May 12, 2023 Quick space links
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- A computer CAD rendering of China’s proposed Raptor engine copy
It looks interesting, but we are still at the level of engineering by powerpoint.
- The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology ( CALT) proposes a whole family of reusable rockets
It appears 1) they intend to start small, and 2) they are skipping any effort to copy the Falcon Heavy and going straight to a Starship/Superheavy copy instead.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit.
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
Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.
- A computer CAD rendering of China’s proposed Raptor engine copy
It looks interesting, but we are still at the level of engineering by powerpoint.
- The China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology ( CALT) proposes a whole family of reusable rockets
It appears 1) they intend to start small, and 2) they are skipping any effort to copy the Falcon Heavy and going straight to a Starship/Superheavy copy instead.
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 print edition can be purchased at Amazon. from any other book seller, or direct from my ebook publisher, ebookit. 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
If you look at the post above that on twitter there is a picture of a metholox engine being tested in China.
How do they have a working Metholox Raptor like engine that they are testing already. Is this a case of simply Chinese Communist Party industrial espionage, or and I admit “this is out there crazy and possibly illegal with ITAR” the price of Tesla having access to the Chinese market.
Somethings not kosher here, that is a very technically complicated engine
There is no way the Chinese space program did this on there own, this quickly.
While the Chinese do copy the work of others, it is not safe to assume that they cannot do original work. Not claiming this in particular, rather a general observation.
Look at a lot of the opinions of Japan a century ago. Backwards nearsighted midgets that copied everything. Then after Pearl Harbor it was learned that much of their military technology was world class original work. The backwards Soviets and Sputnik.
Many companies copy the work of others and then improve it beyond the original. We could get caught out by complacency. I would hate to see that.
Would that be a R1, R2, or R3 engine? Raptor 3 just reached 350 BAR and 269 tons of thrust. I wonder what Jeff and Tory think of this development. :-)
Elon Musk tweets explaining the 1st and 2nd Amendment:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1657318313532313600
Yes, the Chinese brains are just as good as ours. And their engineering and science students actually learn engineering and science. They are perfectly capable of innovating, and I understand that they are doing some impressive stuff in terms of quantum encryption and laser communications, where there isn’t something for them to copy from. But as Bob likes to point out often, they are still being directed from above, and their government/quasi-governmental leadership that is providing that direction doesn’t want to take risks on innovation, they want to build up from the bottom quickly using stuff that is known to work. Whether they will manage the conversion from technology followers to leaders remains to be seen, but it’s going to be determined by timing, demographics, and politics, not any kind of intellectual, manufacturing or research capability.
On the direct “how do they already have a methalox engine” question, there’s not anything particular difficult in methalox as opposed to kerolox, it’s just that nobody cared until recently. People look at Raptor and the effort there, and forget that Raptor isn’t just a methalox engine, but is a full cycle staged combustion engine running at absolutely bonkers chamber pressure and thrust levels. If SpaceX had just wanted to replace Merlin with a methalox variant at the same basic tech level as an evolution of the Falcon 9, it probably would have flown dozens of times by now.
The Chinese system is pretty easy.
And realize I am not saying the US or anyone else has not done this before.
But when the industrial spy group gets the designs and ideas for a private enterprise they turn it over to their government who then passes it on to a small government backed company who them “sells” the designs off to another government backed company.
The engineers and scientists do not even know who originally came up with the idea. They might have never even heard of the original creator.
Its like money laundering. They steal from party one and pass the proceeds through half a dozen LLC’s and outside banks. Inside a week its all fresh and clean and ready for development.
Even if the Chinese scientists see the very same thing outside their nation they have no idea if their own or the outside idea was first. And I am sure their own nation will prove that their creation was first.
We and the Soviets did that for years. It was not until we started feeding them false data, plans and designs which they then copied and built that the rest of the world noticed who were the real innovators.
Just look at the Concorde, the Tupolev TU-144, and for big speed the North American XB-70 Valkyrie.
Don’t forget the Russian Space Shuttle the Buran, a well publicized classic case of industrial espionage, in fact it was reported that a lot of US scientist and engineers that worked on the Shuttle found it humorous that the Buran had a lot of the same problems that the Shuttle had.
Buran was just one payload for Energia though—it’s strap-ons Zenits about Falcon sized with an upper stage.
I really thought their Baikal flyback would be the first RLV of sorts…but space spending was slashed.
Jeff Wright,
The other Energia payload was Polyus (Polus). Energia only flew twice. Energia succeeded with both launches, but the Polyus payload malfunctioned before putting itself into its final orbit and reentered shortly after.
As I see it, the major error the Soviets had with the Buran spacecraft was to copy the U.S. design rather than design a craft to the Soviets’ own needs. The Buran failed to improve on the Space Shuttle’s drawbacks. Had Buran been designed from scratch to be a reusable spacecraft, it may have been designed to be affordable. Instead, it had many of the same expensive problems as the Shuttle had, and it never flew a second time. We cannot compare the Buran’s capabilities with the Space Shuttle’s capabilities, because the Buran did not demonstrate anything other than reaching orbit and landing intact. Its payload capacity, life support, reusability, and other capabilities were never tested in flight. In theory, both were wonder machines, but the Shuttle’s actual performance did not live up to the promise. Would the Buran have lived up to its promise? No one will ever know.
China may be making a similar mistake, in that its version of Starship has fins similar to Starship’s. This tells me that the Chinese also have not attempted to improve upon the Starship design.