China's Space Program Thread II

tacoburger

Junior Member
Registered Member
I personally don't necessarily disagree with this, but it's also apparently seems to be the case that the Chinese government has decided to let state and commercial companies go about their own pursuits and see which float and which don't, with a variety of risk profiles with overlapping redundancies and inefficiencies.
It's hardly the first sector that the government has allowed to have overlapping products and varying risk profiles for the sake of caution.

This is something that's been apparent for the last few years, so unless we see a change in this strategy, I think if it bothers you, it is worthwhile to transition through the stages of grief in a healthy way.
I'm just gonna say this, I think there's a very good reason why top ranking leaders of the space agencies have been arrested or expelled on charges of corruption.

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Wang Xiaojun led development of Long March 7 rockets used to resupply Tiangong space station and launch satellites
Xinhua reported that the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) decided at a conference on Wednesday to revoke the seats of Wu Yansheng, chairman of the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), Liu Shiquan, chairman of the board of the China North Industries Group Corporation, known internationally as the Norinco Group, and Wang Changqing, deputy manager of the state-owned China Aerospace Science and Industry Corporation (CASIC).
Something is clearly not right within the various space agencies and I think it's pretty obvious what the issues could be. Wasting billions on stranded assets is often frowned on.
 

by78

General
More information on the two Tiandu satellites that were launched alongside the Queqiao-2 (Magpie Bridge 2) relay satellite.

Both Tiandu satellites will be used to verify new space communication and navigation technologies. Tiandu-1 weighs 61kg and is equipped with a dual band (Ka/Ku?) communications device, a laser angle reflector, a router, etc. Tiandu-2 weighs 15kg and carryies a communications payload only. The two satellites will enter an elliptical orbit around the moon and carry out data transmission and data forwarding tests, as well as tests on a high-precision orbit determination system. These technologies are crucial for the future Magpie Bridge lunar constellation project, which will establish a Lunar-Earth communications and control network and a remote-sensing constellation orbiting the moon.

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Tiandu-2 has successfully separated from Queqiao-2/Magpie Bridge 2. Tiandu-2 features China's first 3D-printed aluminum propellant tank for satellites, which is currently operating as designed, marking a minor milestone.

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gelgoog

Brigadier
Registered Member
And again, you keep harping on this, but if it's so simple to reuse tooling and factories lines, why hasn't the CZ-8 production ramped up?
Because of the lockdowns. Which delayed the whole program.

It it's just a slight change of the CZ-7 and the CZ-7 first launched in 2016, then it's got to have a very mature production line. But still, one launch a year and no signs of changing.
CZ-7/7A/8 are the same rocket. Four launches a year not one. Right now CZ-8 is mostly being used to put satellites into SSO. Could it be there is just not that much demand for SSO launches? Did you ever consider that?

CZ-2C currently launches most SSO payloads. It can put 1,400kg into SSO. CZ-8 can put either 3,000kg into SSO with the core only, or 5,000kg into SSO with the side boosters. CZ-2C made five launches to SSO in 2023. Just a single launch of CZ-8 with the core only can put twice the payload into orbit, so you just need half the launches. You could launch the same mass up with only two or three launches.
But there is also the CZ-6 with capability of 1,080kg to SSO. So you don't even need that many launches of CZ-8.

And that's the key thing isn't it. Things change. 20 years ago, before the concept of satellite internet and all modern weapons plaftorm being "smart" and electronically linked together, the Faclon's 9 launch rate and payload to orbit would have been called excessive too.
Falcon 9 basically ate up the entire market for US and European launchers. And SpaceX stopped production of it a long time ago supposedly and are using stockpiled rockets. Maybe they could have just kept the factory operational and tried reducing the reuse costs down further and they wouldn't need a superheavy. I'll give you an example. Why does it take many months to turnaround the rocket and get it ready back up to flight? With doesn't it just require a refuel to get it ready to launch again? Imagine you cut down the turnaround time from six months to two days. What is the upmass change then? It's fairly simple. The upmass would be 90x bigger if you launched the same rocket every two days instead of every six months.

