Chinese Rocket Flies with Falcon 9-style Grid Fins
A Long March 2C rocket launched three Yaogan Weixing-30 Group-5 remote sensing satellites into orbit from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center on Friday. The satellites are believed to be for military reconnaissance.
The booster included grid fins that are similar to the ones that SpaceX uses to guide the first stage of its Falcon 9 booster to landings on land and at sea. The Chinese appear to be experimenting with controlled descent and moving toward reusable first stages.
That would be good news for people living down range from China’s interior launch sites. Boosters fall uncontrollably from the sky and land near villages and towns.
40 responses to “Chinese Rocket Flies with Falcon 9-style Grid Fins”
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this is quite interesting…
Would not surprise me in the least if they have the exact same dimensions , mechanism for opening/closing, and turning.
The Soviets had grid fins on N-1, and the military has used them on bombs for decades
https://forum.nasaspaceflig…
https://www.icas.org/ICAS_A…
and yet, I will bet that these will match right up to SpaceX’s.
The old aluminum ones maybe. These Chinese copies don’t look like the current titanium models.
That the problem when you borrow innovations from a fast moving firm like SpaceX, you are always an innovation or two behind the current technology level.
Ain’t that the truth!
Yep, why waste time on doing R&D when it’s easier to just copy the technology. Now if we could only get them to copy the SLS/Orion/Gateway.
Well, Tom, that just begs to ask the question, would they be that idiotic? Regards, Paul.
Hey, there’s precedent: we got the Soviets to copy the Shuttle. Couldn’t get them to keep flying it though.
If Rogozin is to be believed, the Russians are currently developing the Yenisei super-heavy booster, which might be uncharitably characterized as a Russian imitation of SLS. In the same breath, he also asserted that they were developing reusable rockets. Of course, Rogozin is not to be believed, so probably none of this is really happening.
Russians ended up with a much better “copy” though.
Fair play. They got us fixated on the lunar south pole. We must not allow a moon water gap!
dont work on a lot of gen five programs do you…the software is the magic…and thats chinese
if you mean 5th generation programming languages, uh, no. Those are NOT Chinese.
And no, I used to work on Asm, C, C++, Java, Perl, ADA, Mercury, Lisp, Prolog, lexx/flexx, bison/yacc, GAs, embedded systems, etc.
no I meant fifth generation programs
You mean there are aerospace programs that have lasted five human generations? They all must have been started by the Wright Brothers.
you obviously are clueless…the 787 is a fifth generation system go learn something before wasting our time
I was mocking your penchants for attempted intimidation via use of “inside baseball” terminology and for content-free gnomic declarations. /sarc tags next time I guess.
I am, in any event, vastly amused by the designation of aircraft such as Dreamliner and F-35 as “5th generation” when their grievously blown budgets and schedules often seem due in largest part to the quaintly antiquarian software development practices that still obtain in legacy aerospace.
Legacy aerospace needs something akin to an intervention and a 12-step program anent software. The first step is admitting you have a problem and that you are, thus far, powerless to control it. After that, seek counseling.
I would recommend seeking it from game software companies. They also deal in a real-time world of parallel heterogeneous multi-tasking, networked systems, advanced rendering and display, sensor fusion and a lot else with direct applicability to avionics. They even know from sidestick controllers and military terminology.
Get down off your parochial institutional high-horses and ask for some help before they all get security clearances and set up subsidiaries to do for real weapons systems what they now do for pretend ones and put you lot out on the street.
Judging from that “landing” video clip, the software on the grid-finned Long March 2C still falls a bit short of “magic.”
The grids probably have a real life use on the Long March series. Now they can ensure a good clean hit on those villagers instead of the old uncontrolled method of depending on chance where they fell on the outskirts of town most of the time.
It’s hard to keep a long lead on the Chinese. They’re so plugged into our technology base by business and academia it makes their espionage so much more effective than the old KGB was with the USSR. They’re plugged into us with short time constants. Does anyone know the source of SpaceX’s titanium forgings? That’s a hard industrial process one I doubt Space X owns, and if it were in the US it would be very expensive and under constant pressure to go overseas. I wonder if those Chinese grid fins look so much like SpaceX’s fins because they may have them made in China, and the Chinese simply did a production run for themselves?
You’re making a good point. Next up are the landing legs – will those also be Falcon 9 style (a straight copy) or will they attempt a new design?
The Euro’s released CAD drawings with SpaceX style legs. The Falcon is an amazing program. If I were Chinese, Russian, European, or Japanese, I’d copy copy copy and set my intelligence agencies to work. Every employee of Space X would be approached by the most beautiful women and most attractive men to compromise as many as I could to strip all their IP. …. If I were SpaceX I’d be shoving false information into every hole the FBI said I could.
