It looks like they got the landing legs prototyped and tested.
And they’re able to stick the landing on the moon, 3 times now. The moon engine needs to operate in a vacuum. And its landing craft can robotically land itself, after hovering, looking for a suitable landing site, and then softly sticking the landing.
The question is if it’s harder to land on earth, where you must deal with the atmosphere, versus on the moon, where there is no atmosphere.
My guess is that they’ll stick the landing. Or at least, get really close to success on the first shot.
The atmosphere on Earth makes the temperatures a lot higher on re-entry. For rockets without the heat shielding, you need to do a re-entry burn just to slow down. Interestingly enough, unlike the Falcon 9, Rocket Lab's Electron uses carbon fiber wihch doesn't actually need a heat shield. The atmosphere can help slow the vehicle down a lot, but the Earth's higher gravity has a big impact on the rocket equation.
I think China will master Falcon 9 level re-usability in the late-2020s. Given SpaceX's development speed so far, by that point the launch market will have moved on Starship super-heavy lift vehicles with full re-usability of both stages.
China is blocked from competing in the international launch vehicle market (due to concerns over Chinese military espionage and tech transfer) so the benefit of having a commercially competitive rocket is not actually there. Unlike SpaceX, China can't tap into the demand for 100 launches per year on the global market.
Perhaps we'll see a People Liberation Army version of Starlink being launched in 2030, but the pocketbook of the government of China isn't infinite. They are already starting to struggle to provide the aged pension to their people -- culminating in the current push to move the women's retirement age back 10+ years.
I can't see China developing a competitive re-usable launcher for anything other than military payloads. Especially given a United States that will sanction any company linked to the Chinese military (just like they sanctioned SMIC when it appeared to be catching up while being a People's Liberation Army supplier).
Yeah, it doesn’t seem like China is in any rush to do reusability. This is more of a fun hobby now for them.
It seems they are more interested in throw-weight, in pursuing the Long March 9. It’s safer to establish the capability first, then, to work on reusability afterwards.
And they’re locked out of the western commercial launch market, so, that’s irrelevant to them. So they’ll just have to stick with domestic demand.
The next interesting play, is if they go forward with space based solar power. In which, they will need the Long March 9, for its excellent Saturn V level throw-weight.
They are at least three years away from attempting a landing. And flying and landing a hypersonic booster OIG earths atmosphere is far different than landing a small lander in a vacuum.
Thanks for pointing out the historical background of the name.
Despite being the greatest mass murderer of the 20th century (through the disastrous Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward), Mao is still a revered figure in China and is considered the father of the nation.
His face is even on the currency like the Queen of England is in Commonwealth countries.
The government of China censors have re-invented his reputation over there. You'll see the propaganda line that "Mao was 70 percent right and 30 percent wrong" deeply embedded in the psyche of people.
Rewriting history is the power of China's censorship system and media control. It's a pretty scary thing actually.
>Rewriting history is the power of China's censorship system and media control. It's a pretty scary thing actually.
Circling back to space, this is a fundamental reason why China will struggle to make advances in space once the easy gains have been achieved. Creativity and innovation require a free, liberal and open society to thrive.
These are the priciples which have propelled America's advances in science as they are principles which attract the brightest from around the world.
Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.
> Very few of the brightest in the world would be willing to sacrifice that freedom to work in China.
What freedom? The best and brightest go where the money and opportunities are. And considering china has over a billion people, they don't have to look elsewhere to attract the best and the brightest since they have so many in house.
I don't see China's space program as developing particularly rapidly.
China did a manned mission to low-earth orbit in 2003. 17 years later China hasn't done much on the manned exploration front. Long March 9 isn't expected to even be ready for a manned Lunar mission until the 2030s.
America launched Alan Shepard in 1961 and 8 years later Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.
That said, I think there's no reason why China needs to struggle to make advances in space because copying the innovation of other places works very well.
Priorities are simply different right now. Focus is mostly catching up on space infrastructure, indigenous capabilities for civil / military use i.e. actual purpose of space programs. The gap there use to be much larger. Innovative / exploratory missions for nationalism is a sideshow.
The Chinese don't like Mao because of the Great leap Forward, they like him because he led a peasant revolution and kicked the foreigners out of China, after decades of national humiliation.
We supported Chaing Kai-shek. He lost, retreating to Taiwan.
It seems that many Americans are not aware of the propaganda they are being exposed to. The world is not black and white. The truth is somewhere in the middle.
