China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
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by78
General
On April 5, the China National Space Administration and the Ministry of Higher Education, Scientific Research and Innovation of Thailand jointly on cooperation in the exploration and peaceful use of outer space. The two will cooperate on a host of projects, including the International Lunar Research Station.
Man that is just ridiculous
So they had six years. Where are these payloads? You claim having more mass budget available will make satellites simpler to build. So why will it take a decade? Gagarin flew in 1961. People were in the Moon in 1969. And you are telling me they can't make a satellite in 6 years?
It's just a set of constraints. And you know what. Arianespace saw that the average size of satellites was growing historically and then they moved from the Ariane 4 to the 5. Twice the payload. Except the expected customers did not arrive. Only rarely did they need to launch a satellite with more than 4t. The 10t payload of the expanded Ariane 5 was almost useless. Launches were infrequent. Rocket production facilities were mostly idle and staff had to be kept on the payroll to ensure it was possible to produce more if necessary. The Ariane 6 has gone the other way around and they made the rocket smaller, not larger. The miniaturization of electronic components, and increased use of ion propulsion has made the average satellite smaller, not larger.
And if you think there is a huge future in hundreds of space hotels in Earth orbit think again. Just consider. How many people do you know that have went on a flight in a fighter airplane over Mach 2? Not that many. It is really tough to do the high intensity training required to be physically fit to fly to space in a high G environment. If you can do it at all.
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Billion dollar satellites don't magically appear out of thin air. There's spacecraft with missions right now that were started construction before the Falcon heavy went into service and still are under construction. Even then, the FH is already stealing payloads from the SLS, like the Europa Clipper.
And again, the FH isn't gonna be as revolutionary as a fully reusable superheavy rocket, it's still fairly expensive, the fairing's volume if the same size as a F9 and it's not lifting 100 tons into LEO, while being as cheap as a Faclon 9 launch.
Yeah. Like the Europa Clipper, worked started in 2017 and it won't be done until this year. This are billion dollar missions, they usually cost alot more then the rocket they're launching from. If anything, the Europa Clipper shouldn't fly on the FH, too underpowered, it's just that the superheavy rocket that it's supposed to fly is having issues and is too expensive. Flying on the FH means that it needs to make a gravity assist and take 5 years, while a SLS launch would have allowed a direct orbital insertion and a flight of 2 years. As I have said, just because you can launch on a smaller rocket, doesn't mean you want to. Just like how you could take a ship across a globe over a month, but it's much easier to just fly over a day. Superheavies might be worth it just to be able to send missions past Juipter and have the spacecraft arrive before the people that made it dies of old age.
There's already lots of talk on the next generation of spacecraft and telescopes and satellites that can only be launched from Starship. Some have probably started on the design and R&D phase.
Was the Ariane 5 projected to be a few times cheaper then it's competitors? Was the Ariane 5 the only heavy lift rocket of it's kind, instead of facing stiff competition from Russia and America at the time. This is the ESA we're talking about, I'm not surprised that they failed. This are the guys that laughed at SpaceX and rocketlab, and have been stumbling from mistake to mistake for the last decade while losing all their launches to SpaceX. Protectionism is also always a major factor for the launch market.
What's next? You're gonna bring up Roscosmos and NASA as a example of how state agencies are total failures and thus all government space agencies still just hand over all their reins to private companies. Then I can bring up Boeing as an example of how private companies and their obession with profit above all else just proves that private companies are all screw ups. It's almost like bringing up random examples doesn't prove anything, not without any solid reasoning behind it.
Like the F9 can lift more into LEO then most variants of the Ariane 5, why didn't it fail? Maybe because it's cheaper, has the full backing of the US government, and fast turnaround time, Elon is a good salesman and SpaceX isn't a bunch of arguing countries trying to be a space agency.
Clearly the solution here is small lift rockets that can only carry 1kg to LEO. They are the future of aerospace industry. It's not like the most successful modern rocket can lift a respectable payload to LEO of 18 tons, which is more then most variants of the Ariane 5...
I have never mentioned anything about space tourism. My case is simple. 10 years from now, lots and lots of satellites in LEO, they will need space tugs and refueling spacecraft to make sure that LEO isn't ruined for years from collisions. Space tugs will need lots of launches/fuel to do their job, which means that bulk launches of fuel for orbital fuel depots might become a thing. More volume and cheaper mass to orbit also means that satellite makers can afford to make their satellites cheaper, heavy, larger and add redundancies. Which means more larger and heavier satellite for a superheavy to launch.
If directed energy weapons ever become a thing, suddenly mass to orbit becomes a bigggg deal as the amount of solar panels and radiators you can fit scales to the direct power of your laser.
Sure, it probably would be the daily launch rate that Elon Musk is trying to sell us, but to consider it's so useless that you think China should never work on a Starship clone... Sure buddy. It remains to be seen if Starship can lower launch costs and be as reliable as people hopes to be, but if it does, it's a game changer. And it's not like the program is costing trillions, if we scale the costs and compare it to other superheavy rockets like SLS and Starship, the CZ-9's development cost is probably roughly around 10 billion USD.
Again, if you think it's fine to spent billions on a world's biggest rocket production line for the CZ-8, right as it's becoming obsolete, then a 10 billion for the LM-9 is more then doable. It might be lifting satellites/spacecraft that cost a decent fraction of it's budget, so crucial it's fuction.