Yep, use subterfuge, lies and false info to throw spies off the trail. Have you read any le Carre novels? That author describes how the opposition recruits the disaffected to become moles. Lust can do it. Also straight greed is a factor, too as illustrated by the obese IT guy in ‘Jurassic Park’: “Dotson! We’ve got Dotson here!”
the Chinese are doing what they always do…taking someone elses technology that they find interesting and well 1) excersizing the heck out of it and 2) developing their base to understand it and 3) seeing if anything of it is worth enhancing
I know that they have done this with the E2 radar they got from the IDF, its pretty clear that they have done it with the Patriots they got from the IDF and well Boeing paid for their cockpit display technology
some one is going to find the magic combination of “tools” that make first stage recovery both practical and economic at the same time…
You did just see SpaceX underbid a Pegasus, right? Is a 50M orbital launcher not both practical and economic?
underbidding an existing competitor that is overpriced is a good thing it is not about embracing new customers in the launch equation
SpaceX has driven down the cost of launch considerably, but so far the demand for launches is looking rather inelastic.
If these mega constellations start going up then that might constitute a market expansion in response to the lower launch costs forced by SpaceX. Ironically, this increase in launches is looking to land on the books of anyone-but-SpaceX.
we will see…I dont think launch cost is the problem I use to but …anyway we will see I might agree with you
Actually, a lot of sats were launched in the last 10 years. I think that there is a bit of a sitting phase going on. That is why it is important for NASA/CONgress to get Bigelow up to the ISS and get other nations sending ppl into space, along with private citizens.
And as to landing on other books, I suspect that SX will land a lot of them except for where politics comes in.
1st paragraph – Heh.
2nd paragraph – The Chinese grid fins look like SpaceX’s old aluminum models, not the Block 5 titanium units.
Elon has said the titanium grid fin forgings are expensive, but offered no details. The expense is related to the capital-intensive facility required to make them. That wouldn’t change much if moved overseas. The main impetus to off-shoring was the high U.S. corporate tax rate. That’s been fixed now so off-shoring will be much less attractive.
I doubt SpaceX sources anything from China given that it’s likely the number one instigator of attempted cyber-attacks on SpaceX. SpaceX takes its trade secrecy seriously.
Offshoring. There are several factors to go with the corporate tax rate.
One is the regulatory environment.It often cost more time and money to get permitting than to build the factory. NIMBYs often don’t wan’t a nasty factory or even warehouse in their vicinity and fight it in the planning stages attacking the findings in the EIS and anything else. Engineer and lawyer fees as well as time to market can make the foreign option very attractive to a company, or their competition if they wear blinders.
Impact and other fees to build. In my local area, a new house starts at $150k or so. Impact fees average $20k in the county and various municipalities. You have to have an engineered blueprint to pull a permit which adds thousands to the smallest project. While it is obvious that this hits the poorest hardest, it also hurts commercial and industrial interests.
Labor force issues. Americans have a few generations of “don’t work like I did, go to college” in the workforce now. Those that are not college material only hear the first half and think work is bad. No amount of money moves the unmotivated. It is difficult to run any business with non-motivated employees. Not to mention the ones that graduated high school while illiterate and innumerate because teachers were not allowed to fail them. Or government subsidies for poor behavior. etc The motivated are moving up and leaving the non-motivated behind in most areas. Entitled, I won’t even start.
The factories that can shift and change to meet the shifting and changing markets get ahead. The ones that can’t or won’t get left behind eventually. Many of those factories that can meet demand are now foreign. No sinister evil required, just response to demand.The wealth and income envy and double taxation is one factor, but their are more arrows in the Luddites’ quiver.
I don’t disagree about any of that, but those kinds of problems tend to be local or, at worst, regional. That’s why nobody has built a new chip fab in Silicon Valley in a couple or three decades, for instance. But most places in the U.S. aren’t like the CA Bay Area – thank God. So that leaves mainly the tax disincentive as an impetus to off-shoring.
Nor is finding qualified American employees an insuperable problem. All the U.S.-based European, Japanese and Korean car plants seem to have no real problem staffing up. Of course they all build in right-to-work states where working with one’s hands is not seen as akin to having leprosy. Long-term, the problem – to the extent is really is a problem – will abate as fewer and fewer people are needed to produce more and more stuff – much like farming.
I gave my own offspring the opposite of that old-timey advice. She’s had a couple office jobs, but got her junior college degree in a technical field and has been employed in manufacturing ever since. She likes it, seems to be good at it and intends to stay with it. And it sure pays better than being a barista.
And there are both financial and non-financial barriers to off-shoring even if the tax advantages look compelling. If one goes to a developing nation, English-speakers will be hard to find. So will any significant number of staffers with educations even as bad as those of stereotypical U.S. Millennials.
Going to a nation where these aren’t problems generally means putting up with significantly lower productivity than in the U.S. and often with more expensive labor. European and Japanese average manufacturing wage rates are way higher than ours now and even Korea is at rough parity.
I think we will, over time, get a lot of the “lost” manufacturing work back home here as the effects of the Trump corporate tax cut percolate through the economy.
That last part about China making the grid fins was poorly thought out on my part. I was in a rush to begin my reentry from Kitt Peak. What I was trying to say was that in general when American firms outsource production to China they find themselves competing against their own products being manufactured in a duplicate facility located in another city. I doubt very much SpaceX would outsource something like a grid fin to China. Europe maybe, but not Asia. China is a giant in the global titanium market. If indeed they are aluminium fins then any moderately industrialized nation could make them.