It was the KMT who kicked the foreigners (the Japanese) out of China with the help of the allies (Soviets and the US) declaring war on the Japanese mainland.
I did some more reading on this, and found various fuzzy and confounding factors. I have to admit that much of it might boil down to "winners get to write history". For example, whoever won their civil war was going to end up being credited with unifying China.
Lots of interesting stuff I bumped into, though. It did seem that the KMT made some pretty big mistakes, such as disbanding more of their army then they should have after the Japanese were defeated, mismanaging the economy causing hyperinflation, and being very corrupt. Also I had no idea that the KMT backed muslim insurgents on mainland China in the 1950s.
Given all of that Mao's popularity makes enough sense. There's also a lot of curb appeal in a successful peasant/worker revolution.
The Long March was in the 1930s. In itself, it was not particularly horrific -- just a successful retreat of the communists to preserve their forces for future fighting. 25 years later the disasters of Great Leap Forward and the cultural revolution hit China.
Is this connection strong enough to make "Long March" a horrible name? Perhaps, but I want to point out that there is a greater depth to this question that might seem at first glance.
Let's say, hypothetically speaking, that Kennedy and Khruschev were unlucky playing their Cuban missiles game of chicken: they destroyed each other and plunged the world into the dark ages. Which names would be badly tainted with this event? Obviously, Kennedy and Khrushchev, and anyone connected to the Manhattan project would be hated beyond measure by the few survivors. What about Truman? FDR? Or maybe even Lincoln, or Washington, or the American Revolutionary War? What about the scientists who figured out the fundamental laws behind atomic weapons -- Einstein, Rutherford, Bohr? Or even scientists in general?
(I guess it's easier to answer for Russia: presumably the Soviet Union period will take all the hatred. Even then, arguably the mere existence of the USSR was partly due to the ineptness of several generations of Russian tzars, as well as Germany's assistance to communists, so they could share some of the blame?)
It's the equivalent of the Valley Forge Rocket. An arduous trial in the birth of a young nation which incidentally happened to go on and genocide an entire continent of indigenous cultures and people's and forever remove them from the world's collective heritage.
Just let people decide what parts of their own history they want to have pride in, especially if it doesn't affect you. Don't try and control the world and force everyone to think the same as you do.
> Our history with Native Americans is not a morally uplifting one. It is also not a genocide.
What a weird thing to say. Of course it was a genocide, that some tribes may have been slavers or that a meager remainder of their people and culture somehow survives in reservations doesn't make what Europeans and the early US did to their people and culture any less terrible, or not a genocide.
Wait a minute, now I am kind of fascinated by your thinking. Am I to assume that if an Austrian member of hacker news were in fact proud of the Third Reich that you would refuse to criticize their decision to support calling something the Hitler rocket? In your words, after all, people should decide what parts of their own history they want to have pride in.
It’s almost become an anti signal at this point, whenever someone says Mao was responsible for xx millions of deaths you can safely assume that they are easily fooled. There is no serious historian of Chinese history would actually claim a number like that either. Direct responsibility is probably in the thousands range, he was fighting for decades after all, indirectly through 1 degree of separation probably hundreds of thousands, through 2 degrees of separation probably in the low millions if you include the cultural revolution and the very late stages of the famine when he became fully aware of the devastation. 3+ degrees? Perhaps in the 8 digit range, though at that point attributing malice or intent becomes absurd for anyone who understands how Beijing power politics works.
I don't know where India's rocket program is up to, but I imagine that if it is behind China and America they will be catching up at a ahem rocketing pace.
We live in an age of wonders where something close to most of the world have governments that are comfortable with space flight. Well done team humans.
As somebody who follows Starship development closely (side note, I recommend the YouTube channels "Marcus House" and "What about it!?"), I don't share your confidence that India (or China) will be able to catchup to SpaceX anytime soon.
I don't think that Blue Origin or Rocket Lab will be able to catchup either. Let alone United Launch Alliance. I think Rocket Lab will keep a very comfortable profitable niche for a long time though.
The Falcon 9 has really cornered the market for commercial payloads and it's not profitable to compete. And the Starship will cement that place further. Maybe Amazon's Project Kuiper and Jeff Bezos' investment in Blue Origin might make Blue Origin competitive in the long run, but given their current track record I doubt it will happen soon enough to make a difference.
