Chinese pseudo-company launches satellite
The Chinese pseudo-company Ispace today launched what is only described as a “prototype recoverable experiment spacecraft” by another Chinese pseudo-company, its Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.
China’s state-run press now routinely makes no mention of these pseudo-companies. In the past China would tout them in an effort to make the rest of the world believe, falsely, that it had its own competitive and growing space industry. Now it appears the Xi government has decided it doesn’t like the growing and somewhat independent success of these companies, and is making it clear to all that, in the end, everything they do belongs to the government.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
91 SpaceX
61 China
17 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 104 to 61, and the entire world combined 104 to 96. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 96.
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 Chinese pseudo-company Ispace today launched what is only described as a “prototype recoverable experiment spacecraft” by another Chinese pseudo-company, its Hyperbola-1 rocket lifting off from the Jiuquan spaceport in the northwest of China.
China’s state-run press now routinely makes no mention of these pseudo-companies. In the past China would tout them in an effort to make the rest of the world believe, falsely, that it had its own competitive and growing space industry. Now it appears the Xi government has decided it doesn’t like the growing and somewhat independent success of these companies, and is making it clear to all that, in the end, everything they do belongs to the government.
The leaders in the 2023 launch race:
91 SpaceX
61 China
17 Russia
8 Rocket Lab
7 India
American private enterprise still leads China in successful launches 104 to 61, and the entire world combined 104 to 96. SpaceX now trails the rest of the world combined (excluding American companies) 91 to 96.
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
“All your base are belong to us!” – PRC
As in the automotive sector, strong Chinese competition now appears to be building up in the commercial space transport sector, which may eventually lead to dominance.
Questioner,
Every single one of these PRC pseudo-“space enterprises” is an affiliate of one of the PRC’s state-owned space organizations – CASC, etc. There is a veneer of entrepreneurialism for these entities based on the PRC government’s granting them the right to raise non-governmental funds on the PRC’s equivalent of a capital market. To a fairly considerable degree, these faux companies seem to exist in order to provide a way for the state-owned players to do a bit of experimentation without losing face when any of these experiments goes wrong. The various solid-fueled “private” rockets are pretty obviously modestly modified versions of extant military missile hardware. The much-touted “first ever methalox rocket to reach orbit” – Landspace’s Zhuque 2 – is a methalox conversion of the venerable CZ-2 and CZ-3 hardware that runs on hypergolics. None of this is indicative of actual competition – certainly not for SpaceX, anyway. As for dominance? It is to laugh.
The Chinese auto sector isn’t setting the world on fire either. There is essentially no foreign market for PRC gasoline-powered cars and the foreign market for PRC battery EV cars has proven disappointing, especially in Europe. Even in the PRC home market, the only maker to show consistent profit from battery EVs is Tesla. BYD made some modest money on its battery EVs a year or two back but has slipped back into the red recently. All of the other PRC EV makers have yet to make a dime on their wares – something they have in common with legacy automakers in the West. The only potential bright spot for PRC EV makers in future is that some of them seem much more open than their legacy Western counterparts to adopting Tesla manufacturing techniques.