Tag: space transportation

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

A Chinese space plane?

9:17 am

One of China’s pseudo-companies, named Space Transportation, has now announced that it plans to build and launch a fully reusable suborbital space plane to be used for both space tourism and point-to-point transportation, with the first flight targeted for ’24.

Space Transportation announced last August that it had raised $46.3 million for its hypersonic space plane plans, and the company has recently been conducting a number of tests of its Tianxing 1 and Tianxing 2 vehicles. A 10th flight test was conducted on Jan. 23, followed by another test in collaboration with a combustion laboratory belonging to Tsinghua University.

Details about these test flight activities have been limited, possibly due to the sensitive nature of hypersonic-related technologies.

The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), China’s main space contractor, in 2020 and 2021 conducted highly secretive launch tests of suborbital and orbital vehicles from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center as part of a space plane development program. [emphasis mine]

It could very well be that the so-called Chinese super duper hypersonic military test flights that various anonymous and public officials in the U.S. military have claimed took place in the past few years were merely these ground tests by Space Transportation, ginned up to appear more dangerous and threatening.

If so, this fear-mongering by the American military community is somewhat shameful and dishonest, and in the long run is not the right way to go about its business. Their exaggeration of the threat leads to skepticism, which actually makes it more difficult to get their own hypersonic program funded.

Today’s story however is important. We must recognize that this attempt by China to apply hypersonic technology to commercial transportation applications is quite smart, and can eventually be dangerous to us. It will help stimulate development, which can then be applied to military applications.

It is also one of the rare times China has taken the lead in innovation. Except for one British rocket startup, as far as I know no western company is trying to develop hypersonic concepts for commercial purposes.

2 comments

Two Chinese companies test reusable rocket technology

9:06 am

Link here.

One company, Space Transportation, tested on April 22 a design for launching its first stage vertically and then landinf it on a runway.

The joint flight was to test the performance of the dual waverider forebody configuration designed by Xiamen University’s School of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and to verify the rocket recovery and reuse technology, according to Xinhua. The 8.7-meter-long Jiageng-1 has a wingspan of 2.5 meters and part of development of the larger, future Tianxing-I-1 vertical takeoff, horizontal landing reusable launch vehicle.

Beijing-based Space Transportation, founded in August 2018 and also known as Lingkong Tianxing, received backing worth several million U.S. dollars from Source Code Capital earlier this year. [emphasis mine]

The second company, Linkspace, did on April 19th a untethered vertical take off and landing of a small prototype first stage, getting about 130 feet off the ground.

The highlighted words above are intriguing. I did not think it was legal for American investors to invest in Chinese rocket companies.

4 comments