China aiming to complete 80 launches in 2023
According to this Space.com article, China’s many pseudo-company rocket startups are hoping to complete a total of approximately 19 to 21 launches in 2023, which when combined with the 60-plus launches the government hopes to complete, will give China a total of approximately 80 launches in 2023, a new record.
The article provides a good review of all of the pseudo-companies hoping to launch in the next few years. This list includes the following:
- Galactic Energy: 8 to 10 launches in ’23 with its Ceres-1 solid fueled rocket
- Space Pioneer: The first launch of its liquid-fueled Tainlong-2 rocket
- Exspace: 7 launches with its Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11, both solid-fueled
- Landspace: A second launch attempt of its liquid-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket after a launch failure in ’22
- Orienspace: The first launch of its Gravity-1 solid fueled rocket
- Rocket Pi: The first launch of its Darwin-1 liquid fueled rocket
- Ispace: Unknown after three consecutive launch failures of its Hyperbola-1 solid-fueled rocket
The article also adds launches from two government “private” spinoffs, CAS Space, planning 3 launches of its PR-1solid fueled rocket, and China Rocket, planning at least one launch of its Jielong-3 solid fueled rocket. Though both are touted as private, they are both really separate divisions created by China’s space agency CASC, with their launch counts likely included in the government’s hope-for 60 launches.
The pseudo private companies are somewhat more independent as they were founded by private individuals. All appear to have obtained private Chinese capital — in addition to government funding — to fund their development. All however are also entirely supervised in all actions by the government. None could build anything without government approval, and all are depending on government rocket technology that can be withdrawn at any time. These pseudo companies don’t really own their rockets. Furthermore, while they are able to sell their products to other private entities, their market appears almost entirely confined to China.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
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Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
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You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
According to this Space.com article, China’s many pseudo-company rocket startups are hoping to complete a total of approximately 19 to 21 launches in 2023, which when combined with the 60-plus launches the government hopes to complete, will give China a total of approximately 80 launches in 2023, a new record.
The article provides a good review of all of the pseudo-companies hoping to launch in the next few years. This list includes the following:
- Galactic Energy: 8 to 10 launches in ’23 with its Ceres-1 solid fueled rocket
- Space Pioneer: The first launch of its liquid-fueled Tainlong-2 rocket
- Exspace: 7 launches with its Kuaizhou-1A and larger Kuaizhou-11, both solid-fueled
- Landspace: A second launch attempt of its liquid-fueled Zhuque-2 rocket after a launch failure in ’22
- Orienspace: The first launch of its Gravity-1 solid fueled rocket
- Rocket Pi: The first launch of its Darwin-1 liquid fueled rocket
- Ispace: Unknown after three consecutive launch failures of its Hyperbola-1 solid-fueled rocket
The article also adds launches from two government “private” spinoffs, CAS Space, planning 3 launches of its PR-1solid fueled rocket, and China Rocket, planning at least one launch of its Jielong-3 solid fueled rocket. Though both are touted as private, they are both really separate divisions created by China’s space agency CASC, with their launch counts likely included in the government’s hope-for 60 launches.
The pseudo private companies are somewhat more independent as they were founded by private individuals. All appear to have obtained private Chinese capital — in addition to government funding — to fund their development. All however are also entirely supervised in all actions by the government. None could build anything without government approval, and all are depending on government rocket technology that can be withdrawn at any time. These pseudo companies don’t really own their rockets. Furthermore, while they are able to sell their products to other private entities, their market appears almost entirely confined to China.
Readers!
Every February I run a fund-raising drive during my birthday month. This year I celebrate my 72nd birthday, and hope and plan to continue writing and posting on Behind the Black for as long as I am able.
I hope my readers will support this effort. As I did in my November fund-raising drive, I am offering autographed copies of my books for large donations. Donate $250 and you can have a choice of the hardback of either Genesis: the Story of Apollo 8 or Conscious Choice: The origins of slavery in America and why it matters today and for our future in outer space. Donate $200 and you can get an autographed paperback copy of either. IMPORTANT! If you donate enough to get a book, please email me separately to tell me which book you want and the address to mail it to.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black. My analysis of space, politics, and culture, taken from the perspective of an historian, is almost always on the money and ahead of the game. For example, in 2020 I correctly predicted that the COVID panic was unnecessary, that the virus was apparently simply a variation of the flu, that masks were not simply pointless but if worn incorrectly were a health threat, that the lockdowns were a disaster and did nothing to stop the spread of COVID. Every one of those 2020 conclusions has turned out right.
Your help allows me to do this kind of intelligent analysis. I take no advertising or sponsors, so my reporting isn't influenced by donations by established space or drug companies. Instead, I rely entirely on donations and subscriptions from my readers, which gives me the freedom to write what I think, unencumbered by outside influences.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are four ways of doing so:
1. Zelle: This is the only internet method that charges no fees. All you have to do is use the Zelle link at your internet bank and give my name and email address (zimmerman at nasw dot org). What you donate is what I get.
