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Chinese Space Program (CNSA) & Ch. commercial launch and discussion


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All right enough joke. 

The Advanced Space-based Solar Observatory has opened a call for the nicknames (but in Chinese) to the society. 

Spoiler

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To be honest, I'm not particularly good at ancient Chinese literature, so I didn't come up with any particularly "heat-resistant" names with a 'Chinese cultural flavour'.

The space debris detection payloads which mounted on the Tianzhou-3 cargo ship has already acquired thousands of images in orbit

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Spoiler

...It has made breakthroughs in orbit and validated key technologies such as the design of optical systems for the large field of view and high sensitivity detection payloads, in-orbit detection and identification algorithms and processing of space faint targets, and rapid processing of massive data in orbit. The space-based space debris detection, identification, orbiting, correlation, and application have been verified in the entire system. At present, the payload has been in stable operation in orbit for more than nine months.

Chongqing will build a nickname called "China's compound eye" (sounds weird to me), the "Super Large Distributed Aperture Radar High Resolution Deep Space Active Observation Facility" is start of construction. It will be the world's longest-range radar, with an observation range of 150 million kilometres.

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A prediction: we will hear some news about Wentian module this week. Probably would be a picture closing the fairing.

Edited by steve9728
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2 hours ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Compound eyes are like what flies and other organisms have, not too odd considering it will be made up of multiple radars to generate one return/picture.

Yeah, I know. But personally, I really don't like any kinds of insect. So...

A new episode of Tiangong TV

Spoiler

The approximate places passed in the video are

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Northwestern Polytechnical University’s ASN218 drone has completed a landing on board experiment.

845818-CC-1-C0-E-4-ED6-8020-3-B6332-D634

 

Chang'e 4 and Yutu 2 rover has finished the 44th Lunar day. Now both lander and rover are entering the sleep mode for the 44th Lunar night.

The Yutu 2 rover's route of previous 44th Lunar day:

006-HGq7agy1h3xjzadxpfj32441hl1ky.jpg

Yutu 2 rover also help the scientist write this: Radiative Transfer Modeling of Chang'e-4 Spectroscopic Observations and Interpretation of the South Pole-Aitken Compositional Anomaly

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2 hours ago, steve9728 said:

Is there a possibility that all these nicknames for the CNSA's are all with two Chinese characters plus the serial number (if needed)?

[snip]

I am not familiar enough with Chinese poetry/literature?/whatever goes into naming to know. Do most such names/terms/phrases have only two characters (in poetry or whatever it is derived from)?

The names used for most Japanese ships (space and sea) often end up having only two Kanji, not because of a stylistic choice but that’s how most of the words simply are. Nowadays it doesn’t matter too much per se because the names are written in Hiragana anyways, though.

So it may not have much to do with naming choices as much as it is the nature of the “source material” itself.

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Just now, SunlitZelkova said:

I am not familiar enough with Chinese poetry/literature?/whatever goes into naming to know. Do most such names/terms/phrases have only two characters (in poetry or whatever it is derived from)?

The names used for most Japanese ships (space and sea) often end up having only two Kanji, not because of a stylistic choice but that’s how most of the words simply are. Nowadays it doesn’t matter too much per se because the names are written in Hiragana anyways, though.

So it may not have much to do with naming choices as much as it is the nature of the “source material” itself.

For physically something two characters is enough. In fact the very first moment my thought was Xihe (羲和) or Kuafu (夸父). One is the ancient legendary sun goddess, while the other is a giant who chased the sun and killed himself. But Xihe was already named for the Chinese H-alpha Solar Explorer, and Kuafu was already named for the Kuafu project. The rest of the ancient Chinese legend I know about the sun is that of a man called Hou Yi, who "shot down nine of the ten suns in the sky". But considering that he was Chang'e's husband, I would like to save that name for the manned mission to the moon. There has been so much ancient literature over thousands of years that who knows there have how many better names than this.

As far as I can see, the names given by people on the Chinese internet, apart from some jokes, are basically Xihe and Kuafu. But I notice two other: Jin Wu (金乌) and Zhu Zhao(烛照). Jin Wu, aka the "three-legged crow". And Zhu Zhao, the lexical meaning is "the light of a candle shining on something, as a metaphor for the bright and beautiful future of that thing". It's not impossible if you really have to connect it to mythology, although it's also a divine creature related to the sun, but it's a modern novel.

For the ships, the navy's ship has their own rules for how to name them: use the place names. Basically, nearly all cities' names are two Chinese characters (few of them are three), except for some of the names of ethnic minority areas which are little longer (about four to six characters) due to their phonetic transliteration. In the case of civilian vessels such as fishing boats, their name is made up of the abbreviation of their local fishing affiliation (usually three characters) plus a serial number. Objectively speaking, Chinese characters are an extremely informative script, and two characters are really enough for a name.

