China's Space Program Thread II

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nativechicken

Junior Member
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antwerpery said:
They had a plan to make the LM8 reusable, but it was a pipe dream. The LM-8 is not designed to be reusable. The original plan was for the LM8 to land with it's boosters attached. Never gonna happen, it's as ridiculous as the Vulcan's plan to drop it's rocket engines from orbit encased in a heat shield for reuse. Just a desperate plan to make an already obsolete rocket seem more attractive in the age of reusable rockets. For reusable rockets, all of them have a few things in common, that is their engine layout. A central engine surrounded by a ring of even numbered engines.

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This is to balance out the thrust, so as to ensure that the rocket doesn't get unbalanced. Also, reusable rockets use a larger number of weaker engines that can be throttled, instead of the old style of a handful of extremely powerful engines. But the core layout is still the most important factor here.

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None of China's current LM rocket fleet fit this criteria, even if their engines are designed for reuse and throttling. The LM-8 has a 2 engine layout and optional boosters, the LM-12 has a 4 engine layout. And of course you can't just change the engine layout of a rocket willy nilly, especially not adding new engines in. Making the LM8 reusable is like trying to make a brand new rocket. That's basically what's happening to the LM-12, another waste of money. Despite being the last in development of the LM family, they didn't get the memo that reusable rockets were the new hottest until the original expendable design was already completed. SAST developing a reusable version of the LM12 is like developing a new rocket from scratch and thus developing two different rockets, they would have been better if they done what the CZ-9 team did and pivoted mid-design phase to save money and time, and not finished the expendable design at all.

If the LM-8 is already obsolete, then I wonder how many times the expendable LM-12 will be flying? Probably less than 5 times over it's entire lifetime I bet.
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The LM8 configuration faces no major issues in modifying for reusable rockets. The CZ-6X solution demonstrates this. You need to assess technical feasibility through engineering principles. Reusable rockets don’t require engines to adopt concentric circular layouts. The core requirement is achieving a thrust ratio (maximum liftoff thrust to minimum throttled thrust) around 20:1 or higher—a value fundamentally dictated by Earth’s gravity well. This ratio also explains why launch vehicles’ maximum payload mass fraction barely reaches 5%. The LM8’s hybrid engine configuration (combining large and small thrusters) could achieve this target.

In fact, the old LM9 reusable concept followed similar logic.
The reason LM8 won’t develop a reusable version lies in its insufficient post-reusability payload capacity (inherently limited by low baseline liftoff mass). To increase payload while controlling landing mass, a single-core, 3.8-meter-diameter design becomes mandatory.

Observe Falcon 9’s evolution: the drastic differences between v0.9 and v1.2 highlight how expendable-optimized designs must be radically scaled up for reusability.

The LM12 itself has three designs, including two reusable variants (see:
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Reusable rocket development—like all complex engineering—follows phased iterations. First, stabilize baseline functionality (perfecting expendable operations), then attempt reusability. Falcon 9 required ~30 launches to achieve reliable reuse.
 
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nativechicken

Junior Member
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gpt said:
12 is derived from a failed SAST lunar rocket proposal. The 8R and 12 are likely KPI projects within CALT/SAST and not a serious attempt at producing a robust reusable system. If you look at a lot of the key metrics they are all way off-base.
The 'correct' way to do it would've been to:

1) start the development of 7xYF-100K process for the 5m diameter booster
2) start the development of 85-100t engine for 3-4m (5m can also use this, just use 11+ engines)

Then it's just a matter of R&D. It can take a decade to develop a new rocket. So the late start on the above means most of China's reusable rockets will come online in the latter half of this decade.
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The LM12 was designed with reusability in mind from the outset, currently developing both methane and kerosene-powered reusable variants. China now has multiple 65-100t-class hydrocarbon-based rocket engines under development. Projects like the YF130/YF135/YF136 could be applied on 5-7m-diameter rocket bodies using single or dual YF102 engines, enabling the implementation of the CZ6X concept (the actual operationalization of this design).
 
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antwerpery

Junior Member
Registered Member
To everyone making excuses for the state agencies. It's complete and utter bullshit. If the private companies can do with a tiny amount of funding and manpower and talent, there's no excuse for state agencies. @nativechicken keeps going "Oh it's so fucking hard, how can China be expected to switch to from hypergolic to cryogenic fuels in less than a decade". Well despite the entire private industry being a decade old, the private sector is building a modern cryogenic rocket industry from the ground up, and doing R&D like VTVL tests on top of that, grabbing a number of first, like the first methane rocket to reach orbit and likely the first rocket to land and reused. Half of this private companies are less than 5 years old and have a tiny fraction of the resources compared to state agencies. Even the oldest private companies are just 10 years old.

