I'm sure they can ramp up production capacity if needed. I mean, what would be the constraint for producing say a few hundred rockets each year? Materials? Manpower? Space? I imagine the issue right now is more not having an optimal model to mass produce.
China's Space Program Thread II
- Thread starter Blitzo
- Start date
All of that and money, it just isn't economical and scalable to do that. CZ-8 series is meant to be extremely cheap to launch and "fast" to produce, by your logic CALT should abandon all reusable rocket projects and just focus on making 1000 CZ-8s per year yet they are still heavily pushing and investing into reusable rockets.
Jack wrote an article on this, seems like they are moving steadily to continue building. It seems likely to be baked into the local 15th 5 year plan, as well.
Off the top of my head, based on actual contracts:
Ceres-1 price are ¥28.5-¥31.5M ($4-4.5M)
CZ-2C/2D price are ~¥110M ($16M)
CZ-3B price are ~¥260-270M ($37-$39M)
CZ-7A price are ~¥570M ($82M)
Many other prices and cost have been claimed, for example,CALT CZ-8A costs $6k/kg to SSO (which one)? which would be about $42M, but other papers and sources say it is above $60M and closer in price to a Falcon 9.
CZ-6A, CZ-12 and ZQ-2E are also said to be on the same order as a CZ-3B.
IMO as far as commercial payloads are concerned, in china:
-Dedicated small lift and dedicated GTO launch is noticeably cheaper within the Chinese launch market than the western one, perhaps by as much as half as cheap, owing to CASC's proven CZ-2/3/4 launchers and a competitive small launcher sector. However there are few truly commercial GSO comsat companies in China.
-Rideshare is slightly to moderately more expensive than SpaceX's Transporter stable $7/kg, there is not quite the equivalent in china, but there are nevertheless quite a bit of rideshare opportunities on Kuaizhou, Lijian, CZ-2C/D, Jielong...
-Dedicated heavy lift needed for constellation launches is moderately to significantly more expensive within the Chinese market than the international one.
CAS Space's founder was saying last year that the price of expendable Lijian-2 was ~¥30,000/kg which would be ~¥360M or ~52M, this is below F9 price ($74M minimum) but far above cost ($15-20M) He also said that Lijian-1 Price are below $10k/kg (total price <$20M/<¥138M, aiming to reduce that to ¥100M), which is rather believable considering Lijian-1 seems actually competitive with CZ-2C/2D in the same SSO payload class.
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Why would money be an issue if it's competitive with Falcon 9 in cost? Wouldn't they just make more money the more they spend? The only reason they wouldn't invest in something like that is if they expect a significantly more economical model(s) coming very soon.
You literally said it yourself, reusable rockets are just so much more economical and scalable for future growth, building one extra booster to handle more launches is far easier than expanding production facilities to boost production by dozens per year and the associated logistics (Also, the price advantage is only in the small to medium lift range so you'd also need far more launches for the same capacity), all of that costs money, time and manpower. Unlike what people think even SOEs don't have infinite money, they're still budget and time constrained.
Also, you do realize Falcon 9 is extremely fat in margins right now, I wouldn't be surprised these new expendable rockets are launching at a bare profit if not break even just to attract more customers and put a nicer looking number on the brochure to keep themselves competitive which really isn't uncommon these days.
People at CALT and other launch providers aren't dumb, they ran the numbers and came to the same conclusion that reusable rockets is the future instead of trying to scale up production of these expendable rockets.
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You need to go back to my first reply. The main statement is "I'm sure they can ramp up production capacity if needed." None of what you said disproves that. Yes, it costs more time, money, and manpower to use disposable rockets, but if the launch cost is comparable to the F9, even with a far thinner margin, then it can be used, in high quantities even...IF NEEDED. Margins can only improve when scaled up.
The reason it's not being done right now is because it's NOT needed currently, therefore the focus is on the more economical product which is the reusable rocket.
