China's Space Program Thread II

[tphuang]

https://twitter.com/i/web/status/1991880912188174663

Shiyan-21 got launched today. It seems like the launch pace has gotten significantly faster in this past few months.

 

[Asug]

The Russian Scientific Research Center for Space Hydrometeorology “Planeta” has begun receiving and processing data from the Chinese polar-orbiting satellite FengYun-3D, as well as providing users with information products based on these data. The system is used as a core state platform for supplying information to federal authorities and other users, as well as for fulfilling Russia’s obligations in the field of international data exchange.

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[nativechicken]

Recreating this is impossible in China because the risk tolerance is minimal. Too much scrutiny.

It’s just your perception that China has low risk resilience. China simply conducts meticulous scrutiny to determine whether there are issues in the design or execution of technical solutions—whether some technical miscalculations occurred or deviations emerged during manufacturing. Do not mistake scientific prudence for a lack of risk resilience. There was indeed a period in China’s defense sector when political considerations overshadowed scientific ones, or when economic priorities necessitated compromises in certain R&D endeavors. But that era has long passed.

Belittling quantifiable achievements by SpaceX and others should not be sexy. Raptor v3 and v4 being quite good wrt to thrust, twr, and isp is non deniable. New booster recovery system engineering, stainless steel based construction and its optimization, heat resistant tile manufacturing and optimization, stage separation system, and others. These innovations came through heavy investment, building skillset of thousands of workers and engineers, and it build very broad and deep institutional skills and experience. It is therefore more than likely that the starship program will be optimized further to launch large sized payloads and male it a reliable super heavy platform.

You perceive reasonable criticism as an attack on SpaceX. In Chinese culture and education, everything has both positive and negative aspects—what is good should be praised, and what is wrong should be criticized.
SpaceX has excelled in the design of many subsystems within the Starship project. However, its overall design clearly has issues.
The correct approach is to acknowledge what it has done right (without the need to repeat it incessantly—this isn't pledging allegiance to an emperor, where one must extol the other's achievements in every statement) while criticizing its mistakes.
The reason you might notice more criticism than praise is that the core issue lies in the other party's unwillingness to change. Everyone focuses on the points of disagreement, whereas areas of consensus naturally don't need to be reiterated every time.

Brilliant Pebbles planned for 10,000 interceptors, with hundreds over the USSR at any time.
Each pebble was expected to be less than 40kg, so that's 400 tonnes in total.

These days, even larger constellations are feasible, given the launch costs of reusable rockets.

The cost of the interceptors is another question however

Regarding the "Brilliant Pebbles" concept, it's best to take it with a grain of salt. Here’s why:First, China’s current hypersonic weapons primarily operate in the near-space region below 100 km, without leaving the atmosphere. This flight profile makes them inherently difficult to intercept using space-based systems.As for Soviet-era ballistic missiles, their trajectories reached altitudes of 800–1,200 km—far outside the operational plane of a Brilliant Pebbles-style constellation. Given the vast territory of the Soviet Union, deploying a few hundred orbital interceptors would have been futile: the engagement time, velocity vector alignment, and interceptor maneuverability would all have been severely insufficient.

 

[abc李]

Guys I have been reading a lot of comparison how it only took CNSA 9 days to get the taikonauts back on earth while it took NASA the infamous nine months to save the two astronauts from ISS. While this is pretty telling, is it a perfectly fair comparison? Because unlike NASA, CNSA did not have launch an extra mission to get Shenzhou20 back on Earth, since there already was the Shenzhou21 module attached to Tiangong. Wouldn't it be more telling how fast can CNSA launch Shenzhou22, in regards to the NASA failure?

I am not trying to take a position here, just wanna make clear of something I do not yet know enough about, thx for any explanations.

 

[Temstar]

Guys I have been reading a lot of comparison how it only took CNSA 9 days to get the taikonauts back on earth while it took NASA the infamous nine months to save the two astronauts from ISS. While this is pretty telling, is it a perfectly fair comparison? Because unlike NASA, CNSA did not have launch an extra mission to get Shenzhou20 back on Earth, since there already was the Shenzhou21 module attached to Tiangong. Wouldn't it be more telling how fast can CNSA launch Shenzhou22, in regards to the NASA failure?

I am not trying to take a position here, just wanna make clear of something I do not yet know enough about, thx for any explanations.

It's political, Boeing didn't want to be seen as having stranded their two crew on the ISS and needed SpaceX's Dragon to rescue them. If NASA ignored Boeing on this and immediately made the call for SpaceX to go ahead and use the next available Dragon to fetch Starliner's crew and do so with all possible haste then it wouldn't have taken 9 month.

 

[Asug]

Guys I have been reading a lot of comparison how it only took CNSA 9 days to get the taikonauts back on earth while it took NASA the infamous nine months to save the two astronauts from ISS. While this is pretty telling, is it a perfectly fair comparison? Because unlike NASA, CNSA did not have launch an extra mission to get Shenzhou20 back on Earth, since there already was the Shenzhou21 module attached to Tiangong. Wouldn't it be more telling how fast can CNSA launch Shenzhou22, in regards to the NASA failure?

I am not trying to take a position here, just wanna make clear of something I do not yet know enough about, thx for any explanations.

We don’t have enough information about the problem itself or about the decision-making system in this kind of situation. But it is known that the CNSA can launch a backup spacecraft within 8.5 days in an emergency. In this case, the timeframe is longer, possibly because the situation has not been classified as an emergency.