Do you need the upmass of the superheavy to launch the satellites used in the Starlink constellation? The answer is no. Elon only made the superheavy because he supposedly wants to go to Mars and he wanted to get the NASA funds for manned lunar exploration. If you look at the NASA specifications for the lunar missions they want the capability to send a huge amount of mass into the Moon with a single flight.
But other people have shown that unlike the NASA mission profile it is perfectly possible to achieve such missions with something like F9 Heavy and multiple launches.

If you think it's fine to invest billions in the production lines needed to vastly expand CZ-8 production, despite a dozen reusable rockets coming for it in a couple of years, in the tiny off chance that all this reusable rockets all fail horrbiliy for the next 5 years, then I think it's fair to invest a few billion into a fully reusable 2 stage rocket in the chance that it might completely transform the industry like the F9 did.
The production line needs to be there for the Tianzhou capsule. The rest is just added value for little extra effort.

The reusable is already being made as well. The CZ-10.
 
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Blitzo

Lieutenant General
Staff member
Super Moderator
Registered Member
I'm just gonna say this, I think there's a very good reason why top ranking leaders of the space agencies have been arrested or expelled on charges of corruption.

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Something is clearly not right within the various space agencies and I think it's pretty obvious what the issues could be. Wasting billions on stranded assets is often frowned on.

Next time just come out and say it so we can move on.
 

tacoburger

Junior Member
Registered Member
Because of the lockdowns. Which delayed the whole program.
And yet every other rocket has no issues growing their launch rate in the last 4 years.
CZ-7/7A/8 are the same rocket. Four launches a year not one.
If they're the same rocket, why is the CZ-8 called the CZ-8 and not the CZ-7A? Even if we go with your logic and this clearly different rockets are the same rockets, there's no difference. There's still an completely static number of launches for the previous 4 years. There's still zero evidence of a ramp up in launches.
Right now CZ-8 is mostly being used to put satellites into SSO. Could it be there is just not that much demand for SSO launches? Did you ever consider that?
And yet this is supposed to be the main workhorse rocket that supposed to replace the older hypergolic rockets, and for some reason it's only for SSO launches. Just great. You keep shooting yourself in the foot.
Falcon 9 basically ate up the entire market for US and European launchers. And SpaceX stopped production of it a long time ago supposedly and are using stockpiled rockets. Maybe they could have just kept the factory operational and tried reducing the reuse costs down further and they wouldn't need a superheavy. I'll give you an example. Why does it take many months to turnaround the rocket and get it ready back up to flight? With doesn't it just require a refuel to get it ready to launch again? Imagine you cut down the turnaround time from six months to two days. What is the upmass change then? It's fairly simple. The upmass would be 90x bigger if you launched the same rocket every two days instead of every six months.

Do you need the upmass of the superheavy to launch the satellites used in the Starlink constellation? The answer is no. Elon only made the superheavy because he supposedly wants to go to Mars and he wanted to get the NASA funds for manned lunar exploration. If you look at the NASA specifications for the lunar missions they want the capability to send a huge amount of mass into the Moon with a single flight.
But other people have shown that unlike the NASA mission profile it is perfectly possible to achieve such missions with something like F9 Heavy and multiple launches.
You have no idea what ultra-cheap access to space can do to the space economy. The entire point is to enable capabilities that we can't even imagine right now. I will make a post on another date on what I think a fully reusable Starship can do for the space sector.

Anyway, the whole point of the superheavy is that the two stage reusability is cheaper then even F9 and that due to the heat shielding needed for the upper stage you needed a superheavy rocket for that.
 
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by78

General
And yet every other rocket has no issues growing their launch rate in the last 4 years.

If they're the same rocket, why is the CZ-8 called the CZ-8 and not the CZ-7A? Even if we go with your logic and this clearly different rockets are the same rockets, there's no difference. There's still an completely static number of launches for the previous 4 years. There's still zero evidence of a ramp up in launches.

And yet this is supposed to be the main workhorse rocket that supposed to replace the older hypergolic rockets, and for some reason it's only for SSO launches. Just great. You keep shooting yourself in the foot.

You have no idea what ultra-cheap access to space can do to the space economy. The entire point is to enable capabilities that we can't even imagine right now. I will make a post on another date on what I think a fully reusable Starship can do for the space sector.