I'm sure that they'll be enough military payloads to keep the Ariane/ULA/CASC/ISROs occupied for decades to come. But short of unprecedented industrial espionage, in the next 10 years they'll all going to struggle to develop re-usable rockets that can keep pace with SpaceX.
> in the next 10 years they'll all going to struggle to develop re-usable rockets that can keep pace with SpaceX.
National space programmes don't even need to have re-usable hardware.
Building hardware to be mission specific for 2-3 launches per year may well be cheaper than to re-engineer, and then reuse.
Saturn 5 is sixties technology, parts, and materials.
The biggest thing that contenders in national space programmes lack is really a match of talent with sane leadership. This is the thing that was exposed times, and times again by successes of Indian space programme.
Indian space program has a very different set of goals.
- Develop indigenous technology, reduce dependency on technology transfers
- Become a technology provider for defense, as in cheaply available satellites, as well as Research and Development for missiles, etc.
- Get some market share in the international satellite launch market and make a bit of money.
If you observe, Indian missile technology and Indian Space Research Organization, ISRO have grown together.
In India, the Defense is not as advanced and gravitational as in the US, so the idea that the military will have 2 generations advanced tech is not true here (this is my guess)
That is the reason we have missions to moon, mars and all, to develop expertise in technology and build strong institutions that become the bedrock for future endeavors.
It's remarkable that the only serious competitor to SpaceX is China (everyone else will perpetually lag). They have the budget, the iteration pace and will to catch up. If the US wants to get back to the Moon or go to Mars before China gets there, it's entirely on the shoulders of SpaceX to get us there. Much respect to China's accomplishments in this realm. The Russians are broke. I don't know what Bezos is doing with the $10b in cash he has raised from AMZN share sales but it's unlikely he's going to push Blue Origin to go a lot faster (gradatim ferociter and all that). ESA will keep moving along at its fixed institutional speed. JAXA ($1.5b) and ISRO don't have the budget to get there. It's down to SpaceX (big assist from NASA) vs China for the new space race.
Both Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are currently ahead of China in developing re-usable rocket technology.
Blue Origin is admittedly slower than China in developing rocket technology (they haven't even reached orbit yet), but they have a good engine and the New Sheppard has mastered low-velocity vertical takeoff and landing.
Rockets designed in China are blocked from accessing the global launch vehicle market due to satellites containing ITAR restricted components (which is virtually all of them). The reason for this is to curtail China's military acquiring dual-use satellite technology, gaining capital to develop intercontinental ballistic missiles and reducing risk of nefarious actions on the satellites themselves.
China say they'll master first stage re-usability of a medium-lift launch vehicle by 2025. For those of use who want to see an actual space race, let's hope this is a case of "under promise and over-deliver", because that's a Blue Origin level schedule.
Doing a primitive martian insert isn't anywhere in the same universe as landing people safely on the Moon or Mars. India will require several decades of further development yet to attempt a human Moon landing (much less Mars). Russia (nor the USSR before it) can't come close to doing it and they're still far more advanced than India in human launch capabilities.
There are simple things (relatively speaking) you can slash the cost out of dramatically, where it doesn't translate to a far more advanced and difficult mission, and that includes landing humans on the Moon or Mars safely.
NASA can do cheaper missions. There is nothing particularly special about that for such advanced organizations. NASA spends a lot of money because time (getting a mission right the first time) and scarce human resources are both more important to them than sheer dollar cost in most circumstances, unless we're talking enormous sums of money. They could have attempted James Webb in a much faster timeline at a far cheaper cost, by increasing the risk of failure in the mission; that trade-off is almost always undesirable for NASA.
Simply put, a few hundred million dollars is a very big deal to ISRO, it's not a big deal to NASA. If spending $1 billion on a mission gets you down to 5% risk, or you can spend $100 million at 30% risk of failure, NASA will almost always choose the $1b option because there are not enough human resources to throw at numerous copycat missions and the time cost is immense.
India’s GSLV is less than half the payload capacity of a Falcon 9, and costs as much or lure per launch. India’s space program is funded at $2B a year, significantly more funding than SpaceX has had till recently.
It looks like they got the landing legs prototyped and tested.
And they’re able to stick the landing on the moon, 3 times now. The moon engine needs to operate in a vacuum. And its landing craft can robotically land itself, after hovering, looking for a suitable landing site, and then softly sticking the landing.
The question is if it’s harder to land on earth, where you must deal with the atmosphere, versus on the moon, where there is no atmosphere.
My guess is that they’ll stick the landing. Or at least, get really close to success on the first shot.