A Chinese SLS super rocket?
The competition heats up: According to a report in a Chinese newspaper today, China is developing preliminary designs for a new rocket that would be the most powerful ever built.
According to an earlier report by China News Service, Liang Xiaohong, deputy head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, disclosed that the Long March-9 is planned to have a maximum payload of 130 tons and its first launch will take place around 2028.
Liang urged the government to include the Long March-9’s development in its space agenda as soon as possible so that China’s rocket technologies will not lag behind those of other space powers.
Whether this rocket every gets built is highly doubtful. The article seems to mostly be both a public relations response to the U.S.’s test flight on Friday of Orion as well as an example of a government agency lobbying for a bigger budget. (This lobbying happens even in communist China.)
Nonetheless, we should not dismiss the possibility lightly. As competition causes the cost of building all rockets to drop, it will be more affordable to build bigger rockets. By the next decade building a heavy lift rocket might finally be affordable.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
The competition heats up: According to a report in a Chinese newspaper today, China is developing preliminary designs for a new rocket that would be the most powerful ever built.
According to an earlier report by China News Service, Liang Xiaohong, deputy head of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, disclosed that the Long March-9 is planned to have a maximum payload of 130 tons and its first launch will take place around 2028.
Liang urged the government to include the Long March-9’s development in its space agenda as soon as possible so that China’s rocket technologies will not lag behind those of other space powers.
Whether this rocket every gets built is highly doubtful. The article seems to mostly be both a public relations response to the U.S.’s test flight on Friday of Orion as well as an example of a government agency lobbying for a bigger budget. (This lobbying happens even in communist China.)
Nonetheless, we should not dismiss the possibility lightly. As competition causes the cost of building all rockets to drop, it will be more affordable to build bigger rockets. By the next decade building a heavy lift rocket might finally be affordable.
On Christmas Eve 1968 three Americans became the first humans to visit another world. What they did to celebrate was unexpected and profound, and will be remembered throughout all human history. Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8, Robert Zimmerman's classic history of humanity's first journey to another world, tells that story, and it is now available as both an ebook and an audiobook, both with a foreword by Valerie Anders and a new introduction by Robert Zimmerman.
The ebook is available everywhere for $5.99 (before discount) at amazon, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. If you buy it from ebookit you don't support the big tech companies and the author gets a bigger cut much sooner.
The audiobook is also available at all these vendors, and is also free with a 30-day trial membership to Audible.
"Not simply about one mission, [Genesis] is also the history of America's quest for the moon... Zimmerman has done a masterful job of tying disparate events together into a solid account of one of America's greatest human triumphs."--San Antonio Express-News
40 percent of America will never look at this as a competition.
In fact they will feel like they should be helping those poor Chinese to beat the big bad USA.
The other 40 percent will want it to be a competition but will get ridiculed for wanting another cold war. So for the most part will keep their mouths shut.
And the middle 20 percent will never know, or care.
And that only counts those over 30. Everyone under thirty couldn’t care less unless a Hollywood star is on the rocket. Or some one is tweeting all the time during its flight.
Given how many Americans seem to think that the SLS is a bad idea, how ever could they think that a corresponding Chinese governmental rocket project could be a threat? ;p
The Chinese ambitions now declared, seem to me to aim only at reaching the same level as the American. If they for example had focused everything on colonizing potentially resource rich parts of the Moon as soon as they can, then that would’ve been a kind of a threat. But now they sound like copy cats who want to become equal in 20 years or so.
Well put.
One key is to have rockets large enough to serve BLEO HSF objectives but small enough to serve the market launching satellites inexpensively. In this way, the large rockets are relatively inexpensive and don’t hobble the HSF budget.
It appears to me that China is going down the expensive, slow, vulnerable path and so will pose mild national competition.
Indeed. This reminds me that in the USSR Brezhnev was the man who insisted on having the Buran, as an equal to the Shuttle, even though the rocket scientists he’d worked with as commissar before 1963 told him again and again they could do the same job better and cheaper with other ways of getting large payloads to orbit.