2. Patreon: Go to my website there and pick one of five monthly subscription amounts, or by making a one-time donation.
3. A Paypal Donation or subscription:
4. Donate by check, payable to Robert Zimmerman and mailed to
Behind The Black
c/o Robert Zimmerman
P.O.Box 1262
Cortaro, AZ 85652
You can also support me by buying one of my books, as noted in the boxes interspersed throughout the webpage or shown in the menu above.
Okay, this topic, China, is close enough for me to expound on my theory about the “second wave” of balloons, the ones we have been shooting down.
I reject the notion that the original Mother Ship balloon was powered and could maneuver. A balloon operating at extreme altitudes is so large that it cannot be moved significantly against the wind, and does not have the reserve buoyancy to lift an engine and control surfaces sufficient to do so anyway.
Everyone knows that the way you control a balloon’s direction is by controlling its altitude, using the assumption that the wind is always blowing the way you want to go at some altitude – you just need to find it!
So how to find where the wind direction is right? By using “pathfinders”, which is what I think the second wave targets were. I suspect the Chinese have in the air a number of pathfinders afloat over the northern hemisphere at any one time. By controlling their altitude and detecting their exact position from satellites, the Chinese can apply altitude corrections to the mothership spy sats to bring them over targets of interest.
Recall that lower-level winds over North America generally flow west to east, and higher-level jet streams loop over the continent in northwest-southeast and southwest/northeast directions. Looking at the behavior of the pathfinders, a sophisticated computer simulation could steer the mothership quite well, in my opinion!
Why were the pathfinders at lower altitudes? I suspect they were trying to float away to the east over the Atlantic, before either ditching or circling back over Siberia to facilitate the next mission! But we turned off the target discrimination on our radars, and picked up the tiny slow-movers which we normally ignore as they pose no direct threat.
But what about the octagon shape? Well that may be part of a mechanism to allow the pathfinder to vary its volume and control altitude precisely, or even to use a watermelon-seed approach to move laterally!? This actually works -look up 19th century American balloonist Solomon Andrews.
Anyway, this hypothesis seems consistent with what little we know about the balloon phenomenon.
Ray Van Dune: What you write is what I call educated speculation, based on knowledge. Too bad we get so little of this from the so-called mainstream press.
I thank you, as your speculation makes sense, and provides a reasonable cogent explanation of what is being shot down. It also tells us that the bad press from the first balloon spurred the Biden administration to move to eliminate every Chinese UFO that it was previously ignoring.
That’s really the question, isn’t it? Are these ‘new’ or has NORAD just started to care?
Bob, thanks for being receptive to my ideas. I had to cram a lot of thoughts into a reasonably-sized post and inevitably I forgot one… the cheap shot the Biden admin took against Trump, saying the Chinese had overflown before and the Trump admin missed it, but we didn’t!
Well, it’s an lot easier to find something when you know it is there, and all they had to do was replay the raw radar signal recordings, and bingo there it was. Who knows whether the Pentagon deliberately hid previous balloons from Trump, but it wouldn’t surprise me!
This showed up on a pilots’ forum; I thought it was cute:
—–
I love this word “Undetected”. Sounds just like a Who’s On First skit.
“How did you know it even happened if it was undetected?”
-“Because we didn’t see it.”
“Then you detected it.”
-“No, it was undetected because we didn’t see it”
“So how did you know it was there?”
-“Because we didn’t see it.”
Ray
Well done.
This deserves a wider audience.
Thanks,
Gary
Robert Zimmerman wrote: “It also tells us that the bad press from the first balloon spurred the Biden administration to move to eliminate every Chinese UFO that it was previously ignoring.”
From what I hear, the Biden administration does not know where these “UFOs” are coming from, having not ruled out an outer space origin before shooting them down. He may just be shooting at everything that the Air Force doesn’t know where they came from. For someone so against assault weapons, he sure is quick to use them himself. This may be a good time for everyone to make very sure that they file flight plans before flying their private planes.
Didn’t he warn us that the government has F-15s to use against us?
Gary H.: “This deserves a wider audience.”
Thanks, Gary! I don’t have a blog of my own, and don’t use social media. You, Bob, or anyone else here are welcome to reuse it, just attribute it to me of course. Glad you enjoyed it.
I should add that no one has mentioned the one most obvious explanation for many of these objects, which is highly sophisticated military drones. They exist, they are classified, and they are in use.
My balloon theory: the swamp is grabbing our attention with the shiny object in their right had to distract us from what they are doing with their left hand.
https://pbs.twimg.com/card_img/1625191092709646337/nizuS8EG?format=jpg&name=small
James Street: And yes, above all your theory is the most important. All of this appears to me to be an attempt to distract. It ain’t good if foreign powers are able to fly surveillance balloons and drones over our territory, but there are far worse problems developing in the schools and education system, created by these same government thugs, that demand much greater attention by the public.
But the public lives now on its smart phone, and is easily distracted by whatever shiny object is put before it.
Some years ago, I read of an individual who made a ‘ufo detector.’ After getting his computer to weed out planes and sats-what he was left with was a fine sprite detector. Back in 1986, radar detected a Nov. 11 bolide over Birmingham-but after that, systems were restricted to planes only. Not until dual-pol TDS debris balls churned aloft by tornados-did we see much beyond swarms and such IIRC.