China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
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I wouldn't count on it. Rockets larger than the SpaceX Falcon 9/Heavy just aren't cost effective. You would be hard pressed to find enough payloads to make them viable. The designs the Chinese private companies are now working on are already at the limit of what is commercially viable.
But even if those do get into service I doubt this will happen before the LM-10 enters service. As for the gargantuan LM-9 you might as well forget a Chinese private rocket of that size.
The whole point of reusable rockets like Starship is make access to space cheap enough to make large payloads commercially viable. I'm sure that people will find a use for it once the costs come down enough. Shipping billions of tons of goods, or flying millions of people across the world wasn't commercially viable 100 years ago too. Build it and they will come.
Lunar missions, 10 meter telescopes, extremely large satellites, Mars missions etc etc.
That was what many people were saying about SpaceX 15 years ago.
Not me. Anyway Starship is a boondoggle. The only way for it to pay itself is for the US government to fund military Starlink and orbital reconnaissance satellites. And even then the chance it might be cost effective is marginal. You could just launch more Falcon 9s.
This is an impossible proposition to begin with. These commercial companies will NOT make something (CZ-9,10) without state endorsement. Your question is asked in a reversed manner, it should have been "Is the government going to open up the launch catagory of CZ-9 and 10 to players other than CASC some time in the future?"
China's space launching market is controlled by state. In general, state owns all maket because PRC is a socialist state. The current commercial companies are established because the state openned up a sector of the launch service. This sector is middium payload. The sector of heavy payload is not oppened. Look at the commercial companies' protofolio, they compete with CZ-6, 8G, 8A and maybe 7 and 7A as these are in the catagory of commercial service. Nobody is going to make anything like CZ-9 and 10 without asking the state first.
Another more critical control by the state is launch site. All of them are in the hand of CASC. Land is state property. Any company needs state approval to build their own launch site, or need CASC approval to use existing site. So how could anyone develop any rockets without State approval in the first place? Someone can work in house on a CZ-9 class rocket even without government endorsement, but without a launch site what are they doing to do with it? Let alone finding a customer.
I will remind you again, this is China not USA. Things work in opposite order very often. In the US, SpaceX can develop whatever they want and buy a piece of land in Florida and build a site, the government can not say no except going through the same procedure as for NASA's launch facilities. In USA, money and private capital (SpaceX) is the ruler of the country. In China, state rules capital, government approves activities of capital, capital does what the government allows.
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You come up against physics, costs and time.
Today, the vast majority of goods are shipped by sea because it is the cheapest form of transport. Air cargo is faster, but way more expensive, so only accounts for a fraction of cargo volumes.
A Starship would be competing against existing airplane cargo services which would almost certainly still be many times cheaper. But note how an airplane can fly across the world to any destination in 24 hours. How many customers would be prepared to pay much more for a cargo than arrives in say 6 hours versus 24 hours?
A Starship passenger spacecraft sounds more viable, as some people would be prepared to pay for a much shorter flight time, especially for longer flights.
But what we saw with Concorde was that there aren't that many people willing to pay for a very expensive flight, which is far less comfortable and also much more dangerous.
It's only when you start talking about Moon bases or Mars bases (which requires ridiculous amounts of payload capacity), that Spaceship makes more sense than a Falcon 9 sized system.
Even if you were talking about 50,000 LEO satellites at 1 tonne each - Starship is overkill as you would only need 300-odd launches in total.
I am not sure there is business case for private launchers outside of commercial demand from satcom services and satellite imaging and such. Casc is not going to hand projects like mars rover or moon landing to private launchers. But we do have a situation where casc can’t launch fast or cheap enough for satcom services, so we have private launchers playing a major role.
I think the viability of sending things like mars rover or moon landing projects by commercial launch companies is a chicken and egg problem; if the commercial launch companies prove to be competent and viable, then I think there could be more projects and more payloads to be launched.
What I will say is it may be useful to consider whether right now we are in the 1920s equivalent for fixed wing flight, and in a few decades we could rapidly progress to heavier, more frequent, and more normalized launches, whether it's for LEO, GEO, LTO or beyond.
Edit, okay lol nvm
What if you want to put up 150t LEO satellites, 1 satellite per launch, and your goal is to have 50,000+ LEO satellites of 150t weight each.
What if you want to put up 150t satellites into LEO, or 10m diameter mirrors/sensors?
You can place larger objects in orbit by assembling them from smaller components in orbit.
When Columbus went to the Americas he didn't do it with just one ship either.