Chinese Privately Developed Rocket Fails To Reach Orbit (reuters.com) 66
schwit1 shares a report: A privately developed Chinese carrier rocket failed to reach orbit after lifting off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Saturday, in a blow to the country's nascent attempts by private companies to rival Elon Musk's SpaceX. The three-stage rocket, Zhuque-1, was developed by Beijing-based Landspace. The company said in a microblog post after nominal first and second stages that the spacecraft failed to reach orbit as a result of an issue with the third stage. "Before Zhuque carrier rocket was launched, its mission was already completed," the company said in the post on Saturday, without giving further details.
Just to remember.... (Score:5, Insightful)
It sucks their rocket didn't make it, but remember too, SpaceX's early rockets didn't make it to orbit either. The whole company almost went bust before they got one to work.
Now they are shaking up the entire launch industry.
Chinese companies will have plenty of government support and they will succeed. That is a matter of when not if.
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Yep, rockets are tricky [cnet.com].
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From a biological perspective, its even worse if you actually get there. Recent findings reveal that after just 90 days in space, humans loose about 3% of their brain weight. At that rate humans would loose about 18% of their brains just going there and back, without even staying for any length of time. For eyesight, its even worse. Most travelers to and from Mars would likely be nearly blind upon their return.
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It sucks their rocket didn't make it, (..)
That's unusual! Normally it blows when a rocket doesn't make it.
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It sucks their rocket didn't make it, but remember too, SpaceX's early rockets didn't make it to orbit either. The whole company almost went bust before they got one to work.
Given how much Chinese tech is believed to be stolen from established players, though, you’d think they could’ve avoided the early failed stages of rocket development.
And den ? (Score:1)
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Indeed. The Tsiolkovsky rocket equation from the Russians, geometry from the Greeks, algebra from the Persians...
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When Alpha plans are stolen, Alpha results are begotten.
Re:Just to remember.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, I'm sorry for them, but many, many examples tells us that most first tries at building an orbital booster fail.
The biggest part of success in rocket building is the ability to accept a failure, learn from it, and keep on.
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You could make a similar argument for any American company. How far along do you think our own "space travel corporations" would be without the massive taxpayers subsidies that they have been receiving?
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They must have stolen plans for the earliest rocket not the most recent one. :p
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It sucks their rocket didn't make it, but remember too, SpaceX's early rockets didn't make it to orbit either. The whole company almost went bust before they got one to work.
Now they are shaking up the entire launch industry.
Chinese companies will have plenty of government support and they will succeed. That is a matter of when not if.
Indeed. This plays to their strengths. It's already been done before so no real innovation and just needs the right mix of cost cutting.
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It's already been done before so no real innovation and just needs the right mix of cost cutting.
Probably part of the reason SpaceX is moving into the "Never been done before" category right now. Falcon 9 is a really well executed inexpensive rocket from the 1970s. BFR will cost the Chinese a fortune to copy if even SpaceX can deliver.
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You are right. When the US first tried to catch up with the Russians after Sputnik, this kind of thing happened with regularity. Given their massive industrial capacity and educational system that is rapidly overtaking our own, we will likely see many successful Chinese rocket launches in the next few years.
The sad reality is that if humanity is to survive, we must strive to work with the Chinese and the Russians, rather than try to perceive them as perpetual enemies. Despite many political, cultural, an
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How much of that rocket is stolen IP? (Score:1, Funny)
The only "privately developed" part is the Chinese characters painted on the side
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Well, America's space program was built by Nazis we snatched up before the Soviets could grab them. Is that any better? The first Americans in space went up on a derivative of the V2, a rocket that was developed and produced with slave labor.
While the Chinese government is certainly not beyond stealing technology, that's really just a matter of accelerating the inevitable Chinese parity with the West. China has a substantial space program that produces it own unique, indigenous designs.
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Well, America's space program was built by Nazis we snatched up before the Soviets could grab them.
Partly. There was also a US program (in fact, several US programs: the GALCIT team in California didn't work at all with Goddard's team in New Mexico). It's easy to point out that when Vanguard (based on the Navy rocket program) failed, the Army team launched Explorer 1 on the Juno booster, based on the Von Braun team's Jupiter. It's often forgotten, however, that Juno was a four stage booster, and only the first stage was the Jupiter: the second, third, and fourth stages -- the parts that actually took i
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My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design -- not to minimize the contributions of Americans, they still would have been well behind without technology they got from Germany.
