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Chinese Privately Developed Rocket Fails To Reach Orbit (reuters.com)
schwit1 shares a report: A privately developed Chinese carrier rocket failed to reach orbit after lifting off from Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center on Saturday, in a blow to the country's nascent attempts by private companies to rival Elon Musk's SpaceX. The three-stage rocket, Zhuque-1, was developed by Beijing-based Landspace. The company said in a microblog post after nominal first and second stages that the spacecraft failed to reach orbit as a result of an issue with the third stage. "Before Zhuque carrier rocket was launched, its mission was already completed," the company said in the post on Saturday, without giving further details.
It sucks their rocket didn't make it, but remember too, SpaceX's early rockets didn't make it to orbit either. The whole company almost went bust before they got one to work.
Now they are shaking up the entire launch industry.
Chinese companies will have plenty of government support and they will succeed. That is a matter of when not if.
I see many, many space startups trying to build a very small, cheap launcher for very small satellites, or even cubesats. They are all bullshitting their investors - the market just does not exist.
All of them *want* to be in the full satellite launch business. Stuff in the grade of Atlas V, Soyuz, or Falcon 9. 2 to 4 tons of payload to LEO is about the smallest you can do cost-effectively, and 8 to 12 tons is the bulk of the market, and there's demand for larger still.
Everyone is copying SpaceX's business plan. Use initial funds to build a small orbital launcher (like Falcon 1), and then once you've proven you can put something into space, use that to secure funding to build an actual usable rocket (note that, as soon as they got funding for Falcon 9, they never flew Falcon 1 again, even though it shared parts with early Falcon 9s). Even Blue Origin built a suborbital tourist rocket before transitioning to their heavy-lift New Glenn - granted, Blue Origin was founded before SpaceX so they can't exactly be copying them.
This is not exclusive to China - Firefly (US) has their Alpha and Beta, OneSpace (China) has their OS-M1 upgraded sounding rocket, ExPace (China) has a whopping three rockets in their planned Kuaizhou series, Interstellar (Japan) has their Zero, LinkSpace (China) has New Line 1 which clearly implies a NL-2, Orbex (UK) has their Prime, and Rocket Lab (US) has Electron. All of them are competing for a market that just doesn't exist.
LandSpace is barely disguising their intentions. Zhuque-1 is a 300kg-to-LEO firecracker. All solid motors, which is just a terrible way to build an orbital rocket, but I expect they're using off-the-shelf parts (what's the Chinese counterpart to the GEM series?). Zhuque-2 is a much more reasonable 4000kg-to-LEO, methalox rocket. So the chemistry is different, the plumbing is different, the structure is different, even the launchpad is going to have to be different... what can they reuse from Zhuque-1, the avionics?
There is demand for a tiny-sat launcher. That much isn't a lie. But it's demand for a very, very low-cost launcher. Nobody's going to shell out a couple million bucks for a cubesat launch. Get the price down to $100K, sure, you'll be doing business, but all the newspace tiny-sat launchers I've seen are in the ballpark of $5M. Well, Falcon 9 is $50M a pop, and can do 20 tons worth of payload. There's a launch next month specifically for tiny satellites - specifically, 64 different satellites, mostly cubesats. Average price? Just under that $1M apiece figure.
So who would book a super-small launcher? Someone who doesn't need much in the way of payload - a small satellite, not requiring much power or designed to last all that long, but either going into a very strange orbit that no rideshare would go to, or needing to launch at very short notice. As far as I can tell, such customers just don't exist.
It's almost like the dotcom bubble - tons of companies burning through investor cash on a scheme to raise more investor cash. At least their planned second rockets are something that could actually be profitable. Going to be rough to compete with the oldspace companies, many of which are government-sponsored (ULA, Ariane), as well as the first-gen newspace companies (SpaceX, Blue Origin), who have a big lead on the technology. I doubt they'll all be successful... but I think one or two will make it. Which ones, I don't know.
Americans haven't really wrapped their brain around China. Many apparently believe that China is somehow incapable of being a serious rival to the US without cheating.
One in five people on Earth lives in China; one in twenty in the US. The Chinese economy is currently about 2/3 the size of the US economy, ten years ago that figure was 1/3. And just this year, China surpassed the US in number of scientific papers published.
China is fully capable of becoming a serious technological, military and economic rival to the US without cheating. And it is willing to cheat. Without foreign scientists immigrating to the US, there's no way we can keep up with them through mid-century.
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Well, America's space program was built by Nazis we snatched up before the Soviets could grab them.
Partly. There was also a US program (in fact, several US programs: the GALCIT team in California didn't work at all with Goddard's team in New Mexico). It's easy to point out that when Vanguard (based on the Navy rocket program) failed, the Army team launched Explorer 1 on the Juno booster, based on the Von Braun team's Jupiter. It's often forgotten, however, that Juno was a four stage booster, and only the first stage was the Jupiter: the second, third, and fourth stages -- the parts that actually took it to orbit-- were from JPL developed rockets.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
My understanding is that Juno was von Braun's design -- not to minimize the contributions of Americans, they still would have been well behind without technology they got from Germany.
The point is countries don't acquire foreign technology, by whatever means, just to achieve indefinite parity -- which is the best you can expect if all you do is borrow. Parity is just a milestone, and the sooner you get there the sooner you get ahead.
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I don't know what their long term goals are, but this rocket is competition with Rocket Lab's Electron rocket, not SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket.
Zhuque: (alternative news source)
Mass at launch 27 tonnes, 300 kg payload to 300 km LEO or 200 kg to 500 km sun synchronous orbit.
Electron:
Mass at launch 10.5 tonnes, 150-225 kg payload to 500 km sun synchronous orbit
Falcon 9:
Mass at launch 549 tonnes, 22,800 kg payload to LEO in expendable mode.
There are about a dozen companies looking to compete in this ~200kg payload market. Rocket Lab are in the lead at the start of this race, but there is still a long way to go.
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