China Plans to Also Launch Reusable Spaceplanes by 2020 (arstechnica.com) 92
Slashdot reader hackingbear writes: According to a statement from China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation, China's reusable spaceplane will launch in 2020. The spaceplane will be launched vertically by a winged rocket to orbit and each of them will be returned to the ground horizontally, according to Chinese media reports. The system is designed to be reusable in 24 hours and for at least 20 times, cutting launch costs to 1/10 of the current price... "Currently China is developing its own reusable earth-to-orbit space vehicles that can take off and land horizontally," Liu Shiquan, vice director of the China Aerospace Science & Industry Corporation, said. "We have already finished several crucial ground tests for engines and [other key components], yielding remarkable achievements."
they are ALL reusable (Score:2)
Yeah (Score:2)
I predict that their also launching capabilities will be unsurpassed.
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I predict that their also launching capabilities will be unsurpassed.
Well, it'll be interesting to see if their 'reusable spaceplane' design is a deathtrap like the US space shuttle was.
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Does the shuttle really qualify as a spaceplane though? Seems like the definition requires "acting as an aircraft in atmosphere", while everything I've heard of the shuttle suggests it flew more like a brick.... :-D
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But it clearly also launched.
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Plenty of rockets have launched, and even flown home and landed. I haven't heard anyone calling the Falcon 9 a spaceplane...
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True enough. The spaceplane concept hasn't had the greatest track record so far. Whether that was because of implementation issues or it's an intrinsic feature of spaceplanes remains to be seen. But I'd note that NASA, who has the most experience with that approach, has abandoned it.
The Soviets had the best approach to it; remote control and automated systems. The Buran never flew with a crew on board; its test flight was entirely automated. They considered it too risky for cosmonauts. The Space Shuttles test flight had a crew on board with no hope of survival in event of a mishap; it never flew without a crew, could never have flown without a crew.
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You make it sound like that's significantly different from rockets. At present anything that's going into space is a significant risk. The main difference between the US shuttles and the Soviet ones is that by the time they had that first flight, the country was practically bankrupt. By that time, they had already had the Chernobyl nuclear reactor accident and much of what infrastructure they had was having serious problems due to the lack of resources for design and maintenance.
Fully automating things is OK for certain things, it's been feasible to send probes to other planets for decades because we didn't need to send a probe. But, we could never get the science done in orbit that we've gotten if we took such a conservative approach to the problem.
It's unfortunate, that there have been deaths in the space program, but I'm not sure how it could realistically be avoided given what we knew at the time. And the number of people killed has been relatively small when compared with the various other expeditions that have gone wrong.
Well, the first flight of all the US rockets didn't have crews... so why did the space shuttle have to go up first time with a crew if its not significantly different from rockets?
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The Space Shuttles test flight had a crew on board with no hope of survival in event of a mishap; it never flew without a crew, could never have flown without a crew.
Not for technical reasons, though, but for astronauts unions reasons. Plus, one could argue that "Buran...never flew with a crew, could never have flown with a crew" as well. And making Buran flyable with people would have involved more work than making STS fly *without* people since Buran was effectively unfinished at the time of its flight.
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That's how science works, after all.
Re: This makes Elon sad. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: This makes Elon sad. (Score:2)
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Re: Elon: scamming par excellence (Score:2)
Falcon 9 has been used for more than half of all US launches in 2017. Spacex isn't going away anytime soon.
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How deranged does someone have to be to trust that the former director of the American Gestapo (read: FBI) is somehow an impartial and just source of American equity? Do you wish cross-dressing serial crook J Edgar Hoover was here, too?
Bitch, please. If Obama had even 1 link to Russia, you nutbags would want him lynched
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How can this be if CHIIIINA is also-doing all this good stuff?
Mmm Hmm (Score:2)
Aren't they going to the moon [bgr.com] too?
With the Chinese, it's not precisely the same thing as when a tinpot dictator spouts off with some improbable future outcome, but it sure is reminiscent.
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Swim? English not your first language?
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Wow, you are a fucking genius at guessing.
Meanwhile american BATTLE cruisers are a death trap for their own crewmen.
Would you care to test that for yourself, Mr. AC? Would you dare to confront an American Battle Cruiser on the high seas and only have concern for it's own crewman?
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Then get yourself onto a tanker and rule the seas. Our stupid cruisers won't have a chance.
