if it weren't for the need to lift heavy payloads into space, who knows how long China would have delayed her cryogenic rocket program for?
As such, there really isn't much problem with the overall planning around space that China has done.
China made orbit in 1970 and it's first purely cryogenic rocket launch was in 2015. I see a bit of a delay there. Compare that with other space agencies. There's a reason why even IRSO isn't using hypergolics nearly as much as China does.
Do you know how long it took for America and the soviet union in the 1960s to move to cryogenic rockets?
Lol, you're the joke and stupid one if you think the PRC is that incomponent. What's more, what does that make all the other governments in the world then? Including the US government lol.
Goverments can make their blind spots. This is one of China's. Their blind obession with their aging hypergolic rockets.
Also, you way overemphasize how much Spacex plays in the Ukraine/Russia war lol.
Again, most of what Spacex is launching is their starlink, which really doesn't have such a revolutionary or game changing role as the media makes it have.
Stop coping so hard. What Spacex is doing is extremely important. Starlink might not seem important because it's marketed as a "civilian internet provider" for people in rural or remote areas, but it can easily can be a data link for jets over the south china sea.
And they are working on that lol.
It took 50 years for from making orbit to it's first pure cryogenic rocket. And even today, the hypergolic fleet is still >50% of launches, and growing in number too. When will we see the last long march 2/3/4 fly? 2035?