HOLY SHIT. This is pathetic, you can pivot fast if you wanted. Just look at Landspace. They are copying SpaceX hard, so hard that they completely changed their original ZQ-3 design from a standard F9 clone to a stainless steel mini-starship instead of their original F9 design. So we can track timelines here, Starship only switched to stainless steel in 2019, that means that current design of the ZQ-3 must have been changed after 2019. And despite the sudden change in the design from 2019 onwards, they still managed to finish development and the ZQ3 is set to have her maiden launch this year.

Meanwhile the LM-12 designers have must known from 2014 that reusability must have been the key feature in any new rocket, but a decade later and they still shit out a expandable rocket design while working on a reusable variant that's probably years away.

I want to repeat myself, in 6 years, Landspace completely changed their design of their rocket in development to feature stainless steel, methane and reusability, all brand new features, while the LM-12 that came out in 2024, is completely a bog standard rocket design that doesn't offer anything new that's basically doomed from the start without reusability. There's plenty of private companies that are around 5 years old that are planning to unveil their reusable rockets soon, this companies are likely younger than the development time spent on the LM8 and LM12. Stop making excuses for state agencies that need to step up their game, it's embrassing to see this giant state companies get completely outcompeted by private companies 1/10th of their age and with 1/100th of the funding and people still come in here and defend them.

nativechicken said:
The LM12 was designed with reusability in mind from the outset, currently developing both methane and kerosene-powered reusable variants.
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So why isn't the engine layout in the classic octoweb that everyone agrees is the best for reusability? Why is SAST having to develop variant of the LM-12 to make it reusable? Why not just make the LM-12 reusable from the start? It's not like it snuck up on people. Since 2014, everyone with a brain must know that reusability is the future. They have had plenty of time to switch designs. Hell, the LM-12 likely didn't even start development by 2014, or if it did, it must have been in the very early stages where it's easy to make drastic changes.
 
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by78

by78

General
antwerpery said:
To everyone making excuses for the state agencies. It's complete and utter bullshit. If the private companies can do with a tiny amount of funding and manpower and talent, there's no excuse for state agencies. @nativechicken keeps going "Oh it's so fucking hard, how can China be expected to switch to from hypergolic to cryogenic fuels in less than a decade". Well despite the entire private industry being a decade old, the private sector is building a modern cryogenic rocket industry from the ground up, and doing R&D like VTVL tests on top of that, grabbing a number of first, like the first methane rocket to reach orbit and likely the first rocket to land and reused. Half of this private companies are less than 5 years old and have a tiny fraction of the resources compared to state agencies. Even the oldest private companies are just 10 years old.

HOLY SHIT. This is pathetic, you can pivot fast if you wanted. Just look at Landspace. They are copying SpaceX hard, so hard that they completely changed their original ZQ-3 design from a standard F9 clone to a stainless steel mini-starship instead of their original F9 design. So we can track timelines here, Starship only switched to stainless steel in 2019, that means that current design of the ZQ-3 must have been changed after 2019. And despite the sudden change in the design from 2019 onwards, they still managed to finish development and the ZQ3 is set to have her maiden launch this year.

Meanwhile the LM-12 designers have must known from 2014 that reusability must have been the key feature in any new rocket, but a decade later and they still shit out a expandable rocket design while working on a reusable variant that's probably years away.

I want to repeat myself, in 6 years, Landspace completely changed their design of their rocket in development to feature stainless steel, methane and reusability, all brand new features, while the LM-12 that came out in 2024, is completely a bog standard rocket design that doesn't offer anything new that's basically doomed from the start without reusability. There's plenty of private companies that are around 5 years old that are planning to unveil their reusable rockets soon, this companies are likely younger than the development time spent on the LM8 and LM12. Stop making excuses for state agencies that need to step up their game, it's embrassing to see this giant state companies get completely outcompeted by private companies 1/10th of their age and with 1/100th of the funding and people still come in here and defend them.


So why isn't the engine layout in the classic octoweb that everyone agrees is the best for reusability? Why is SAST having to develop variant of the LM-12 to make it reusable? Why not just make the LM-12 reusable from the start? It's not like it snuck up on people. Since 2014, everyone with a brain must know that reusability is the future. They have had plenty of time to switch designs. Hell, the LM-12 likely didn't even start development by 2014, or if it did, it must have been in the very early stages where it's easy to make drastic changes.
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Would you shut up?
 
GOODTREE

GOODTREE

Junior Member
Registered Member
by78 said:
High-resolution images from the launch of Tianping-3A-02, which marked the 568th flight of the Long March series.

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The satellite will be primarily used for the calibration of ground-based radar equipment and radar cross section (RCS) measurement. It will support imaging experiments for ground-based optical equipment and monitoring tests of the low-orbit space environment, while also providing services for atmospheric space environment measurement and orbital prediction model correction.

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