China today finally succeeds in vertically soft-landing a first stage
The Chinese pseudo-company Landspace today not only successfully launched its new Zhuque-3 rocket (essentially a copy of SpaceX’s Falcon 9), placing a low-orbit communications satellite into orbit, it also finally succeeded in landing the first stage vertically at a down range landing zone.
The screen capture to the right show the stage just before touch down. As you can see, its resembles closely the Falcon 9, with almost identical grid fins and landing legs. It however is an upgrade in that it uses methane fuel (like Starship) rather than kerosene.
This achievement — along with the successful recovery of the first stage of a Long March 10B government rocket in early July — means in the next year or so China can begin ramping up launches because it will be able to reuse these first stages. Moreover, Landspace will have no ability (as in the U.S.) of protecting its Zhuque-3 technology. Chinese pseudo-companies are just that, fake private companies that work independently to compete for contracts, but are always under the supervision and control of the communist government. We should fully expect this technology to quickly begin appearing on other Chinese rockets.
As that technology begins going into full operation, China will also slowly stop crashing uncontrolled lower stages within China, often at great risk to its own citizens. The Chinese communists did not develop this technology for this reason (it has apparently never cared whether its falling rockets injured innocent civilians), but to lower its launch costs and increase its launch rate. It will now be able to do all these things.
The leaders in the 2026 launch race:
99 SpaceX
55 China
11 Rocket Lab (plus two suborbital HASTE launches)
10 Russia
For the third straight year SpaceX leads the entire world combined in total launches, 99 to 92.
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The print edition can be purchased at Amazon or from any other book seller. If you want an autographed copy the price is $60 for the hardback and $45 for the paperback, plus $8 shipping for each. Go here for purchasing details. 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.
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"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
America had wealth during the Cold War, but space advocates never had any really pull when the ABMA was yanked out from Medaris.
China has an absolute supervillain zeal for space –but they don’t really have LeMay/Rickover level Chief Designers like the Soviets, since they raid their brightest and put them on subbotnik.
Elon has wealth and freedom–but more importantly–power.
An iron hand is all important.
An iron man with power and a benevolent iron hand who operates within the proper structure and system that drives the risk reward equation and progress.
Where does freedom, innovation, wealth and prosperity come from? (How do you define these items?)
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/how-to-destroy-incentive-and-value-define-taxing-the-hell-out-of-millionaires-1
I think it is realistic to say that if there was no such thing as America and the economic engine based on what the Constitution structures and Capitalism there would not likely be anything near the technology, prosperity and freedom in the world. No matter what the radical now overly confident DSA / CCP loving Democrats have to say about it.
And this condition certainly comes with its positive and negative aspects like everything else in existence, there would not likely be talk of a moon base, satellite’s, chip technology or much of anything else. ALL of these things in my estimation are connected to the fight for freedom, warfare and the technological results from that / those struggles and competitions. And what system has driven that struggle and success? Obviously, oppression, Communism and Socialism (Sarcasm for Lee S and company)
There will be a dominant “Mafia” in the world, choose your “Mafia”.
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/choose-your-mafia
This is the DSA “Mafia”:
https://www.sigma3ioc.com/post/new-owners-of-the-democrat-party-telling-and-showing-you-their-dreams
They are all white pasty faced mostly overweight idealistic and moralistic 30 something classroom trained Marxists.
How many Americans are they willing to kill like their ideological leaders Mr. Marx, Mr. Lenin and Mr. Mao when the killing has to be done to fulfill their dreams? And will they be doing it?
Choose your “Mafia”.
A little more:
https://youtube.com/shorts/DP1mW3_K_2s?si=CczXKECFGBTNQ7E1
See: European Dark Ages.
Then; the Enlightenment.
It’s all been done before. Except America; that’s new. The problem a lot of people seem to have is that to establish a space where America could happen, we had to use the same-same historical tactics every other power has used. Difference being; after we appropriated your land, we (eventually) invited you to the table. That has rarely, especially among ‘indigenous’ peoples, happened previously, and nowhere near this degree.
I see those control freaks and raise you one Nick Saban
We have a lot of guys in the armed services that aren’t a whole lot different that the D/S types.
One thing I have noted from law enforcement is that gang-bangers join the military for the wrong reasons.
They will stand and swap fire where the younger punks run.
Instead of my money going to them–and theirs–I’d prefer a space based force-projection model with a relative handful of folks who are REAL patriots.
If I were over a modern ABMA, and President Trump wanted me to use space launch to drop an asteroid on Iran–I’d do it in a heartbeat.
But look at these kids jumping off carriers that are lucky yachts compared to the Essex class.
You can’t trust them for crap.
I made the mistake of watching these bloody women on CNN second guess the war.
Only I should get to do that ;)
If we had to fight WWII today…we’d fail.
Even some of the special forces guys are suspect to me. The Army Rangers didn’t write books like these Seals do. The Rangers took part in wiping out Bin Laden–but being good soldiers they kept mum.
Some of these frogmen are worse than USAF Second Lieutenants….and that’s pretty bad.
Chief Designers, Marines, and RAF pilots…many are worth less than the Few.
The TQ-12 engine used by Zuque-3 is like a Merlin
engine (gas generator cycle with dumped exhaust) just using methane instead of RP-1. But methane does have more energy per kg.
With booster reuse China may be able to go 4 times the launch rate soon enough. One can anticipate a network to compete with Starlink which would put many countries in a regulatory quandary.
“Soon enough” may take awhile. Sticking a landing is a significant step forward, but now there is refurb to learn, pad turnaround to improve and many other things that will need to be scaled up before the PRC starts hitting multiples of its current launch cadence.
