Yes, seems like they are going for a starship like design after many modifications.
China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
You guys are talking as if it’s easy toaster reusable tech and even more important to scale it up . If it was that easy then don’t you think China or even Europe/Russia would have done the same ? In fact forget foreign countries , don’t you think even other US space companies who have tried(and failed so far) to to compete and keep up with space X in this sector like Blue origin/ ULA/ rocket lab etc would have done the same ?
I said a while ago, just because space X has made it look easy doesn’t mean you guys should underestimate the degree of technology and complexity needed to achieve this and most of all scale it up . It’s been over 10years and the only other company that has been able to achieve a successful rocket landing is blue origin, and they did it only very recently . The question now is can they even ever hope to match spacex in scale and payload? I doubt that.
I’m not even talking about starship (who has no equivalent in the world as everyone is far behind , maybe only along march 9 might try and be a match, but that’s in the future maybe a decade from now at best, and nothing is even guaranteed about it yet.
People tend to underestimate what musk has achieved with space X and blame other companies for lagging behind, which I don think it’s right. just because a student outperforms others in a sector doesn’t means the others are weak/stupid/slow per se.
Anway, China is not in a direct competition with the US or spaceX in space. China would have her own goals and objectives to achieve. . Granted they also learn from spacex success and adopt some of their practices (Leo constellation, reusable rockets , starship like rocket etc). So they don’t compete directly anyway, since China isn’t really open for global launch market due to US sanctions for decades now .
I though they went with Saturn V style with reusable Superheavy style first stage for 1st phase and only later in 2nd phase they would incorporate the reusable Starship style second stage.
Operating since 1961 but seriously resource constrained since inception. Got a new life in General Musharraf era in mid 2000's.
Nobody said it was easy, but if it can be done by one group of humans then it can be done by another. If it's something worth doing, then it WILL inevitably be done by another group of humans.
I mean, nobody's done what ASML did for past however many years, and it involves probably even more cutting edge science done in a lot more countries, yet China is steaming towards replicating it. High end logic chips and aerospace are the last frontiers China is generationally behind, but it's trying hard to catch up, so let's just wait and see how the race turns out.
is this 1:1 scale mockup?
Judging by the serial on the landing legs, this is still Y1
CALT says they're working on a larger, 6.4 metre diameter fairing for the CZ-5B for Tiangong space station expansion, while CAST says they'll also upgrade the capabilities of the station's robotic arm.