China's Space Program Thread II

[tphuang]

China's commercial launch market has been starved of launch capacity of years, even before Starlink/Guowang/G60 became a thing. Waiting time for commercial payloads is years long. The demand of satellites is there, the launches are not. It's not unique to China of course, in every country rocket launches are the bottleneck and the waiting times are long, although SpaceX is changing that.

And it's still not a good sign that even though China's total number of launches far outstrips that of Russia, their total combined mass and number of objects launched is still somewhat comparable. I have already explained why, because most of the LM are for military payloads, they don't offer rideshares, so there's often wasted unused capacity in a lot of launches.

Can you name some important programs that were delayed due to lack of launch capacity?

There has been a pretty big increase in launching needs in the past year due to domestic OEMs needing satcom. And that's why all the new gigafactories are coming online right now.

I haven't seen any evidence that the limiting factor is launch vs satellite product or demand.

 

[Dante80]

NASA did not allow SpaceX to supply cargo to the ISS with the Falcon 9 before the launcher did several successful launch missions. Would you trust an unproven rocket with delivering payloads to a multibillion space station? That is not how things are done.

Nah, not really, it was only the third mission (

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), as per plan. Both Falcon and Dragon were pretty much unproven back then, and with extremely low flight experience (two flights for the LV and only one for the capsule itself).

But this was a different project/time, and Falcon9 1.0+Dragon were purpose built for COTS/CRS.

 

[gelgoog]

Nah, not really, it was only the third mission (SpaceX COTS Demo Flight 2), as per plan. Both Falcon and Dragon were pretty much unproven back then, and with extremely low flight experience (two flights for the LV and only one for the capsule itself).

But this was a different project/time, and Falcon9 1.0+Dragon were purpose built for COTS/CRS.

The Chinese private space flight companies right now don't even have a launcher of similar payload capability.
They are still building rockets which are much smaller. They don't have enough payload to supply the station. And those rockets have like a couple flights experience tops.

Plus like I said, the Chinese space agency isn't that desperate to begin with. They have their own launcher program and it is working just fine. NASA was basically hosed with the termination of the Shuttle and the failure of the Ares program. Desperate times, desperate measures. It could have been a failure, try reading about Kistler K-1 or Beal Aerospace. The running joke in the space sector is that if you want to make a million dollars you need to start with a billion. While I never doubted the viability of the concept of the Falcon series (either 1 or 9) including the reusable, their success was certainly not guaranteed. It helped that they had the right team and just enough funding to pull through it.

China does not need to engage in such risky development practices.

 

[Dante80]

The Chinese private space flight companies right now don't even have a launcher of similar payload capability.
They are still building rockets which are much smaller. They don't have enough payload to supply the station. And those rockets have like a couple flights experience tops.

Plus like I said, the Chinese space agency isn't that desperate to begin with. They have their own launcher program and it is working just fine. NASA was basically hosed with the termination of the Shuttle and the failure of the Ares program. Desperate times, desperate measures. It could have been a failure, try reading about Kistler K-1 or Beal Aerospace. The running joke in the space sector is that if you want to make a million dollars you need to start with a billion. While I never doubted the viability of the concept of the Falcon series (either 1 or 9) including the reusable, their success was certainly not guaranteed. It helped that they had the right team and just enough funding to pull through it.

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I just wanted to correct your mistaken assertion that NASA only allowed SpaceX to supply cargo after "several successful launch missions".

NASA specifically gave money and a contract to SpaceX to supply cargo before SpaceX even built the rocket that became Falcon 9 or the capsule that became Dragon. That was the whole idea of the COTS program (which in retrospect was extremely successful).

As I said, a different time and project.

 

[gelgoog]

I'm not necessarily disagreeing with you, I just wanted to correct your mistaken assertion that NASA only allowed SpaceX to supply cargo after "several successful launch missions".

NASA specifically gave money and a contract to SpaceX to supply cargo before SpaceX even built the rocket that became Falcon9 or the capsule that became Dragon.

Back then it was considered as insurance in case the Ares program failed. Which it did. They gave SpaceX like $100 million USD which was like 1/20th the cost of the Ares program. And it wasn't all given in one go. SpaceX had to follow several program milestones to get the money. This was done at a time when the US had basically no alternative to paying Russia for Soyuz flights. So NASA and the government were pretty desperate.

When the contract was given SpaceX had already launched a satellite with Falcon 1. And the Falcon 9 design was supposed to use the same Merlin engines. I say supposed to, because they basically ended up redesigning the whole engine.

The mission requirements for successful launches are different for manned space and cargo. It is typically considered that if a rocket nails the first flight you have like 90% chance of the rocket being successful for cargo launches. But to man rate a rocket requires at least ten such successful launches in a row.