Meanwhile, the PRC’s structural problems continue to worsen. How far its space efforts will advance before an inevitable regime collapse occurs will be interesting to see.
I have been following your comments on the Chinese social and economic situation, and I had not thought the situation as dire. I recently read some articles from reputable sources, some in China, that demonstrate the tanking economy (little, to perhaps, negative growth), and a reproductive rate well below replacement rate. Some sources estimate that the Chinese population will shrink by 2/3rds in the next 75 years. That’s not, as they say, sustainable. That information throws the Chinese emphasis on military and space into a new light.
The PRC economy had its last good year a decade ago. Since then, debt at all levels of government has skyrocketed, particularly at the local level as land sales to housing developers – formerly the main source of revenue for local governments – dried up in the wake of the decade-long housing crisis. Which is a crisis of oversupply, rather than undersupply.
Ordinary PRC citizens invested most of their savings in “income property” as they had almost no other options. But that only works if there are people to whom one can rent one’s income property. And, due to plummeting fertility rates and nearly five decades of fakery anent population numbers, there just weren’t any renters to be had. So vast amounts of private investment served only to encourage the building of “ghost cities” of new apartment blocks no one was ever going to live in.
The developers started defaulting on their financial obligations and many went bust leaving already-mortgaged units unfinished or never started. Those with underwater mortgages on “income property” quit paying on them. Many banks, themselves, flirted with insolvency or succumbed to it and local governments, starved for traditional sources of revenue began, in some cases, actually kidnapping local rich people and extorting ransom to let them go.
All of this hangs from a common hook, the accelerating demographic collapse of the PRC. The One Child Policy got that particular ball rolling even before Mao died. That placed the PRC on a track to having each successive generation be half the size of its predecessor. Local and provincial governments which, then as now, get a lot of transfer payments from Beijing based on population, started lying about their actual birth rates and populations. Then Deng’s establishment of a capitalist economy led by exports resulted in the most rapid urbanization and industrialization wave in human history. Both are things that have long-term effects that reduce fertility rates. It didn’t help that the One Child Policy resulted in countless girl pregnancies being aborted in order that one’s single allotted child be a boy, and that what women there were migrated disproportionally to cities for office and industrial jobs.
This radically reduced the fertility rates in both rural and urban regions. There are so few women of child-bearing age in many rural areas that there has emerged the phenomenon of gangs of rural men traveling to cities to kidnap women there and bring them back to the sticks where they are, in essence, both sex slaves and communal brood mares.
The notional PRC population is, officially, just a bit short of 1.4 billion. No one, including PRC officials themselves, know what it actually is due to the half-century of compounded fraudulent data. Central government researchers continue to raise their estimates of how many “ghosts,” who were never actually born, but were reported to be, there have been over the past three generations. The answer seems to be at least 200 million but new estimates keep leaking out and they keep getting larger. The actual population of the PRC, at present, might well be below a single billon.
And falling rapidly. In several major urban coastal areas, the fertility rates have fallen to 1/3 or even 1/4 of replacement rate. That means three to four deaths for every live birth. Even based on the phony official stats, the acknowledged average age of a PRC citizen was 40.2 as of 2024, but the separately-reported figure for Hong Kong was 47.2. This latter is almost certainly the more accurate of the two and strongly suggests that the current median age of the PRC citizenry is about 50. The half of the PRC population that is older than this will nearly all be dead by mid-century. The remainder of the century will see the passing of nearly all of the rest of the Han ethnicity in its home territory. The remnant will be a rounding error.
I use the term “home territory,” as opposed to “the PRC,” for the very good reason that the PRC will disappear as a going concern even before mid-century. By century’s end, it will be a distant memory and a living one to only a handful of the unusually-long-lived. The population of the PRC is on a steep downhill slide to complete oblivion and there are no brakes and no reverse gear. It is literally a half-century too late for anything to be done about the now-inevitable disappearance of the Han as a people – with the sole exception of the Han diaspora including in the US.
The PRC’s financial problems are also related to its ongoing population collapse. It is younger people, especially those with families, that account for much of the domestic consumption in a typical advanced economy. As noted, that demographic is already freakishly small in the PRC and continues to get still smaller as a percentage of the whole. Thus, efforts to try generating more GDP from domestic consumption have consistently failed and will continue to do so. That, in turn, has made the PRC even more manic in its pursuit of external markets in which to sell the wares of its massively hypertrophied industrial sectors.
As the late Ed Yourdon used to say, “Everything is deeply intertwingled.” The PRC has tied itself in a demographic and financial Gordian Knot that cannot even be cut. Things will not end well.
” . . . and local governments, starved for traditional sources of revenue began, in some cases, actually kidnapping local rich people and extorting ransom to let them go. ‘
California? Difficult to tell one from the other.
Hi GeorgeC,
I think you mean methane (CH4) has a higher specific impulse (Isp) than RP-1 (kerosene). I agree with you. It would take more RP-1 to go as fast as methane. RP-1 has a higher energy density than methane, almost twice as much, so you can have smaller fuel tanks.
RP-1 is cheaper to buy and store than methane if you want to throw cost into it.
A side note, methane is the best propellant for a nuclear thermal rocket when it comes to Isp, storing the fuel against boil off, and making the fuel throughout the solar system.
Mr. Z., I think you meant to write “Chinese pseudo-company” rather than “pseudo-Chinese company” in that first sentence. Nothing pseudo at all about its Chinese-ness.
Yup. Now fixed. Thanks.
Two steps forward, one step back it would seem. Faw down. Go Boom!