The point is countries don't acquire foreign technology, by whatever means, just to achieve indefinite parity -- which is the best you can expect if all you do is borrow. Parity is just a milestone, and the sooner you get there the sooner you get ahead.
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My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design --
As I said: the Juno vehicle used the Von Braun team's Jupiter as the first stage. The other three stages of the four-stage design were JPL.
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My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design
You said
The first Americans in space went up on a derivative of the V2
But in reality, they went up on an Atlas [wikipedia.org]. Atlas was most certainly not a von Braun design, and was definitely more advanced than Juno. I mean, von Braun was important to the US space program but lots of the good things he did involved clever use of equipment already in development by Americans, such as the F-1 engine on the Saturn V.
Re: How much of that rocket is stolen IP? (Score:2)
Yeah. Right. (Score:2)
Re: Yeah. Right. (Score:2)
Re:If at first you don't succeed, (Score:5, Interesting)
Americans haven't really wrapped their brain around China. Many apparently believe that China is somehow incapable of being a serious rival to the US without cheating.
One in five people on Earth lives in China; one in twenty in the US. The Chinese economy is currently about 2/3 the size of the US economy, ten years ago that figure was 1/3. And just this year, China surpassed the US in number of scientific papers published.
China is fully capable of becoming a serious technological, military and economic rival to the US without cheating. And it is willing to cheat. Without foreign scientists immigrating to the US, there's no way we can keep up with them through mid-century.
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China is in serious risk of falling into the middle income trap. The debt implosion is going to hit and it only a matter of when. When it does, at this level of debt China may never be able to attain parity with Japan or South Korea due to its massive population and demographic makeup.
Depends on what you mean by "parity". China is already immensely more militarily powerful than either of those countries. In space, China launches twice as many payloads as Japan does, and South Korea has only launched one orbital mission -- and that was on a rocket with the first stage bought from Russia.
China may never reach parity on a median-income basis, but it is already immensely more powerful than either South Korea or Japan economically and militarily, and in selected areas technologically.
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The ghost cities were built to try to tackle the overcrowding of preexisting cities. Problem is they forgot people move to cities because of the jobs, not just because it's a city, so everyone kept moving to Shanghai and ignored the empty cities.
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The "nobody lives in them" hasn't been true for a long time. The ghost cities are mostly settled by now.
China built these cities to a specified size instead of growing them slowly so they could achieve certain economies of scale. The boon is that they don't need to modify anything to accomodate the growing population of these cities.
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And just this year, China surpassed the US in number of scientific papers published.
Only this year? China is behind several other Asian and European countries then. US scientific output has been falling for decades.
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Even assuming this is true for the moment, I'm not going to pretend it will be the case forever. I know enough talented Chinese researchers who are doing good work, and I see enough papers in high-quality journals with all-Chinese author lists, to see the shift coming. Either we play together, or we risk losing.
Nobody wants to be a small-sat launcher (Score:5, Interesting)
I see many, many space startups trying to build a very small, cheap launcher for very small satellites, or even cubesats. They are all bullshitting their investors - the market just does not exist.
All of them *want* to be in the full satellite launch business. Stuff in the grade of Atlas V, Soyuz, or Falcon 9. 2 to 4 tons of payload to LEO is about the smallest you can do cost-effectively, and 8 to 12 tons is the bulk of the market, and there's demand for larger still.
Everyone is copying SpaceX's business plan. Use initial funds to build a small orbital launcher (like Falcon 1), and then once you've proven you can put something into space, use that to secure funding to build an actual usable rocket (note that, as soon as they got funding for Falcon 9, they never flew Falcon 1 again, even though it shared parts with early Falcon 9s). Even Blue Origin built a suborbital tourist rocket before transitioning to their heavy-lift New Glenn - granted, Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX so they can't exactly be copying them.
This is not exclusive to China - Firefly (US) has their Alpha and Beta, OneSpace (China) has their OS-M1 upgraded sounding rocket, ExPace (China) has a whopping three rockets in their planned Kuaizhou series, Interstellar (Japan) has their Zero, LinkSpace (China) has New Line 1 which clearly implies a NL-2, Orbex (UK) has their Prime, and Rocket Lab (US) has Electron. All of them are competing for a market that just doesn't exist.