Anyway, the whole point of the superheavy is that the two stage reusability is cheaper then even F9 and that due to the heat shielding needed for the upper stage you needed a superheavy rocket for that.

Instead of constantly harping on the same talking points over and over and over again in this thread, why don't you write a tome about what you believe are the deficiencies of the Chinese space industry and then self-publish it? That way, you can scratch that itch, get it off your chest, maybe make some money and, more importantly, stop imposing on us your pesky concern trolling masqueraded as obsessive-compulsive whinging and pearl-clutching.

Please read the room. This isn't a venue for parading your profound genius like a motor-mouthed, strutting peacock, because next to no one would give a flying rat's ass about the thoughts –– as much as they can be charitably characterized as such –– of an invertebrate irk.

Nobody wants a ply of toilet paper to cling stubbornly to his shoe, so please go unstuck yourself.

Thank you.
 
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tacoburger

Junior Member
Registered Member
Do you need the upmass of the superheavy to launch the satellites used in the Starlink constellation? The answer is no. Elon only made the superheavy because he supposedly wants to go to Mars and he wanted to get the NASA funds for manned lunar exploration. If you look at the NASA specifications for the lunar missions they want the capability to send a huge amount of mass into the Moon with a single flight.
But other people have shown that unlike the NASA mission profile it is perfectly possible to achieve such missions with something like F9 Heavy and multiple launches.
A fully reusable superheavy will change the way that satellites are made. You have to understand that satellite design are heavily heavily constrained by launch prices, mass and volume. A launch platform like Starship will change that. For the most famous example, consider the JWST. Why? Because it had to be folded up to fit into a tiny fairing of an Ariane 5 and had to shave weight every way possible. The chief designer of the JWST has once said that if he had the option of launching the JWST on a platform like Starship or SLS, the JWST could have cost a fraction of the final price due to not needing to fold the telescope and having a lot more mass to to work around and they didn't have to risk the unfolding process destroying the telescope/mission. Considering that JWST cost around 10 billion, that's a fair amount of money and development time that could have been saved, that's a decent chunk of SLS and Starship's cost right there.

All satellites have this issue. Even an off the shelf cubesats have to shave off weight whenever possible. So they instead of cheap and heavy steel, they have to go for lightweight expensive aerograde materials, they have to go with the bare minimal size for their solar panels, they have to go with the bare minimal of reaction mass, they have to go with the bare minimal of radiation shielding, they have to fold their solar panels and antenna to fit within the fairing. Billion dollar deep space science missions have limit their instruments/sensors.

Do note that the folding of the solar panels and antennas are still an issue. The recent Lucy missile had issues when it's solar panels failed to unfurl and there have been plenty of very expensive spacecraft that have been lost or couldn't perform to their fullest potential due to their solar panels or antenna not deploying properly.

Now imagine if the costs fell so much that you didn't have to shave every gram of weight off a satellite, they would of course be easy to make. You can pack a satellite with an immense amount of extra fuel, especially for the evasive manoeuvres that spy satellites like to play with each other, or for more important satellites to last an extra long in orbit. You can pack a satellite with tons and tons of just raw mass for radiation shielding so that you can operate in enviorments like the van allen belts or if you want to fit your GPS satellite with the best electronics without having to worry about radiation wrecking it.

You can use off the shelf solar panels instead of insanely expensive multi-junction thin flim solar cells. You can just launch a particularly expensive mission with it's solar panels and antenna already deployed and not have to worry about them unfolding in space, extremely expensive missions like the Mars sample mission that you don't want even the slighest chance to fail will greatly benefit from this. You can launch massive payloads like entire space stations without having to assemble them in orbit. In this respect for volume, you need a superheavy like the SLS/Starship/CZ-9 , only they have the fairing volume for this to make sense, even if you think that a Faclon heavy or triple core LM-10 is cheaper and can also get the job done. Suddenly you can make cheaper satellites, at the expense of them being heavier and larger, but mass and volume and cost won't matter so much with a launch platform like Starship.