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The Chinese Academy of Sciences will be selecting new missions soon as part of the Strategic Priority Program III (SPP III)- https://spacenews.com/venus-orbiter-lunar-constellation-and-exoplanets-telescopes-among-candidates-as-china-selects-new-space-science-missions/

The proposals (with a comment after where it isn't so obvious what it is)-

  • Enhanced X-ray Timing and Polarimetry (eXTP)
  • Dark Matter Particle Explorer-2 (DAMPE-2)
  • Discovering the Sky at the Longest Wavelength (DSL), is a constellation of 10 small satellites in lunar orbit "using the moon as a shield from Earth interference to study faint signals from the early universe"
  • Closeby Habitable Exoplanet Survey
  • Earth 2.0 (ET), is a mission to find Earth-like exoplanets with similar orbits around Sun-like stars. I'll also note that both the name and acronym feel meme-able
  • Solar Ring (SOR), three spacecraft at 1 AU studying the Sun and inner heliosphere
  • Solar Polar-orbit Observatory (SPO)
  • Earth-occulted Solar Eclipse Observatory (ESEO)
  • Chinese Heliospheric Interstellar Medium Explorer (CHIME)
  • (Unnamed?) "E-type Asteroid Sample Return"(?), would bring back samples from 1989 ML
  • Venus Volcano Imaging and Climate Explorer (VOICE), a Venus orbiter
  • low-Earth orbit Climate and Atmospheric Components Exploring Satellites (CACES)
  • Ocean Surface Current multiscale Observation Mission (OSCOM)

Of these, only 5-7 will be picked. SPP I and SPP II yielded mostly Earth orbiting missions, with one of them, the Solar wind Magnetosphere Ionosphere Link Explorer (SMILE), featuring collaboration with ESA.

SPP III also awards funding for studies of future missions. Interestingly, one of the proposals is a Ceres exploration program.

------

Planetary Society thread and article on China's Neptune orbiter project-

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Some news on China's crewed lunar program-

To be clear, the booster under the parafoil and the rocket stage on the tether in the two separate images are unrelated.

A 2030 crewed lunar landing would challenging but not impossible. Currently the LM-5DY is set to have its first launch in 2026. In contrast, SLS will have its first launch in 2022 and is expected to send astronauts to the surface of the Moon in 2025. Another way of looking at it is that the US selected its mission mode for Apollo in 1962 and landed on the Moon in 1969.

China is known for doing development slowly and at its own pace, but that could change. China has already decided to do a Mars sample return mission ahead of NASA, perhaps Chinese space goals may become more aware of the international spaceflight situation instead of being based around China's internal conditions.

The engine for the third stage of the LM-5DY has entered testing!

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Also from the above presentation about the lunar program, more info on China's future reusable launch vehicles-

Image

Image comes from this tweet- https://twitter.com/CNSpaceflight/status/1546671716415418370 but I am just going to write the info here because the format in the tweet is a little crude.

 

The first one is likely a cargo variant of the LEO version of the LM-5DY, basically a single core variant of the triple core rocket for lunar missions. Diameter is 5 meters. It looks like it has a payload to LEO of 5 tons, 4 tons to SS, 7 tons to GTO, but I can't say for sure, that looks a little odd. Regardless of the numbers, considering the single core version is intended to also launch the Next-Generation Crewed Spacecraft for space station missions, it looks like it will provide China with the capabilities of the Falcon 9.

The second and third are the Long March 9 (!), which has changed remarkably since its first inception as a conventional, non-reusable rocket with strap on boosters.

Diameter of the LM-9 is 10.6 meters, height is 110 meters. Mass is 4122 tons. First stage has 26x 200 ton thrust methalox engines, second stage has 4x 120 ton thrust LOX/LH2 engines, third stage has 1x of the same 120 ton thrust engine. Payload to LEO is 150 tons and payload to LTO is 50 tons.

All three of these are intended to be flying by 2035.

The bottom line says something to the effect of "these rockets will close the gap with SLS and Starship", or "there is no gap [in the performance of the Long March 9] when compared with SLS and Starship".

[-snip-]

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And finally, launch of Wentian has been tentatively set for July 24th, with the core stage re-entering uncontrolled shortly after

I will be making a specific thread for the core stage's re-entry, to avoid cluttering this one. The core stage attracted a lot of discussion last time, but compared to before when Tianhe was "one and done", we will be following Wentian's approach, docking, and then fixture into it's final position this time around.

Edited by Starhawk
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Further content has been removed by the moderation team.

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Tianzhou-3 has left the space station and it would be de-orbit in few days later. It has been in orbit for 302 days since 20 Sep. last year. If we really have looking for a pattern, the length of time in orbit for the Tianzhou-2 was 305 days.

