Victims of the US war on China.
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- Thread starter bd popeye
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Victims of the US war on China.
No the Chinese collaboration is set for a later date and is a separate event.
That said there is nothing stopping them from redeveloping a rover with Chinese components.
By then Russia's Angara pad at Vostochny will be operational as will Angara A5. So Russia will have the launch capability to put their own station up if they want to. Russia also needs to test their next generation capsule.
Do we have recent photos of the progress at Vostochny? ROSCOSMOS has only launched 3 A5s since 2014 and one was a failure (upper stage). The soonest 'next launch' of the A5 is 2Q24? And Orel is...when?
The launch pad is supposed to be ready for launch late this year. But delays would not be anything new really.
As for the failure, that failure was the upper stage, Block DM. That is a repurposed upper stage from Proton. The actual new Angara components have never failed in a launch thus far.
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I think for the starship launch the Florida launch site was also limited by geography, due to the high water table in Florida and its proximity to the sea building a flame trench would've been very expensive as it'll probably need to be elevated. You can already see water pooling under the damaged launch site.
Raptor V3 has hit 350 bar chamber pressure, 269 tons of thrust
The other nations will likely also have to go into this full-flow engine technology eventually I think.
You can have much higher chamber pressure with full-flow staged combustion. It is a technology invented in the late 1960s. But back then no one got it to work reliably. Hopefully SpaceX will eventually get it working reliably. The fact this engine is already on at least its 3rd redesign when the vehicle hasn't had a successful launch yet shows the difficulty of the problem.
You can have much higher chamber pressure with full-flow staged combustion. It is a technology invented in the late 1960s. But back then no one got it to work reliably. Hopefully SpaceX will eventually get it working reliably. The fact this engine is already on at least its 3rd redesign when the vehicle hasn't had a successful launch yet shows the difficulty of the problem.