Mostly agree except that a lot of that Chinese bootleg production actually goes on in the same plants, just during different shifts. Maybe they keep the differently printed packaging at a second location and just bring it in as needed.
I have no real idea who SpaceX contracts with to make its grid fin forgings but it’s not entirely outside the realm of possibility that it’s LockMart. Lockheed, as it was back in the day, had to develop much of modern large-scale titanium fabrication technology for the SR-71/YF-12A program including big forgings.
SpaceX only went to the titanium forgings because they were actually going for multiple landings and reuses of their 1st stages and the original aluminum grid fins, even with a coating, weren’t durable enough. The Chinese, if all they need to do is steer their descending stages into deserted areas, and not eventually try to soft-land them, wouldn’t have that problem. Aluminum is plenty good enough for a single-use component.
You are also quite correct that no exceptional industrial capacity is needed to make copies of F9-size aluminum grid fins. I’ve been in a number of shops hereabouts that have gantry-style vertical mills plenty big enough to handle those as single pieces.
The number of titanium forges in the US is quite small. I’m going to see if I can start accounting for them. This should be a well contained problem to pin down.
I’m sure what you say about titanium forges is true. Please update us if you find anything of particular interest.
As expected the Thomas register has the most extensive listing I could find. Lot’s of small shops that look like they have high end (as in high end Haas manufacturing centers with work volumes above a cubic meter) machines configured to work titanium. What I’m looking for is a shop with really big machines like the platform mills made by Ingersol and large hydraulic presses in the 10’s of thousands of PSI range or greater. I still have a question about the process, are the grid-fins pressed? Machined? Or, I assume, both? If they’re called forgings, I assume a hot pressing process somewhere in the recipe.
You would definitely need one of Haas’s biggest fully-enclosed units to accommodate an F9 aluminum grid fin. That’s almost certainly what SpaceX used to make them in-house before going the titanium route.
There was a video made quite a few years ago of Elon conducting a tour of the Hawthorne factory. It may still be available on YouTube. There were a lot of big machine tools in the backgrounds of certain shots and every one of them was a Haas.
Even now, I suspect that SpaceX goes outside only for the raw forgings and does the final machining of them itself.
As to what the forging process employed is, in detail, I would be less confident of my predictions as, other than welding, I’m far less familiar with hot metal work than with cold.
Given the rather intricate nature of the titanium grid fins, I’m thinking drop forging is probably not the approach taken. Drop forging seems like it would work best for objects with few or no through-holes in the finished articles. Drop forging is also not a process that is optimal if one wishes to produce an article that is near net shape.
There is a process known as hot isostatic pressing (HIP) that has been in use in the aerospace industry for 40 or so years that is often used to make near net shape parts in complex shapes from difficult-to-work metals. Cribbing from Wikipedia:
The HIP process subjects a component to both elevated temperature and isostatic gas pressure in a high pressure containment vessel. The pressurizing gas most widely used is argon. An inert gas is used so that the material does not chemically react. The chamber is heated, causing the pressure inside the vessel to increase. Many systems use associated gas pumping to achieve the necessary pressure level. Pressure is applied to the material from all directions (hence the term “isostatic”).
For processing castings, metal powders can also be turned to compact solids by this method, the inert gas is applied between 7,350 psi (50.7 MPa) and 45,000 psi (310 MPa), with 15,000 psi (100 MPa) being most common. Process soak temperatures range from 900 °F (482 °C) for aluminum castings to 2,400 °F (1,320 °C) for nickel-based superalloys.
When castings are treated with HIP, the simultaneous application of heat and pressure eliminates internal voids and microporosity through a combination of plastic deformation, creep, and diffusion bonding; this process improves fatigue resistance of the component.
Primary applications are the reduction of microshrinkage, the consolidation of powder metals, ceramic composites and metal cladding.
Hot isostatic pressing is thus also used as part of a sintering (powder metallurgy) process and for fabrication of metal matrix composites,
often being used for post-processing in additive manufacturing.
I’m guessing that there aren’t too many HIP chambers big enough to accommodate an entire F9 grid fin. The 15,000 psi mentioned in the Wikipedia article as being normative for HIP applications is roughly equivalent to the pressure at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. 45,000 psi would be three times that pressure. Yikes!
A lot of very high-strength mass would be needed to build such a chamber, especially considering the very high sustained temperatures also involved. Then there are the pumps and pipes needed to pressurize it. And the seals, OMG the seals! Scary.
The actual details of titanium grid fin fabrication are almost certain to be fascinating, whatever they are. But anyone at SpaceX who told us about them would probably have to shoot us afterward.
In the meantime, in my substantive ignorance, I’d like to think HIP is involved because it is a seriously badass industrial process. It’s the romantic in me I guess.
Thanks for your thoughts, that was educational to me. Primus Aerospace in Denver looks like an interesting candidate.