China are working on a next generation manned spacecraft (apparently)...

[xenomorph555]

To keep it short, apparently a next generation manned spacecraft has been approved for development. This comes from people within China so it could be fake however I believe it could be true due to the reasons for it's development.

The Shenzhou has been declared "unfit" for beyond LEO activities (minus a Zond mission) and will therefore solely carry on it's duty as a station ferry, because of this (and also maybe because U.S. and Russia are making NGS's) a new spacecraft is now under development.

This could be the reason for CASC's shady re-usability program...

What do you guys think?

Real?

If it is what do you think it will be like?

Copy or Original or based on?

Edited December 31, 2014 by xenomorph555

[Tommygun]

I don't know, but it seems too soon to be developing a new spacecraft when they don't have that many flights on the Shenzhou and they have a lot of other projects to work on, like building a station and future probes to the Moon and Mars.

[Nibb31]

Rather than design a new spacecraft for lunar exploration, it makes more sense to simply modify Shenzhou to extend its capabilities.

The Chang'e 5 sample return capsule is clearly a scaled-down Shenzhou capsule.

Although it's too small to carry astronauts, it also seems way oversized for just bringing back a few soil samples from the lunar surface. To me, it's clear that the main purpose of Chang'e 5 is to test lunar manoeuvers, docking and lunar reentry for a future manned capsule.

There has been a lot of activity around the Moon recently. I wonder if they are actually shifting focus away from their space station program and towards lunar activity. A lot of their PR these days is about robotic exploration of the Moon and Mars rather than on manned spaceflight. It's also not impossible to imagine that their space station could be used to support lunar exploration, similar to what Russia is planning for OPSEK.

[Bill Phil]

Shenzhou in its current form is unsuited for beyond LEO operations.

[Nibb31]

Shenzhou in its current form is unsuited for beyond LEO operations.

So was Soyuz, but then the Russians turned it into Zond and LOK.

Shenzhou is modular, efficient, proven, and safe. To turn it into a lunar vehicle, you would only really need a modified service module, but there is no reason why they wouldn't keep the orbital module and just stick a beefier heatshield on the descent module, especially now that Change'e 5 has proven that it works for lunar re-entry.

[xenomorph555]

I don't know, but it seems too soon to be developing a new spacecraft when they don't have that many flights on the Shenzhou and they have a lot of other projects to work on, like building a station and future probes to the Moon and Mars.

Ten Shenzhou's have flown and the program was started n 1993, 20 years. So it's very old and mature. I know what you mean with the station and probes though.

So was Soyuz, but then the Russians turned it into Zond and LOK.

Shenzhou is modular, efficient, proven, and safe. To turn it into a lunar vehicle, you would only really need a modified service module, but there is no reason why they wouldn't keep the orbital module and just stick a beefier heatshield on the descent module, especially now that Change'e 5 has proven that it works for lunar re-entry.

Maybe it is a beefed up Shenzhou, it was never stated if it was a super new design or if it was an upgrade. It could possibly be a Shezhou with more shielding/com's/life support and fuel. We will have to see!

[Bill Phil]

So was Soyuz, but then the Russians turned it into Zond and LOK.

Shenzhou is modular, efficient, proven, and safe. To turn it into a lunar vehicle, you would only really need a modified service module, but there is no reason why they wouldn't keep the orbital module and just stick a beefier heatshield on the descent module, especially now that Change'e 5 has proven that it works for lunar re-entry.

Soyuz was originally designed for lunar missions AND LEO missions. The Zond and LOK are variants. And I said current form because it IS not capable in current form. With a few modifications, sure.

[xenomorph555]

Found an interesting official document, they were looking into propulsive landings by researching and theorising, looking at other ships that are going to use it. The consensus was that it was very promising and should be added in China's new ship for various reasons including "the further we go into deep space, the larger the ship gets and the heavier capsule gets. Parachutes are limiting.".

Very interesting, still unsure if this ship program is real though.

- - - Updated - - -

Apparently this is real, sort of. While I am unsure if it's a government program, the manned spacecraft engineers began work after they finished Tiangong-1. They want to fly a command/return capsule demonstrator. The ship in their eyes should be multi-purpose being able to do station ferrys, go to the moon and fly to deep space. So it's looking like a Chinese version of the PPTS so far.

Update:

The more I read into this the more serious it becomes, it seems that they have many high ranking organizations that have been involved with Shenzhou and other space projects in the past working on this program. They have have studying, designing, building and testing. This is very exciting, I wonder what it will look like...

- - - Updated - - -

As of October the project is authorized and funded, the design is also finalised

Had to go through a lot to get all of this information (translation mostly), it's mainly because only a tiny percent (3%) of the Chinese space program is on the American internet, to find the other 97% of all information you have to get into the Chinese web, the main problem is I don't speak Mandarin XP

Edited December 31, 2014 by xenomorph555