More power is another area that satellites can never get enough of, considering that many mission profiles directly scales with power, like ion drives, sensors, instruments and anything to do with the EM spectrum. The ISS has the largest and heaviest solar arrays in space and it's enough for 240 kilowatts... Not a lot by comparsion to earth based systems. Especially as space warfare heats up and suddenly you're wanting ever more and more power for jamming, propulsion and maybe even energy weapons like lasers or mircowaves. And of course, that's a lot of mass in solar panels, and with all that power comes extra heat, which means extra radiators. The mass requirements go up fast in that regard. And there's the wildcard of space based solar power to consider.

There's lots of other mission profiles that might open up in the future. For example, if orbits are filled with hundreds of thouands of satellites which will likely be reality in another decade, then suddenly anti space trash systems like space tugs and refueling spacecraft are suddenly extremely important. Do you know how much fuel it takes to change your inclinations in orbit, or to deorbit something? Such space tugs or refueling spacecraft will have to be 90% fuel by mass if they want to reach more then a handful of satellites. Again, a fully resauble low cost rocket might be useful if you want to launch a 100 ton spacecraft's 90% raw mass(fuel) to orbit every week to prevent valuable orbits from becoming trashed by the exponential increase in space trash.

Fuel depots is another thing that a fully reusable superheavy enables. Raw bulk mass in large amounts, like you yourself said that it fits a superheavy profile. And you might ask, what's the use of fuel depots? Well there might be uses for them in lunar/Mars missions and deep space missions. But I think their main use will be in the forementioned space tugs and refueling spacecraft, espically if the trends continue and we end up with hundreds of thousands of satellites sharing LEO and suddenly redunct satellites are a regular and expensive problem.

Oh and deep space missions are a massive boost with a superheavy. Sure you could launch a Jupiter mission on a medium/heavy lift rocket, but it will take 20 years and a few gravity assists to get there. Or launch it on a superheavy and have the spacecraft arrive in 5 years. Take your pick.
The only reasons to use a superheavy are if you either have an indivisible payload you need to put up into space, or you have to put so much upmass in orbit that it justifies the huge expense of building the superheavy and its factory. The current requirements worldwide for indivisible payloads are supposedly one flight every two years, with a max of one flight every year in the future.
And do you really think that people wouldn't adjust their satellites to take full use of a superheavy? Have you maybe considered that maybe why space agencies aren't sending up massive satellites and telescopes is because the only superheavies in service right now is the FH and SLS, with the SLS barely functionable. And the FH barely counts as superheavy and it's fairing size is the same as the F9, which greatly limits the missions that it can launch. This is putting the cart before the horse. Of course nobody would design their payloads to only fit a superheavy's mission profile when there's only really the FH flying reguarly. As I have said before, the volume matters of the fairing matters alot in this case. Even then, the FH only took it's first flight in 2018, there's probably lots of satellites designed for it that haven't finished building yet, considering the lead time for space projects is around a decade.

I don't think you understand that satellites have to be designed around the rockets that they are launching on and not the other way around. Do you have any idea how much science missions to deep space are neutered because they didn't have the mass budget to fit an extra science instruments, didn't have enough power due to being unable to fit as many solar panels as they wanted- to the point where some satellites can't power all their instruments all at once and have to cycle though them , couldn't add redundancies like an extra set of batteries or extra fuel for course correction or took an extra decade to arrive at their destination because they had to launch on a low energy orbit on a medium lift rocket.
 
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escobar

Brigadier
Zhang Tao, a representative of the National People's Congress and a professor at Beihang University, noted that the implementation of (Starlink) has brought unprecedented pressure to our country…(China’s) satellite internet industry is still in the on-orbit verification stage and has not formed operational capabilities similar to Starlink. In order to prevent being passive in space competition and encountering a “space blockade”, (China) urgently needs to accelerate the seizure of orbital resources, accelerate the development of a satellite internet industry, and build a Space-Ground Integrated Network in the 6G era as soon as possible”
Zhang Tao pointed out that in terms of traditional models and technologies, the local gap between my country and aerospace powers is narrowing or even surpassing it. However, in terms of emerging models and new technologies, the gap with emerging commercial aerospace companies represented by SpaceX is accelerating and widening. Therefore, it is necessary to encourage private enterprises to participate in the development of satellite Internet.
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