I am fairly sure that the first cargo flight only carried inexpensive cargo that they wouldn't mind losing if the whole thing exploded as well.

 

[FairAndUnbiased]

I echo some of the points raised by Tacoburger. In fact I remember reading around 2015-16, from a Chinese state space executive, that they strongly believed that SpaceX won't succeed in making reusable rockets commercial, and hence they are going the route of making normal expendable rockets cheaper through economies of scale and better system design. This was a huge miscalculation that has resulted in a lag of 7-8 years vis-a-vis US.

Now, however since the market and technology have been proven, I am optimistic.

However these things need to be thought about:

1. How did China misjudge this emerging technological trend? How can it avoid similar mistakes in space and other sectors later?
2. How to catch up fast with SpaceX?
3. How to put more focus on disrupting things rather than simply continuing with the current gravy train.

Nobody's perfect. Japan fucked up with hydrogen cars and doubled down. US fucked up HSR, shipbuilding, solar and battery, now they don't even talk about climate change anymore and is doubling down on gas.

China made 1 mistake. Big deal. It's being fixed. That's the key - to correct mistakes.

 

[gpt]

1. How did China misjudge this emerging technological trend? How can it avoid similar mistakes in space and other sectors later

Pretty much every aerospace player around the world misjudged. 10 years ago everyone, and I mean everyone was saying reusable rockets didn't make sense and there was an aversion towards building proliferated LEO architectures, meaning the demand/flight cadence was never there.

But having said that, NASA's COTS program, which made SpaceX what it is, turned out way better than they had hoped for. NASA also continues to help SpaceX a ton with every single one of its projects with modeling, sims and other engineering work under the hood that's not widely talked about.

This sort of broad expertise is not readily available at places like CASC and they lag behind in many individual technical areas, especially back then. US still has many advantages in aerospace and if it wants to it can move very quickly. China focused most of its efforts on closing the overall gap with the US, with a checklist of what it believed to be more important items, like having a GNSS (Beidou), a heavy-lift rocket. Hell, when I first started following Chinese spaceflight, CZ-3B was the best rocket they said.

It's good to reflect on this but honestly it's not really a 'misjudgment'. CASC/SAST are very risk averse and does everything in incremental steps due to not having the resources, both funding and expertise wise, to move at the breakneck pace of SpaceX.

 

[jli88]

Nobody's perfect. Japan fucked up with hydrogen cars and doubled down. US fucked up HSR, shipbuilding, solar and battery, now they don't even talk about climate change anymore and is doubling down on gas.

China made 1 mistake. Big deal. It's being fixed. That's the key - to correct mistakes.

That's cool, though I don't think they are totally giving up on climate change yet.

With China, it needs to match up to the whole West. If Japan fails in something, and US succeeds, then Japan basically has access to that tech.

 

[jli88]

Pretty much every aerospace player around the world misjudged. 10 years ago everyone, and I mean everyone was saying reusable rockets didn't make sense and there was an aversion towards building proliferated LEO architectures, meaning the demand/flight cadence was never there.

But having said that, NASA's COTS program, which made SpaceX what it is, turned out way better than they had hoped for. NASA also continues to help SpaceX a ton with every single one of its projects with modeling, sims and other engineering work under the hood that's not widely talked about.

This sort of broad expertise is not readily available at places like CASC and they lag behind in many individual technical areas, especially back then. US still has many advantages in aerospace and if it wants to it can move very quickly. China focused most of its efforts on closing the overall gap with the US, with a checklist of what it believed to be more important items, like having a GNSS (Beidou), a heavy-lift rocket. Hell, when I first started following Chinese spaceflight, CZ-3B was the best rocket they said.

It's good to reflect on this but honestly it's not really a 'misjudgment'. CASC/SAST are very risk averse and does everything in incremental steps due to not having the resources, both funding and expertise wise, to move at the breakneck pace of SpaceX.

I hope China is paying attention to the crop of defense startups coming on board like Anduril, Palantir, and in some segments SpaceX. These players have no historical baggage and can disrupt things. They are also much more efficient.

 

[Xiongmao]

Nobody's perfect. Japan fucked up with hydrogen cars and doubled down. US fucked up HSR, shipbuilding, solar and battery, now they don't even talk about climate change anymore and is doubling down on gas.

China made 1 mistake. Big deal. It's being fixed. That's the key - to correct mistakes.

The jury's out on reusable rockets. There are some commentators that are saying that SpaceX will be bankrupt in 3 to 5 years given the fundamentals. I tend to agree with their analysis.