None of that is necessary. I just told you satellites are moving to ion propulsion. You can carry enough reaction mass for the whole lifetime of the satellite in a small footprint. And you think you are going to refuel them past the operational life of their electronics? I have seen such proposals to refuel satellites. But ion propulsion makes them redundant. Chemical propulsion is going to be increasingly irrelevant in satellites in the future. With ion propulsion you can use the existing solar panels in the satellite to provide a lot of the impulse and reduce mass and volume. You don't have to mess around with hypergolics during satellite launch preparation either.
Ariane 5 was not the only heavy vehicle that was an economic failure. There are more. The Delta IV Heavy. The Space Shuttle. The Energia-Buran. There is a veritable litany of them. Because of the dearth of payloads the Atlas V Heavy was cancelled even before it was built.
Ariane 5 was not the only heavy vehicle that was an economic failure. There are more. The Delta IV Heavy. The Space Shuttle. The Energia-Buran. There is a veritable litany of them. Because of the dearth of payloads the Atlas V Heavy was cancelled even before it was built.
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Ion propulsion benefits from increased power generation. Increased power generation means more solar panels, which means more weight. Add radiators and batteries too. It's the same issue as increased fuel. Sure the mission doesn't strictly need them, but if you can add on extra power generation for a tiny cost, nobody is gonna say no to that.
Hence the need for space tugs that can physically grapple onto spacecraft and deorbit them. Again, we're looking at potentially hundreds of thousands of satellites in LEO in the future. That's a hundreds of billions of dollars worth of satellites. Big market there.
Satellites are already struggling for power, what part of "Satellite makers will always want more mass on their spacecraft to add more stuff" don't you get? The solar panels and radiators on the ISS and Tiangong are already a substantial part of their weight of those space stations. Replace "add more fuel" to "add more solar panels and batteries"
Trying to throw in a spacecraft that failed solely due to the soviet union breaking up just makes you look dishonest you know.
Yeah, almost like there was this thing called the 2008 recession that fucked up economies for years around the time that the D-IV had it's first launch and when things were getting back to normal, there was this little company called SpaceX eating their launch market.
A lot of them failed because SpaceX was eating up the Western launch market from 2012 onwards. Some of them also failed because ESA and American oldspace are a bunch of dinosaurs who can't innovate anymore, were coasting on their success from 20 years ago and were busy failing upwards with ever increasing launch cost just for the sake of increased profit. Just look at the mess that is Starliner. America was literally paying them for failures and delays. If you looked at launch prices during that time, they would be trending upwards, yeah no shit they weren't finding many customers.
What's next, you're gonna declare the concept of passenger aircraft dead just because Boeing is having issues at the moment, and with every new commerical aircraft maker failing to make a viable product?
Actually the whole EELV program (Atlas V, Delta IV) was supposed to make cheaper rockets. And it did. At least compared with the Titan IV and Space Shuttle launches they replaced. Both launchers use a common core architecture which was meant to scale to triple core launchers for launching large NRO spysats. In the Delta IV they went as far as making the engines as cheap as possible. For example the main engine, RS-68, uses an expendable ablative carbon-phenolic nozzle instead of using regenerative cooling. Each core only uses one engine to have as few parts as possible. In the case of the Atlas V, they bought the RD-180 from the Russians, which was much cheaper than any engine produced in the US. Including the RS-68. Despite being way more complicated in number of parts and design.
The EELV program was supposed to also lead to a resurgence of the US space launch sector clawing back market share from Arianespace and the Ariane 4 and 5. The thing is, back then, the Russians were still selling launches. A Soyuz or Proton launch was even cheaper than the EELVs due to lower cost of labor in Russia and depreciated factories and launch sites. Despite the Russians operating from launch sites further away from the Equator. So both EELV rockets ended up just launching US government payloads and having little success in the launch market.
Even with all the claimed advantages of the Falcon 9 the launch price for it was similar to Russian launches on the Soyuz or Proton. And initially reliability was low so it didn't compete with Arianespace in that either. It took a US government ban on Russian launches to basically kill that. They banned launches of US satellites, or US manufactured satellites on Russian launchers. And the US is one of the world's largest satellite manufacturers. Only non US companies continued using Russian launch service. And some did this to the very end. For example Starlink competitor OneWeb was still launching satellites on Soyuz, manufactured in Europe, until the moment the Russians stopped providing launch services to all Western countries.
For similar reasons you won't see Chinese launchers putting Western satellites into orbit. The US might claim all sorts of reasons for ITAR sanctions on China. But the truth is they just wanted to remove another competitor from the market.
The EELV program was supposed to also lead to a resurgence of the US space launch sector clawing back market share from Arianespace and the Ariane 4 and 5. The thing is, back then, the Russians were still selling launches. A Soyuz or Proton launch was even cheaper than the EELVs due to lower cost of labor in Russia and depreciated factories and launch sites. Despite the Russians operating from launch sites further away from the Equator. So both EELV rockets ended up just launching US government payloads and having little success in the launch market.
Even with all the claimed advantages of the Falcon 9 the launch price for it was similar to Russian launches on the Soyuz or Proton. And initially reliability was low so it didn't compete with Arianespace in that either. It took a US government ban on Russian launches to basically kill that. They banned launches of US satellites, or US manufactured satellites on Russian launchers. And the US is one of the world's largest satellite manufacturers. Only non US companies continued using Russian launch service. And some did this to the very end. For example Starlink competitor OneWeb was still launching satellites on Soyuz, manufactured in Europe, until the moment the Russians stopped providing launch services to all Western countries.
For similar reasons you won't see Chinese launchers putting Western satellites into orbit. The US might claim all sorts of reasons for ITAR sanctions on China. But the truth is they just wanted to remove another competitor from the market.
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