Tag: China

China launches three astronauts to Tiangong station

8:42 pm

The new colonial movement: Using its Long March 2F rocket, China has successfully launched three astronauts into orbit for a six month mission to its Tiangong space station.

The crew will be transported to the station in China’s Shenzhou capsule, docking about six hours after launch. During this mission China will also launch the last two large modules planned for the station, completing its initial construction by the end of the year.

I have embedded the live stream below the fold, cued to just before launch.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

22 SpaceX
18 China
8 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 18 in the national rankings, as well as the entire globe combined, 31 to 29.

» Read more

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China launches nine satellites for commercial data constellation

9:16 am

China today used its Long March 2C rocket to launch the first nine satellites in a commercial data collection constellation.

Owned by GeeSpace, a subsidiary of Geely Technology Group, the satellite constellation will be mainly used to research and validate technologies, such as travel services of intelligent connected vehicles, and vehicle/mobile phone and satellite interaction. It will also provide data support for marine environmental protection.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

22 SpaceX
17 China
7 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
3 ULA

The U.S. still leads China 31 to 17 in the national rankings, and the entire world combined 31 to 27.

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China begins preparing Long March 5B for launch of next space station module

9:47 am

The new colonial movement: The Long March 5B rocket that will launch in July the next large module for China’s Tiangong space station, dubbed Wentian, has arrived at the launch site.

China’s Long March-5B Y3 rocket, which will launch lab module Wentian for the country’s space station, arrived on Sunday at the launch site in the southern island province of Hainan. The rocket, along with the Wentian lab module already transported to the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site, will be assembled and tested at the launch site, announced the China Manned Space Agency. [emphasis mine]

In all past launches of the Long March-5B the core first stage has crashed to Earth in an uncontrolled manner because its engine could not be restarted after it shut down. The highlighted “Y3” added to the rocket’s name above suggests China might have fixed this. Previous Long March-5B rockets used YF-77 engines. Adding Y3 to the name — which generally follows China’s system for naming its engines — could mean they will now be able to control the core stage’s de-orbit. This speculation is further strengthened by a previous report that China was testing a new engine for the core stage that implied it was restartable.

If so, China will avoid the kind of bad press it received with previous Long March 5B launches. It will also put it back in compliance with the Outer Space Treaty, which it violated with each past core stage crash.

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Chinese expert calls for China to find ways to destroy Starlink constellation

11:27 am

A Chinese communications expert at its Beijing Institute of Tracking and Telecommunications has written a paper calling for China’s military to develop ways in which it can to destroy SpaceX’s Starlink constellation.

According to the South China Morning Post, lead author Ren Yuanzhen and colleagues advocated in Modern Defence Technology not only for China to develop anti-satellite capabilities, but also to have a surveillance system that could monitor and track all satellites in Starlink’s constellation.

“A combination of soft and hard kill methods should be adopted to make some Starlink satellites lose their functions and destroy the constellation’s operating system,” the Chinese boffins reportedly said, estimating that data transmission speeds of stealth fighter jets and US military drones could increase by a factor of 100 through a Musk machine connection.

I am sure China (as well as every other superpower — including the U.S. military) is already working on developing methods for either jamming or destroying Starlink. Doing either however is difficult because of the constellation’s nature: many small satellites all of which provide redundancy and are easily replaced. Even more depressing for these power-hungry government entities is the fact that Starlink is not the only constellation now in orbit, with many others soon to follow.

For example, consider the contracts that the NRO announced today with three different surveillance satellite companies, all of which have their own constellations. Getting rid of one is hard. All three is likely impossible.

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Chinese scientists plant seeds bred on Tiangong space station

9:45 am

The new colonial movement: Chinese scientists have now planted on Earth some of the 12,000 seeds that were bred on China’s Tiangong space station for six months and brought back to Earth in April.

The seeds, including alfalfa, oats and fungi, were selected by multiple research institutions last year. They were brought back to Earth by the Shenzhou-13 on April 16. Space breeding refers to the process of exposing seeds to cosmic radiation and microgravity during a spaceflight mission to mutate seed genes and then send them back to Earth to generate new species.

The goal is to see which seeds survive best in the harsh environment of space, which would thus make them better candidates for transport to other planets for planting.

While some of the results of this research will be published, much will not. China tends to keep what it learns close to the vest.

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Zhurong goes into hibernation

9:30 am

Overview map

According to a report today in China’s state-run press, the team running its Zhurong Mars rover have placed it into a hibernation mode in order to sit out the Martian winter.

To tackle the dust storms and low-temperature challenges, the Chinese rover went into dormancy on Wednesday. It is expected to wake up and resume work in December when the dust clears and Mars enters its spring season, the administration said in a statement.

The rover sits somewhere in the blue circle in the map to the right, created using elevation data and images from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter (MRO). This region is about 25 degrees north latitude, so though it is in the dry equatorial regions of Mars, it still gets very cold in winter, down to -180 degrees Fahrenheit at night. Furthermore, the increased winter dust storms block the light from the Sun, which reduces the available power the rover’s solar panels can produce.

