Tag: China

September 5, 2022 Space quick links

11:11 am

All courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

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China’s Long March 4C rocket launches military satellite

9:55 am

China today successfully used its Long March 4C rocket to place a military Earth observation satellite into orbit.

Launched from an interior spaceport, the rocket’s lower stages thus crashed uncontrolled in China.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

39 SpaceX
34 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 54 to 34 in the national rankings, and the entire globe 54 to 52.

3 comments

Chinese astronauts complete first spacewalk using new Wentian module

10:05 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese astronauts yesterday completed their first spacewalk using the airlock on the new Wentian module that was recently launched to that nation’s Tiangong-3 space station.

The spacewalk lasted six hours, and was mostly designed to test the airlock itself as well as do the first tests of Wentian’s own robot arm. It appears they also installed an “extended pump set”, whatever that is, and did other work near the hatch. More here.

4 comments

August 31, 2022 Quick space links

3:47 pm

Thanks to BtB’s stringer Jay.

That’s nice, but years have passed and the first Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft, Tenacity, has still not flown. It is well past time for this company to finally get off the ground.

This also be the first spacewalk using the airlock on the space station’s new Wentian module.

It appears to be built by the pseudo-company Orienspace.

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August 29, 2022 Quick space links

2:19 pm

Courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay:

As I’ve said numerous times, I’ll believe this engine is a flight engine when I see it in flight.

The link goes to the research paper from the Beijing Institute of Space Mechanics and Electricity, which is in Chinese except for the abstract. This tweet highlights the “leg deploying test and full-scale landing impact experiment” from that paper.

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August 24, 2022 Quick space links

4:15 pm

Links courtesy of BtB’s stringer Jay.

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Indian research project for China’s space station threatened by Chinese-India military conflict

11:21 am

A science instrument from India, slated to fly on a Chinese rocket to China’s Tiangong-3 space station, is now threatened by the military tensions between the two nations.

The project, called Spectrographic Investigation of Nebular Gas (SING), also involves collaboration with the [India] Institute of Astronomy [IIA], Russian Academy of Sciences, and has been designed and developed by research students at the IIA. The plan is to have it ready by the year end so that it can be launched in the summer of 2023. Though the plan is on schedule, scientists at the IIA are now consulting with the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) as well as the Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) on whether they are in the clear to go ahead with the project.

Chinese and Indian troops have been engaged in a prolonged stand-off in eastern Ladakh. The two sides have so far held 16 rounds of Corps Commander-level talks to resolve the stand-off, which erupted on May 5, 2020, following a violent clash in the Pangong lake area.

It appears the Indian government is having second thoughts about this cooperative project. After decades of naive trust in the communists from both Russia and China, it seems India has finally realized the communists really have little interest in helping India, being more focused on using it for good PR while it steals Indian technology. Moreover, India now realizes that China has become a dangerous neighbor, willing to use its newfound power violently at the border between the two countries.

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Two Chinese pseudo-companies pursuing suborbital tourist market

9:35 am

Link here. One company is apparently copying Blue Origin’s New Shepard, though its capsule’s exterior looks more like a copy of SpaceX Dragon capsule.

The other company however is doing something very unusual for a Chinese space operation. It appears to be designing something original, not a copy of some American achievement.

Space Transportation’s goal is to develop a suborbital spaceplane capable of carrying tourists on suborbital flights. The winged system is very different from Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, which is currently in flight test.

A larger Space Transportation vehicle would be a high-speed transport that would fly between distant locations on Earth in less than two hours.

…The company released very little information about the six launches it conducted this year. It’s not even clear where the flights took place, although Wikipedia indicates they might have been conducted from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center.

If successful, Space Transportation will have have done something almost unprecedented for China, building something from an entirely original design.

3 comments

China launches hi-res Earth observation satellite

9:14 am

China today used its Long March 2D rocket to place a new version of a smallsat Earth observation satellite into orbit. Dubbed the Beijing-3B, it appears to be an upgrade of a design first launched last year.

The launch site was in the interior of China, and for certain dumped its first stage onto that interior.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

37 SpaceX
33 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 33 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 52 to 51.