LandSpace is barely disguising their intentions. Zhuque-1 is a 300kg-to-LEO firecracker. All solid motors, which is just a terrible way to build an orbital rocket, but I expect they're using off-the-shelf parts (what's the Chinese counterpart to the GEM series?). Zhuque-2 is a much more reasonable 4000kg-to-LEO, methalox rocket. So the chemistry is different, the plumbing is different, the structure is different, even the launchpad is going to have to be different... what can they reuse from Zhuque-1, the avionics?
There is demand for a tiny-sat launcher. That much isn't a lie. But it's demand for a very, very low-cost launcher. Nobody's going to shell out a couple million bucks for a cubesat launch. Get the price down to $100K, sure, you'll be doing business, but all the newspace tiny-sat launchers I've seen are in the ballpark of $5M. Well, Falcon 9 is $50M a pop, and can do 20 tons worth of payload. There's a launch next month specifically for tiny satellites - specifically, 64 different satellites, mostly cubesats. Average price? Just under that $1M apiece figure.
So who would book a super-small launcher? Someone who doesn't need much in the way of payload - a small satellite, not requiring much power or designed to last all that long, but either going into a very strange orbit that no rideshare would go to, or needing to launch at very short notice. As far as I can tell, such customers just don't exist.
It's almost like the dotcom bubble - tons of companies burning through investor cash on a scheme to raise more investor cash. At least their planned second rockets are something that could actually be profitable. Going to be rough to compete with the oldspace companies, many of which are government-sponsored (ULA, Ariane), as well as the first-gen newspace companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin), who have a big lead on the technology. I doubt they'll all be successful... but I think one or two will make it. Which ones, I don't know.
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Rocket Lab wants to be in the small-sat launch market. They've recently opened a new factory to build lots of Electron rockets. They've been announcing plans for new launch sites for the Electron. They are making no moves to build bigger rockets.
The strategy you propose, to emulate SpaceX by making a few small-sat launchers and then shifting to large satellites, looks to me to be crazy, because the large satellite market is already dominated by a successful disrupter (SpaceX) and is being competed for by so
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Yeah Electron (which by the way also failed to reach orbit on their first attempt like nearly everybody else) I don't think physically *could* be scaled up.
Falcon 1 to Falcon 9 was a straightforward roadmap. There is no way to take Electron's defining feature and scale up without massive inefficiency. You won't be fueling a Merlin class fuel pump with an electric motor anytime soon.
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Of all the small-launch newspace companies, I could most believe that Rocket Lab is the one that's actually genuine about focusing on the small-launch market. Mostly because I don't think their engine design can scale up much past where it is - I think this is about the limit for battery-cycle rocket engines with current technology.
All rocket-launch markets are semi-protected. Nobody wants to launch a spy satellite on someone else's rocket - so there's a market that Landspace only has to compete with other
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Blue Origin is very much not in stealth mode. They just aren't in Elon-Musk-crazy-stunts PR mode. You hear about them fairly regularly in the rocket press, just not the mainstream, same as with ULA or Arianespace.
Blue Origin's New Shepard (the suborbital tourist one) is still gearing up for crewed test flights - they're supposed to happen this year, not sure if that's officially slipped yet or not. They're also supplying the BE-4 engine to ULA for their upcoming Vulcan rocket, intended to replace Atlas V an
Competing with Rocket Lab (Score:3)
I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Zhuque: [nasaspaceflight.com] (alternative news source)
Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.
Electron [wikipedia.org]:
Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit
Falcon 9 [wikipedia.org]:
Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.
There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.
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I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Zhuque: [nasaspaceflight.com] (alternative news source) Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.
Electron [wikipedia.org]: Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit
Falcon 9 [wikipedia.org]: Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.
There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.
This is a troubling trend, and not because these are Chinese rockets. There is a finite amount of satellites that can be put into orbit without causing too much clutter to achieve higher orbits. It is in each company's interest to place as many satellites into orbit as possible to maximize profit. There is no incentive to avoid a Kessler syndrome [wikipedia.org]. Unless an international body starts regulating the number of satellites that can be launched, we're going to have a big problem.