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Or, just keep typing stuff into a little backwater of the internet.
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Would you dare to confront an American Battle Cruiser ... perhaps you want to google what a battle cruiser is. But, well it was the parents fault to start that discussion :D
Sure! I doubt they have a sea worthy Battle Cruiser
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At least he speaks and writes a second language ... ... a German could make the same mistake.
Swim
Which word would you chose? Drive? Travel? Move? Float? Drift? Go? Find?
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When the Soviets started Sputnik, they were just 10 years beyond german WWII technology.
When the USA sent people to the moon, they where 20 years beyond german WWII technology.
No idea which point in technology advancement we want to assign China at the moment. But technology wise they are minimum 30 beyond the moon technology of the USA. Probably a decade more. Considering that the moon crew vehicle, landers etc. had less processing power than a toaster ... everything can now bought on the world market.
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I have high hopes for Humanity, but I also fear that instead of exploiting space exploration for the greater good of mankind, we are on the precipice of exploiting it for military advantage.
no people please (Score:2)
For any satellite or cargo mission in the foreseeable future, there is absolutely no need to have a person in space, and doing so just increases the costs / risks and decreases the useful load of what has to go up there.
Aside from going to Mars / putting a person on Mars, there really isn't any need for humans to be in space at this point. As a c
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Go kill yourself by driving off the edge of the Earth already.
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I think the Chinese are pretty much made of time and money.
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Yes, that's what internet space buffs always say. It flies in the face of the experience of the space program to date, but it's easy to say sitting behind a keyboard.
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Yes, internet space buffs are always saying stuff like we don't need people in space.
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Maybe they want a new way to take people to their space station?
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As of last summer, the ISS has given us thousands of manhours of zero-G experience by 222 people. This is hardly baking soda volcanos.
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And what's the practical use of having thousands of manhours of zero-G ?
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And what's the practical use of having thousands of manhours of zero-G ?
Of what use is a newborn baby?
- W Churchill
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Of what use is a newborn baby?
They are fun to make. And they don't cost billions a piece.
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Of what use is a newborn baby?
They are fun to make. And they don't cost billions a piece.
Until you get divorced.
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Pssst! S E X in free fall!
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Aside from the glory factor, there's no need for people. And while maybe for some countries that's still necessary, for a country like China -- guys, we already believe you.
Hey, now give me a reason for putting anything in space at all, ever.
Today, if we were all living in say Europe, we could use the argument, demanding robot oceangoing ships because there's no need for people to do worldwide exploring - stay at home and let the drones and robot ships do the work. Building ships and planes for meatbags is too expensive, and what's the point? We have to fix the problems in Europe before the expense of sending people to explore new lands that might not be of any use anyhow.
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Hey, now give me a reason for putting anything in space at all, ever.
GPS, telecommunication, earth observing sciences, weather forecasting, mapping, espionage, to name just a handful of obvious reasons.
what is the point of exploring the moons of Jupiter if we plan to never ever leave earth,
It's interesting to see what's out there.
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You wouldn't even have learned words like corona or chromoSPHERE, or even eclipse, if what you're trying to convince us were true. You're just a troll. And not a very good one at that.
Re: How Eclipses Show the Flat Earth (Score:2)
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With a few careful observations, you can begin to understand that the
heliocentric model is a lie, and you live on a flat plane.
I bet your bridge is just a drawing on a flat plane.
Schedule seems ambitious (Score:5, Insightful)
Nothing fundamentally wrong with a fully re-usable space plane but the 2020 launch date would imply that they are very far along. If so, I'm surprised no design information has leaked out. They should already be testing full scale gliding models etc.
I hope its real and they have just been keeping it hush hush: the more human capability there is to do space, the happier I am. I'll believe it though when I see some pictures of actual hardware .
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There are many design and scaled models leaked on the Chinese web, like this [baidu.com], this [ifeng.com], and this [sina.com.cn]. Do not assume if you don't read Chinese and really know nothing about China.
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Thank you for the links.
I've also seen the old US reusable spaceplane models - you can still find some in the Smithsonian and other museums. We also had dynosaur, and the various lifting body craft. Sill we never built a real one. (unless you count the partially-reusuable shuttle).
They are also not making a big deal about it in their internal museums - at lest nothing in the space section of the Shanghai technology museum a couple of years back.