Meanwhile, the Wentian module with CZ-5B rocket has transferred to the launch site

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The mission patch:

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And Mengtian module completed thermal vacuum tests

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A comparison of Core module, Wentian and Mengtian:

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At least this quadrant of the Mengtian in the picture looks quite "neat".

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17 hours ago, insert_name said:

Tianlian relay (CSNA equivalent of TDRS) launched to GTO out of Xichang on an LM-3b on Wednesday, wonder if we will get footage of the boosters hitting the ground.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/07/13/china-launches-tianlian-data-relay-satellite/

I think all LM-3 and LM-4 launches now use the parafoil recovery system, which significantly reduces the area in which the boosters fall.

Unlike, say, the early 2000s, it is also possible CNSA is now putting beacons on their boosters, so they can be found and secured faster.

LM-2 for Shenzhou doesn’t use the parafoil recovery system but it’s boosters may drop in a different area, out of view of most civilians.

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On 7/17/2022 at 8:19 PM, insert_name said:

Tianlian relay (CSNA equivalent of TDRS) launched to GTO out of Xichang on an LM-3b on Wednesday, wonder if we will get footage of the boosters hitting the ground.

https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/07/13/china-launches-tianlian-data-relay-satellite/

Do some little research and I find this: Notification of emergency evacuation of rocket wreckage. Can't find the full version now. (via. Weibo)

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Translate: A satellite launch mission will take place on 13 July 2022 between 00:19 and 00:39 (Tuesday evening). According to the instructions from the higher level, our Shuikou Township belongs to the scope of this satellite launch wreckage landing area, in order to successfully complete this recovery mission and ensure the safety of people's lives and property, we hereby notify the relevant matters as follows.
1. Each village must finish village and group cadres meeting before July 12, 17:00, each group should finish meeting of heads of households, and should finished the publicity. Make every household knows, everyone knows....

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Try to search something wreckage video from Tiktok and Kwai. Apart from other videos of the rocket wreckage from a year and two years ago, I could only find video footage published two days ago of traffic police closing roads in a 30km radius.

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Read an article named Some Thoughts about Cislunar Exploration and Exploitation from Journal of Astronautics (《地月空间探索与开发的思考》), write by Bao Weimin, the director of CASC, and Wang Xiaowei, professor at Beijing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics. But this article is fully Chinese.

In this article the outlook for the development of spaceflight on the Earth and Moon is mentioned. "... The future of space transportation in Earth-Moon space is bound to be flight-oriented and will require the following capability requirements.
1. Access to space-carrying capacity: single-entry space capacity to break through the 100-ton class and access to space on a scale of 10,000 tons/year.
2. Space transfer capacity: to support the realisation of large-scale lunar and asteroid exploration, with the scale of orbital transfer reaching several thousand tons/year.
3. Reliability, safety: cargo flight reliability not less than 0.995, manned flight safety not less than 0.9999.
4. Launch costs: launch costs per unit payload down 1~2 levels from current, single carrier use up to 100 times.
5. Launch frequency: a significant increase in the scale and type of access to space, with a launch frequency of 1,000 sub/year."

The industrial systems of cislunar exploration and exploitation includes:

Basic Industries:

  • Transport (including launch sites)
  • Measurement and control
  • In-orbit service and maintenance
  • Space monitoring and early warning
  • Space Weather Services
  • Space life support

Dominant Industries:

        Application Industries

  • Communication, navigation, remote sensing
  • Space exploration and testing
  • Space Science and Technology Experimentation Services
  • Space energy conversion and utilization
  • Space tourism
  • Space security

        Development and Utilization Industries

  • Space Power
  • Space Mining
  • Space agriculture
  • Space manufacturing
  • Space medicine

Expanding Industries:

  • Insurance
  • Education and Training
  • Science industry
  • Finance
  • Entertainment
  • Culture
  • Tourism
  • etc.

And

"4.3 Development routes.
It is expected that around the middle of this century, the Earth-Moon space transportation, resource exploration and development drink infrastructure system will be fully completed, the legal and regulatory system will be perfected, a low-cost and highly reliable Earth-Moon space flight-based transportation capability, an efficient space resource development and utilization capability, and a frontier space science exploration capability will be fully formed, and it will be in the world in terms of original frontier scientific discoveries, major key technologies and major engineering achievements The new industry of the Earth-Moon space will be fully formed, the output value will reach RMB 100 billion, the industrial and economic structure will be reshaped, breakthroughs in scientific and technological innovation will be made, and the overall world view of the Chinese people will be greatly changed.

