China completes first launch of Long March 8 rocket
The new colonial movement: China today successfully launched for the first time its new Long March 8 rocket, designed at some point to mimic the Falcon 9 by vertically landing its first stage and reusing it. (Note: link fixed!)
On this launch the rocket had no such recovery capability.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
34 China
25 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 40 to 34 in the national rankings.
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The new colonial movement: China today successfully launched for the first time its new Long March 8 rocket, designed at some point to mimic the Falcon 9 by vertically landing its first stage and reusing it. (Note: link fixed!)
On this launch the rocket had no such recovery capability.
The leaders in the 2020 launch race:
34 China
25 SpaceX
15 Russia
6 ULA
6 Rocket Lab
The U.S. still leads China 40 to 34 in the national rankings.
The support of my readers through the years has given me the freedom and ability to analyze objectively the ongoing renaissance in space, as well as the cultural changes -- for good or ill -- that are happening across America. Four years ago, just before the 2020 election I wrote that Joe Biden's mental health was suspect. Only in this year has the propaganda mainstream media decided to recognize that basic fact.
Fourteen years ago I wrote that SLS and Orion were a bad ideas, a waste of money, would be years behind schedule, and better replaced by commercial private enterprise. Even today NASA and Congress refuse to recognize this reality.
In 2020 when the world panicked over COVID I wrote that the 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. Only in the past year have some of our so-called experts in the health field have begun to recognize these facts.
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.
Please consider supporting my work here at Behind the Black.
You can support me either by giving a one-time contribution or a regular subscription. There are five 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:
5. 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. And if you buy the books through the ebookit links, I get a larger cut and I get it sooner.
What is interesting is that the reusable mode seems to be, launch with the center core (2 engines) and 4 strapons (1 engine each) and then land as a cluster of 5 cores, since now one engine has sufficient throttle/thrust control to actually land.
That is going to be interesting to debug and see! But it means single core, and three core models may not be recoverable, only the 5 core version. Eventually. One day. in the future.
Errata- the link under “today successfully launched” has a spike in it in the very first character.
So I wonder, recovering the booster in the coming years and decades will seem like a natural thing to do. The anomaly being the rush in the 50s and 60s to get anything up before the other side did as much, so accept the cost of disposable use-once rockets. And maybe the control systems were not up to the task, but I imagine they could have worked out something – they got them off the pads forgoshsakes.
David Telford: Thank you! Link fixed.