I'm not doubting that the Chinese are working on it - just the
It's easy when you steal (Score:2, Funny)
It takes time to translate all the stolen documentation into Chinese then re-source the materials. Google translate isn't quite good enough for this task yet.
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The Chinese certainly aren't stealing space technology from us these days......
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Actually Baidu Translate does a much better job with Chinese than Google does.
You should be careful with that accusation. Same thing was said about Japan, and then suddenly Japanese cars and electronics were better than the western ones and they were the ones doing all the innovation. It's already happening with China - European car manufacturers who missed the EV boat are now buying in Chinese technology and parts to catch up. Same with renewable energy, everyone just assumed Chinese products were crap and
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It seems to me I heard similar plans, with similar cost claims, about forty years ago . . .
Took a little less than a decade from design approval to launch.
hawk
What ever happened to Chinese manned spaceflight? (Score:2)
Re:What ever happened to Chinese manned spacefligh (Score:5, Informative)
From the list of astronauts you can see that there have been six missions to space. The last one, Shenzhou 11, launched on 16 October 2016 and rendezvoused with the space laboratory. They stayed in orbit for a month. [wikipedia.org]
The Chinese are taking their time and making sure that they get everything right. They are definitely not rushing things with their program. I wouldn't put down the Chinese space program as they at least have the capability to put people into orbit unlike the US.
Developing... horizontal takeoff? (Score:2)
Why would you want to launch horizontally, regarding (presumably) a second vehicle under development? It just doesn't seem like you make any meaningful improvements, unless you are small and being dropped from a plane at 50,000 feet
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I figure there's some kind of translation error:
"Currently China is developing its own reusable earth-to-orbit space vehicles that can take off and land horizontally,"
I assume they mean the rockets will take off and then land horizontally. The concept is somewhat like the Space Shuttle--the rocket will go up vertically, release the satellite/space-plane, and rather than falling back and burning up, crashing someplace, or doing a controlled landing (like SpaceX), it will glide like the Space Shuttle and be remote piloted like the Buran back to an airfield where it will land horizontally.
That would be impressive to see.
Re:Developing... horizontal takeoff? (Score:4, Informative)
I'm the OP's author. They are developing both versions. The vertical take off one is to be launched in 2020 and the horizontal take off one by 2030. I made it clear in my original post as a side note. The English news article omitted the details.
Doesn't matter. Only speed matters (Score:2)
As far as reaching orbit, it doesn't much matter. The altitude is easy. It's getting orbital speed that's the hard part. If they figure they can get velocity faster by using lift to counteract gravity, thereby saving engine thrust to use for velocity, that could make sense. On the other hand, getting into lower air pressure in the first 60 seconds will help acceleration.
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If they figure they can get velocity faster by using lift to counteract gravity, thereby saving engine thrust to use for velocity, that could make sense
The problem is that the wings add extra mass that also needs to be accelerated, which could negate all the savings.
wings are already there for landing. Save rocket (Score:2)
The wings are already there for landing. By also using wings for takeoff, the craft can use it's much more efficient jet engines to reach hypersonic speeds, saving the rocket engine for when it's too high to get any oxygen from the air. That reduces the weight of fuel required, as well as potentially piping, pumps, etc.
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the craft can use it's much more efficient jet engines to reach hypersonic speeds, saving the rocket engine for when it's too high to get any oxygen from the air. That reduces the weight of fuel required, as well as potentially piping, pumps, etc.
Less fuel, but you need two kinds of engines, which only adds more piping, pumps, etc, plus the dead mass of the extra engines. At least the extra fuel you carry will be burned, reducing mass as you go.
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Why would you want to launch horizontally, regarding (presumably) a second vehicle under development? It just doesn't seem like you make any meaningful improvements, unless you are small and being dropped from a plane at 50,000 feet
Eventually, all orbital shots are done horizontally, as you need horizontal speed to stay in orbit. Rockets just go striaght up inorder to get above the atmosphere first. Being launched by a second plane at 50,000 feet or so saves about 5% of the fuel costs of a rocket and when going to orbital velocities, one doesn't need much "vertical" velocity as the ground will drop off with "horizontal' travel quickly under the accelerations normally needed. The idea of a plane concept is that it can use atmospheric o
That rocket; it looks...familiar (Score:2)
Well, if nothing else, the speed with which China meets its objectives will serve to highlight the strength of its outstanding corporate espionage sector.