In the near future, it will complete the key technology research and development of flight-oriented space transportation, remote sensing resource exploration around the Moon and lunar polar regions, and start the construction of three major software and hardware systems; the initial construction of a legal and regulatory system, based on the Space Law, linear designation of laws in areas such as commercial space management, and raising the legal ranking of prior approaches; the scientific progression of the Moon from global census to local detailed investigation and then to laboratory analysis of samples; and the formation of some basic industries such as transportation, measurement and control, space detection and warning.

In the medium term, the construction of the three major hardware facilities will be basically completed and initially operated, and core capabilities will be formed; the legal and regulatory system will be basically perfected, with complete supporting laws for space safety, spacecraft operation in orbit and space activity management; breakthroughs will be made in research on the origin and evolution of the Moon and the coupling of the Sun-Earth-Moon space environment, and a multi-station linkage exploration of the 'Lunar south pole main research station + frontal substation + back substation' will be realised; basic industries will be fully formed, leading industries and expansion industries will be basically formed, and the Earth-Moon space economic zone will be initially built.

In the long term, the construction of the three major hard facilities will be fully completed, and the low-cost and highly reliable Earth-Moon space flight-based transportation capacity and efficient space resource development and utilisation capacity will be fully formed; the legal and regulatory system will be complete, and the needs of the Earth-Moon space industry will be fully and effectively guaranteed; the main and sub-stations of the completed research stations will be used to establish an interactive detection network; the industrial chain will be closed and the Earth-Moon space economic zone will be fully established, and various types of deeper space exploration activities will continue to increase with Earth-Moon space as the base."

 

First building the ships and then setting up camps in Antarctica. With the development of technology, it makes it both easier and more profitable for ordinary people to travel to Antarctica at the same time. It's not unreasonable that mankind could reach this level of scientific and technological development 100 years or more later. Considering that from the time when the adventurers explored the Antarctic 100 years ago to the time when ordinary people can travel there and even start a wedding more than 100 years later. There was a video blogger on the Chinese internet who managed to "propose at the North Pole and get married at the South Pole". Let's hope that in a hundred years' time someone will be able to "propose on the moon and get married on Mars":D

Edited by steve9728
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And, if everything goes well, Wentian will be launched around 14:20 (UTC+8) at this Sunday. I checked the weather forecast. The weather in Wenchang on that day will be sunny from 27 to 31°C with a 20% chance of rain attached. If it doesn't rain, this will be a wonderful day for a typical tropical beach.

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45 minutes ago, JoeSchmuckatelli said:

It's supposed to be free floating, like Hubble - right?  Not attached to the station 

Yes indeed. And the original CCTV’s report makes me feels like there will be upgrades for it in the future. So it would be using the same orbit with the station and floating around it. And dock with the station if it need.

Meanwhile it probably would be the first telescope that can refuel in space hahaha

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1 minute ago, SunlitZelkova said:

Launch is in 11-12~ hours.

CGTN started a stream 17 hours ago for some reason lol, but then ended it 8 ago. It was just a shot of the VAB/ready building basically.

Actually, if anyone are boring enough. There’s a live online now hahaha

Here’s the link:  https://b23.tv/5QeaL2W

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More Wentian’s photos published:

The Chinese words below: the Wentian Module can carry out space science experiments at the intersection of single or multiple disciplines.

4904597-C-9-B9-E-4719-93-F9-72492-D5-C59

Assembling the control module. We can confirm that there has two grapple fixture for the robotic arm now and this one is closer to the airlock: it definitely is for the astronauts’ EVA mission

0035-D38-D-C94-C-4-B5-E-BCAE-6-F715-E23-

1-BFFA3-EB-38-FB-4193-B5-BD-2-DAEACF4-D9

The shorter robotic arm for the exposure experiment racks

E3-AD03-A0-545-F-43-D0-B4-D1-BF7-ED7-A40

The white Chinese: Wentian Module’s launch weight are around 23000kg

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The indexing robotic arm (Lyappa Arm 2.0)

2721-F4-D9-5045-40-F3-9-E68-3379-AA4-B87

And the entire module looking from the tail

CD457-FAD-88-C3-4-F33-9204-B232613912-AF

These photo is from a video published by the CMS’s official Weibo. But there’s still don’t have English subtitles. The video also mentioned that it provides 50 m3 inside for the astronauts. CASC’s official Weibo said that the noise inside are 60dB and no more than 50dB in those 3 sleeping bays, a new toilet on board, temperature will be 24 ℃ and with 40% humidity, taking 8 experiments racks and 22 standard sockets for the exposure experiment payloads. It will be a fast docking, which is about 7 hours to docking with the core module. And it will shift to the right or starboard side (or CNSA’s way to call it: the quadrant IV) one month earlier before the launch of Mengtian Module. In terms of the schedule, the shifting will be happened in September.

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