China's Space Program Thread II

[sunnymaxi]

Unless China aggressively starts flying more missions to the moon, I don't see China landing a man on the moon by 2030.

this is official statement from CNSA in front of Media ... entire country have watched this ..

All design work on the mission system .. Long March10 , spacecraft , Lunar lander and spacesuit have completed and entered in prototype stage. with extensive testing carried out on subsystem and components ..

Launch site of Long March10 is also under construction..

first LM10 flight expected in 2026 ..



so we literally don't care what you said ... do you know better than CNSA ??

 

[bebops]

I don't understand current Chinese timeline of 2030 manned landing. Apollo 11 mission was preceded by several test Apollo missions including human flyby of moon before even attempting a landing. This was done to test all the subsystems, space craft and procedures.

China has been very cautious and methodical in its space missions so far. So, how can they directly land on the moon without doing their own series of test flights to test all the space craft, manned lunar lander and so on. But the only moon mission planned before 2030 are Change 7 & 8 which are also unmanned missions. Seems very risky to directly go from 2 of these missions and then do a manned lunar landing.

Unless China aggressively starts flying more missions to the moon, I don't see China landing a man on the moon by 2030.

The manned moon mission is basically chang 5 or chang 6 with a seat. If they can return rock samples from the moon, they can do that with humans. just need a comfortable seat on the rocket

 

[greenHeron]

Didn’t China already collect some samples from the moon relatively recently? Are the samples to be collected on the far side of the moon going to be so different from the samples collected on the near side?

 

[Temstar]

Didn’t China already collect some samples from the moon relatively recently? Are the samples to be collected on the far side of the moon going to be so different from the samples collected on the near side?

Apollo program have collected samples from many near side sites, no one has ever collected any sample from the far side so we don't know.

Lunar near side and far side certainly look very different:

We have theories on why all the lunar mares are on the near side and almost none on the far side. Samples from the far side may give us better hints at how this happened.

 

[tiancai8888]

Didn’t China already collect some samples from the moon relatively recently? Are the samples to be collected on the far side of the moon going to be so different from the samples collected on the near side?

Yes, They did. The second question is why they need to send Cheng'e 6 to find out.

 

[tacoburger]

so we literally don't care what you said ... do you know better than CNSA ??

I'm confident that China can do a crewed landing by 2030 though it will be tight if they don't speed things up, but can you stop using appeal to authority argument for everything? It's so common with you and it's not an proper argument. Believe it or not, even regular everyday people can often know better than massive government agencies and billion dollar companies. Organizations and people often lie or make up bullshit timelines that they know that they can't keep. Furthermore, this is space, where even a single failed launch can set timelines back by years.

Everyone knew that the 2024 timeline for a American crewed lunar landing was bullshit the moment they announced it, just as everyone knows that the current 2026 date is bullshit. You don't see people going "Hmmmm, NASA literally landed on the moon before, surely they know better then a random guy on the internet, they will surely manage a lunar landing this year to meet the original timeline". You don't see people blindly believing the obvious American PR bullshit, everyone knows that the SLS is a expensive piece of crap that's wayyy over budget and that America will be lucky to land on the Moon by the end of the decade, no matter what NASA or SpaceX says.

This is similar to what happened with the reusable Long March 8, I called bullshit the moment I saw CALT's plan to somehow land a two engine rocket together with the booster still attached. It's actually laughable that they actually thought that it would work, but people still called me out when I pointed out how stupid the idea was and asked me where my PHD in rocket science was, as if that meant anything. I don't need a PHD in rocket science to know that a two engine layout was going to be horrible for thrust control and that landing with the boosters attached was going to be horrible for aerodynamics.

 

[taxiya]

Why it take so long to land? It took only a week for Chang'e 5 lander to land on the lunar surface.

Three differences that I have gathered, we can imagine the reasons behind.
Chang'5 was like touch and go. Chang'6 will circle the moon for about 20 days before landing.
Chang'6 has international instruments that need to be put on the surface doing on-site experiment.
Chang'6 will do on-site sample analysis.
The digging and departing is only a short portion of the mission.

 

[tphuang]

this is what a modern satellite factory look like, by Geespace, Geely subsidiary

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1787171017825173581

 

[tacoburger]

Just posting this to show how badly China has fallen behind and how badly it needs the commercial space sector. People talk about the space race to the Moon for optimal south pole sites and access to water, but the real space race is in LEO. There's a limited amount of good orbital bands in LEO and GTO, not to mention frequencies. This has never been a problem before, but with multiple American and Chinese mega constellations coming online, and with Europe and India likely to try their hand at launching their mega constellations too, it's going to be very crowded in LEO and GTO. With how much of a nightmare it's going to take for all those nations to share, it's likely just going to be a game of "first come first served" in regards to LEO real estate. And sure, China launches a large number of rockets, but the the actual total amount of satellites is actually quite low.

One reason why China is not way ahead the number of satellites launched despite their larger number of launches compared to other countries is that the military monopolies Long March launches and that military focused LM payloads don't tend to offer ride-shares , and even when they do, it's not for a lot of payloads. The record for the amount of satellites a Long March has deployed on a single launch is 22, which is low compared to other space agencies. Russia, India and SpaceX all surpassed this record easily.

2ndly is that a large number of launches are from small lift solid fueled rockets, which inflates China's launch numbers while not launching very much into orbit.

This is why private spaceflight in China is going to be extremely important, even more so then national prestige missions to the Moon. Despite the people here that keeps trying to shit on China's private rocket efforts. Even if they don't achieve greater costs saving then a long march rocket, even if they never figure out re-usability, they will still be useful in that they won't be largely limited to launching a handful of military satellites and can actually optimize ride sharing to launch as much payload and mass as they can into orbit per launch.

Even the Long March 8, which is supposed to be more focused on be launching commercial payloads , I suspect will still be roped into supporting a large number of military payloads, especially if it's replacing the older hypergolic rockets. And of course the LM-8 is still very far away from being mass produced enough to take up the brunt of China's launch market.

 

[bebops]

If those commercial companies can build 500 ISR satellites/yr and launch them into space, then its a game changer.. No blind point on earth. Nothing can hide included the most stealthiest plane like B21, zumwalt destroyer or even future bombers like B50. It will be observed from base, to their point of flight and landing.

Internet satellite like starlink is not a big of a deal.