Chinese engineers have apparently adapted the hibernation techniques they use on the Moon with their Yutu-2 rover to place Zhurong in hibernation.

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More Chinese space junk crashes in India

9:52 am

It appears that debris from an upper stage of a Chinese Long March 3B rocket, launched in September ’21, fell in India on May 12, 2022.

Local media reported that the objects crashed with “loud thuds that shook the ground” in Gujarat. There were no casualties or property damage, according to The Indian Express. The crashed objects were all discovered within a 15-kilometer radius, and among them was a black metal ball weighing around five kilograms, the newspaper said.

Though the sources objects have not been identified with certainty, they look like inner tanks from a rocket, and the only object that reentered the atmosphere on this date and also had an orbit that crossed this part of India was the Long March 3B.

This is second time in less than a month that debris from an abandoned Chinese upper stage has crashed in India. Both are thought to have come from Long March 3Bs. More important, both now prove that China has no protocols when it launches these rockets to de-orbit the upper stages in a controlled manner.

Stay tuned for more Chinese space junk heading your way. In the next seven months it will launch two Long March 5B rockets, the large core stage of which reaches orbit. In all of the previous 5B launches, that stage — big enough to hit the Earth — then quickly fell back in an uncontrolled and unpredictable manner. Fortunately, each time it crashed in the ocean, though the May 2020 deorbit ended up with some debris landing near villages in Africa.

Recent tests of the 5B’s core stage’s engine have suggested that China might have redesigned it to allow it to be restarted, which would allow them to control its deorbit. This fact however has not been confirmed.

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Chinese pseudo company Ispace experiences another launch failure

9:11 am

The Chinese pseudo company Ispace today had another launch failure of its Hyperbola rocket, the third in four launch attempts.

It appears the cause was a failure of the rocket’s second stage to ignite after stage separation.

Ispace’s first launch of Hyperbola 2019 successfully reached orbit, making it the first and still only Chinese pseudo-company to reach orbit. Since then however the rocket has failed three consecutive times, each for what appears to be different reasons.

The rocket itself has four-stages, all using solid fuel motors, which means the rocket is derived from military missile technology. This also illustrates why Ispace is a pseudo company. It might be financed by private capital, and be attempting to make profits on commercial and government contracts, but everything about it only exists because it has government permission and supervision.

Furthermore, while it is entirely possible for a startup to survive such a string of failures, the possibility is small. In most cases a purely private company would lose customers and investment capital. Ispace’s survival up to now suggests the Chinese government wants it to succeed, and in that sense is acting as its owner.

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China launches Tianzhou freighter to space station

3:50 pm

The new colonial movement: China today successfully used its Long March 7 rocket to launch a new Tianzhou unmanned cargo freighter to its Tiangong space station.

The cargo is for the station’s next crew, scheduled to launch in June for a six month mission, during which two new large modules will be added to the station.

The launch took place at China’s sea coast Wenchang spaceport, so its expendable lower stages all fell harmlessly in the ocean.

The leaders in the 2022 launch race:

18 SpaceX
15 China
6 Russia
3 Rocket Lab
2 ULA

U.S. private enterprise still leads China 26 to 15 in the national rankings, as well as the entire world combined 26 to 24.

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China releases to the public some of the datasets from the Chang’e-5 lunar mission

10:44 am

China announced today that it has made available to the public the data from some of the instruments that flew on its November 2020 Chang’e-5 sample return lunar mission.

The instruments involved were the mission’s landing camera, panoramic camera, lunar mineralogical spectrometer, and regolith penetrating radar.

The data is supposedly available here, but you have to be able to read Chinese to find it.

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Chinese pseudo company Linkspace to try suborbital vertical rocket test this year

10:39 am

The Chinese pseudo-company Linkspace announced in a press release May 5th that it will attempt to vertically launch and land a first stage booster to suborbital space before the end of the year.

The rocket will later be transported to Lenghu in the northwestern Chinese province of Qinghai, the site of LinkSpace’s earlier tests. The team aims to launch the 47.5-foot-tall (14.5 meters) RLV-T6 to an altitude of around 62 miles (100 kilometers) and land it safely using landing legs and grid fins, similar to the way that the first stage of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket touches down.

The rocket to be tested is almost exactly the same height as SpaceX’s Falcon 9 first stage, so apparently this test will be a test of a full scale prototype of Linkspace’s own first stage. If successful, the company will be able to soon followup with reusable launches.

Linkspace had performed small scale vertical rocket tests three years ago, and then disappeared for unknown reasons. Its reappearance now suggests the Chinese government has approved its effort and will thus allow it to go forward.

Note: I call all the so-called private companies coming out of China “pseudo” because none function like an independent company privately owned. They might raise Chinese investment capital and work to earn profit, but anything they design or build is closely determined by the communist Chinese government. None builds anything without that supervision, and should the government change its mind the company will quickly be shut down.

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