China's Space Program News Thread

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SimaQian

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Nowadays aerospace activities are expensive for all countries. Even if China makes out her own reusable rocket launching system like US did, lowering launching cost by one digit or even more, it's still a business without enough market demand and profit.

So in the future, with more national fund CNSA may pratice much more aerospace exploration projects than they do now. But more than one thousand launches every year by 2045 is totally out of my imagination.
China should seriously consider building space elevator. The challenge of course is enormous. But if there are serious plans to mine out of this world minerals, the first thing to do is build the logistics infrastructure. Just like mines in earth, ports, railways, roads, power are needed to transport people and material. In space the lowest cost of transporting materials is an elevator. This will usher to a new era in humanity, as this will open the real posibility of capturing high mineral content asteriods for space mining. This will also open the possibility to clean up the space junk left over that 70 years of human space exploration. I hope we can see this in our lifetimes not in distant centuries.
 

Richard Santos

Captain
Registered Member
Space elevator can only possibly work if it is anchored at the equator because it’s motion must coincide with the plane of earth’s rotation. Otherwise it will wobble back and forth as the earth rotates, the magnitude of the wobble proportional to the distance the anchor is from the equator. Anchor it more than a few degrees from the equator it will probably either crash down to earth after a few days or rip itself from the mooring,

Also, the notion that space elevator, once completed, can dramatically lower the energy cost of sending mass into orbit is scientifically unsound. It doesn’t matter how something gets into orbit, it has to gain both the potential energy of its new elevation, as well as the kinetic energy, and angular momentum, of it new orbital velocity. If you just send it up in a space elevator, all that energy and angular moment the payload must gain to go up, has to be taken from the space elevator. The space elevator does not have an infinite supply of either. If, over the long run, more mass goes one way than the other up or down the space elevator, either the entire elevator will lose enough energy and angular moment to the new payloads to collapse because more mass went up then came down. Or the elevator will gain so much energy and angular momentum from its payload because more mass came down then went up, it will rip itself from its mooring.

So the space elevator has to burn fuel to adjust its own energy and angular moment as payload goes up and down.
 
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SimaQian

Junior Member
Registered Member
Yes thats the thing, the space elevator must provide energy to payload to climb up or down. Since the elevator is fixed on the ground, and yes near the equator, the other end too is fixed beyond the geosync orbit with the center of mass of the system is in the geosync orbit. So this opens an opportunity to put solar farms in space with far more efficiency per unit area of solar panel at the other end of the elevator. But then again the other problem is how to transport energy as the elevator minimum lenght extends beyond the geosync orbit around 35,000 km. So unless there is a superconductor that doesnt have any energy transmission losses, this is also another engineering problem to overcome.

Again the challenges are enormous. But since all earth minerals are finite anyway, and human population still has no indication to max out, time will come, nations will squabble with the remaining earth mineral deposits particulary copper and iron the two most important raw materials for modern civilization growth.
 

Jiang ZeminFanboy

Senior Member
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Does anyone want to summarize the Chinese space station? I would very much like to hear about future experiments, the potential of CSS, modularity, etc.
 

oceanmaster

New Member
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What is the rockets labeled “land space”? Never seen them before

Landspace is one of the leading commercial rocket companies in China. Actually it's very close to its first fluid rocket that has in orbit delivery capability, most likely later this year.

The other players include iSpace and Galatic Energy, Link Space etc.
A great portion of these companies are aiming at first fluid rockets and/or reusable rockets to be tested this year.
A truly joyable year for astro fans.
 

Temstar

Brigadier
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Zhang Zhi is the chief designer of the new manned launcher (AKA 921) and former chief designer of CZ-2F.

The (new) near earth orbit manned rocket is derived from the moon rocket. Near earth payload capacity close to 20t.

This seems to indicate that CZ-7 will not be developed to be manned rocket for the new spacecraft as planned before. This is natural because CZ-7's manned mission was planned before the decision of 921. Having the same line of rocket and spacecraft for both near earth and deep space mission is a better choice.

The near earth 921 would be the single stick version with a reduced 2nd stage (one YF-100M instead of two) and no 3rd stage.
That's pretty cool. The LEO version of the new crewed spacecraft has a smaller service module and can seat 7 people right? Using a core only 921 means in the future the big first stage will be reusable which should keep cost down. I imagine it would be used for keeping a bigger crew on the space station?
 

by78

General
Some high-resolution images from the Shenzhou-12 launch.

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