China's Space Program News Thread
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Thanks for the link. This is an old concept for spaceflight, a lot of similar iterations have been around in the last decades.
Personally, I think it has zero probability of implementation. The TRL is too low, and the funds/manhours needed to bring it up are too substantial. Especially for any quasi-private entity.
There's a Nasa proposal to :
But it would also potentially work as a railgun, or in bringing up hypersonic aircraft and missiles to operating speed
More details about the constellation can be found here "High-resolution images (mostly) from CZ-11's prep and sea launch.
“"
- There are 25 of them in orbits (seems not including these 9 new).
- The final constellation (phased II) will have 138 in orbits, revisiting every part of the globe in 10 minutes.
- The company has moved from R&D to serial production with a capacity of 30 per year. The nine launched this time are the first batch from the production line.
- From other source we were told that phase I will put 60 in orbits, giving 30 minutes revisit of hot spot of the globe.
- If the launch capacity matches the production capacity of 30 per year. We should see phase I being realized in one year (end of 2021) because 25+9=34, there is just 26 left to be launched that is a year's production. That is 3 more launchers of CZ-11, very doable.
- Giving another 2 years (60+ more sat) some time in 2024, phase II would be ready.
- By 2024, every ship or vehicle on this planet would be running naked.
You know what I am talking about - Even with phase I in end of 2021, in the interested area, ships and vehicles would be running half naked, because 30 minutes revisit interval minus the overhead duration of x minutes means that there is only about 20 minutes or less to hide before the next sat coming over.
- It is as important as Beidou GNSS.
- Beidou let us know where we are.
- Jilin-1 (together with Beidou) tells us where they are.
by78
General
I found a series of images from a seminar. They seem to indicate an effort at a space plane using combined cycle rocket engine. My technical Chinese is very limited, so I was unable to translate these. For our Chinese speaking members, do you spot anything interesting?
Xi'an Aerospace Propulsion Institute of CASC has apparently , intended for a single-stage reusable space plane.
OpenFOAM mentioned in the slides is a popular fluid/gas dynamics simulation package. The fact that this software is mentioned here makes me to think that these slides are related to developing computational models for flow of air in ramjet engines, or something like that. It looks more like a piece of theoretical work than an immediate "real world" engineering application.
Corrections:
- It is 2 stage to space as you can see from the last picture.
- It is not RBCC (Rocket Based Combined Cycle) which does not have a turbine. There is no RBCC program in China as far as I can gather. Actually RBCC concept was never seriously considered by Chinese according to this paper "Analysis of Key Technologies and Propulsion Performance Research of TRRE Engine" published by 11th institute in Beijing in 2017.
- It is almost certain that this tested engine is TRRE (Turbo-aided Rocket-augmented Ram⁃jet Combined Cycle Engine) which is studied above because the test was conducted by 11th institute in Xi'an which is the other office of 11th institute besides the one in Beijing. Same developer same program.
It was said in the article that you posted
The bold texts indicated that the engine or test craft was launched by a rocket. This indicates that the engine was only tested in the Ramjet->Rocket Inducted transition->Scramjet regime, excluding the turbine powered phase (Ma 1 to 2). It means that they have not built a flyable air-frame with autonomous flight control system that could enable taking off horizontally from a runway. That should be the next milestone for use to watch.
Connecting the dots:
- The spacecraft (spaceplane) launched days ago was the 2nd stage of the combo in your last picture. It uses rocket engine to enter LEO after departing from the carrier aircraft.
- The newly tested engine is to be used by the 1st stage carrier aircraft in the 3rd step.
- Now we are beginning to see the puzzles being put together.
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