0 comments

China’s Kuaizhou-1A rocket launches satellite

8:47 am

China today successfully used its smallsat Kuaizhou-1A rocket to launch what appears to be a technology test satellite for the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

As the launch was from an interior spaceport in China, the rocket’s first stages crashed somewhere inland.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

37 SpaceX
32 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 32 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 52 to 50.

1 comment

August 22, 2022 Quick space links

11:03 am

From BtB’s stringer Jay:

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SpaceX and China complete launches

12:51 pm

Two launches have just occurred in the 2022 launch race. First, SpaceX today successfully launched another 53 Starlink satellites, using its Falcon 9 rocket.

The first stage successfully landed on its drone ship in the Atlantic, completing its ninth flight.

China in turn used its Long March 2D rocket to launch three military reconnaissance satellites, at what was the early morning hours of August 20, 2022, China time. The launch path took the rocket over China’s interior as well as Taiwan, with the first stage crashing somewhere in China.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

37 SpaceX
31 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 52 to 31 in the national rankings, and the entire world 52 to 49. The 52 launches so far this year is now the fifth best total for the U.S. since the launch of Sputnik in 1957.

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August 18, 2022 Quick space links

10:50 am

As stringer Jay correctly noted to me in an email today, “Slow news day.” None of the stories below merit a full post, even though they are pretty much all of today’s space news.

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August 16, 2022 Quick space links

2:06 pm

Tiangong-3 in orbit
Click to see full image.

Some quickie stories worth noting, most provided by stringer Jay:

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China’s radar ship finally docks in Sri Lanka

9:00 am

Despite objections by India and an initial refusal by the Sri Lanka government to allow a Chinese military communications/radar ship to dock at one of Sri Lanka’s ports, the ship was finally allowed to dock yesterday.

Sri Lanka, which needs the support of both India and China as it struggles with its worst economic crisis in decades, initially granted the ship permission for a five-day replenishment stay in Hambantota, from Aug. 11.

It later asked China to delay the vessel’s arrival, citing the need for more consultations.

Yuan Wang 5 will now berth for only three days to stock up on fuel, food and other essentials, said an official at the port who declined to be identified as he is not authorised to speak to the media.

The ship is used by China to track satellites, rockets, and missiles, both its own and other nations.

Sri Lanka is caught between a rock and a hard place. The country is bankrupt, its citizens facing starvation due to the previous government’s imposition of numerous green environmental policies that destroyed its agriculture industry. It has also taken aid from both India (providing military hardware) and China (which built the port and holds a 99-year lease to operate it), and neither looks kindly at the other.

3 comments

August 15, 2022 Quick space links

12:43 pm

From Jay, BtB’s stringer:

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August 14, 2022 Quick space links

1:06 pm

Some weekend news from BtB’s top stringer, Jay.

1 comment

Russia and China complete launches

8:45 am

Both Russia and a pseudo-commercial Chinese company today completed launches.

Russia used its Soyuz-2 rocket to launch a military reconnaissance satellite for Iran, along with 16 Russian smallsats. The rocket was originally going to launch a South Korean satellite, but that launch was cancelled due to Russia’s invasion of the Ukraine.

In China, the pseudo-company Galactic Energy used its four-stage Ceres-1 rocket to place three Earth observations satellites into orbit. Because three of the rocket’s four stages use solid rocket motors, they were likely reworked from military applications. Thus, Galactic Energy does nothing without the full approval and supervision of the Chinese government. It might have been funded privately, and focused on making profits, but it really owns nothing it builds.

Nonetheless, this was its third successful orbital launch, making it the most successful of these Chinese pseudo-companies. It is also developing a Falcon 9 clone rocket dubbed Pallas-1, which it hopes to launch next year.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

34 SpaceX
29 China
11 Russia
6 Rocket Lab
5 ULA

American private enterprise still leads China 49 to 29 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 49 to 47. A SpaceX Falcon 9 launch later today should strengthen this lead again.

The leade

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August 8th quick space links

12:47 pm

Some quick links, provided by reader Jay:

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