China's Space Program Thread II

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iewgnem

Captain
Registered Member
Andy1974 said:
Didn’t Blue Origin just send a mission to Mars, and don’t they have a moon lander also?

Isn’t SpaceX’s entire reason for existence to send humans to occupy Mars?
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This is the difference between people who follow space from media side and people who follow it from industry side.
- BO's Mars mission consist of 2x 500 kg orbiters built by NASA's at $55 million total, to put things into perspective a Mars surface runs $1 billion on average, EscaPADE is in itself an example of shortage of funding.
- BO's lunar lander is a singular subsystem out of 4-5 required for a Artemis V architecture (transfer vehicle, gateway, suit, surface mobility, re-entry vehcle), or 1 out of 10+ required for a lunar base. The fact that neither SpaceX nor BO can afford to develop the rest, or afford to even develop just the HLS is another instance of massive funding shortfall.
- SpaceX's entire reason for existnece is Starlink, the entire reason for Mars is marketing, I mean have you seen SpaceX build even a 500 kg Mars orbiter to date?
 
Tomboy

Tomboy

Senior Member
Registered Member
bebops said:
At this point, I think china needs to develop a completely new revolutionary approach to launch satellites to space. That approach is to shoot the satellites up to space with a launcher. You can picture it like shooting a bullet up to the air. This is a game changer. There are people who floated this idea already.
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They are actually still working on HTHL approach with a single staged spaceplane and a airbreathing mothership.
 
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gadgetcool5

Senior Member
Registered Member
If there's any silver lining to all this, it's that while the situation is dire, it's not necessarily any more dire than it was at the beginning of the month. Before this month, Chinese entities had never even tried a first stage rocket recovery. They had only successfully achieved two or three 10km hop tests in 2024. Space X never even did 10km hop tests at any point in 2012-2014 because by that time, they were already doing full launches to orbit for paying customers.

Now, China has had two rockets with a reusable configuration make it to orbit. Which means we have a clear barometer for where the most far-ahead Chinese entities are vs Space X in the last decade: their progress is similar to that of Space X when it did the sixth flight of the Falcon 9, and the first flight of v1.1, on September 29, 2013. After that, it took 26 months to complete a successful first stage recovery. Under this timeline, we would expect Chinese entities to have an initial first stage recovery in February 2028. Their goal right now is to meet, and if possible, condense that timeline.
 
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Asug

Junior Member
Registered Member
Please clarify whether I have understood correctly that there are:
- a 12A version with 7 engines;
- a 12A version with 9 engines and a different stage diameter?
And there is also the 12B, but that is something entirely different...
 

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I

iewgnem

Captain
Registered Member
gadgetcool5 said:
If there's any silver lining to all this, it's that while the situation is dire, it's not necessarily any more dire than it was at the beginning of the month. Before this month, Chinese entities had never even tried a first stage rocket recovery. They had only successfully achieved two or three 10km hop tests in 2024. Space X never even did 10km hop tests at any point in 2012-2014 because by that time, they were already doing full launches to orbit for paying customers.

Now, China has had two rockets with a reusable configuration make it to orbit. Which means we have a clear barometer for where the most far-ahead Chinese entities are vs Space X in the last decade: their progress is similar to that of Space X when it did the sixth flight of the Falcon 9, and the first flight of v1.1, on September 29, 2013. After that, it took 26 months to complete a successful first stage recovery. Under this timeline, we would expect Chinese entities to have an initial first stage recovery in February 2028. Their goal right now is to meet, and if possible, condense that timeline.
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It's hard to see anything dire here, the amount of importance some people place on VTVL is really hard to justify.

If the goal is to build a Starlink matching LEO constellation then doing so with purely expendable vehicles isn't exactly prohibitively expensive, if the goal is low cost access to space then the primiary focus should be on payload which make up vast majority of mission cost rather than launch vehicle, and that's arguably where Starlink actually derived it's scale from.

China's official planning clearly don't place reuse on any critical path, nor do they consider VTVL as the only path for reuse. Reuse is a nice to have but not blocking for neither massive LEO structures nor lunar bases nor nuclear electric propulsion nor Mars. Spaceflight is one of those subjects where you really can't plan properly if your perspective is based on what's advertised by a car salesman.
 
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Asug

Junior Member
Registered Member
Andy1974 said:
Didn’t Blue Origin just send a mission to Mars, and don’t they have a moon lander also?

Isn’t SpaceX’s entire reason for existence to send humans to occupy Mars?
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Of course, not. You just have to look at what he does. Ex ungue leonem (in China, I think you could say 窥一斑而知全豹). Musk's goal is money.
 
Tomboy

Tomboy

Senior Member
Registered Member
Asug said:
Please clarify whether I have understood correctly that there are:
- a 12A version with 7 engines;
- a 12A version with 9 engines and a different stage diameter?
And there is also the 12B, but that is something entirely different...
Click to expand...
They rushed CZ-12A so they used the 100km test article and modified it into a orbital rocket. The one showned was the original design. 12B should be the actual product, 12A is a test article with little payload capacity.
 
A

ACuriousPLAFan

Brigadier
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