China Goes All-in on Sea Launch
Already operating four spaceports (three of which drop stages over land), China will construct a new port to facilitate launches from an off-shore submersible platform, China Daily reports.
The State-owned space conglomerate China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp is working with the eastern coastal province of Shandong to start construction of a port for sea-based space launches before the end of this year.
The Beijing-based space giant said on Tuesday that during a recent visit by Ling Wen, deputy governor of Shandong, to the company’s headquarters, a strategic cooperation framework agreement was signed by the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, city government of Yantai, and Shenzhen-headquartered China International Marine Containers Group to jointly build an eastern coastal space port in Haiyang, a city administered by Yantai.
The project will make use of Yantai’s unique location, existing harbors and local space research and marine engineering facilities. Upon completion, the port will consist of support facilities for sea-based space missions and four research and production centers for carrier rockets, satellite equipment, sea-launch platforms as well as satellite data and applications.
China launched a Long March 11 from a submersible platform in June.
8 responses to “China Goes All-in on Sea Launch”
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.
Pretty cool. If we start launching heavier rockets on a more frequent schedule, launching from a sea platform is going to be a very good idea.
Maybe. Every body of water has a storm season. To insure decent odds of acceptable weather for any given launch it seems that at least two such platforms would be needed in places whose storm seasons don’t coincide.
Not sure where those would best be located in the case of the U.S. The hurricane seasons in the Atlantic and the Gulf of Mexico are pretty much the same. One in the Atlantic and one in the Pacific maybe? But then the one in the Pacific would have to be a long way offshore to insure enough room for post-launch recoveries of 1st stages launching to low-inclination orbits. One “pitcher” platform and one “catcher” platform in each ocean maybe? So four platforms altogether.
They’d also have to be damned big to ride out storms during the off-season and they’d move far too slowly to keep bipping in and out of any port hundreds of miles away – or maybe even more in the case of the Pacific platform pair. So that means a significant service fleet to keep them supplied and also big ships/barges of some kind to bring out the rocket stages and payloads.
There’s also the non-trivial issue of vulnerability in wartime and vulnerability to terrorist attack in nominal peacetime. At a minimum, there’d need to be self-defense capability incorporated. Sonar, torpedoes and small ground-to-air missiles maybe? Maybe even a modest-sized full-time garrison of troops?
This just gets more complicated and expensive the closer one looks at what it would take to avoid a half-arsed job. Perhaps the Chinese are blessed with more favorable geography off their east coast.
They already have forward presence in places like Kenya. The Italians operated a Scout launch pad just off Kenyan waters for a long time. Likely whatever they develop and operate off the Chinese coast will pop up off the coasts of their colonial client states.
Maybe. But I doubt it. The reason they seem to have picked the Chinese location they did was that there were nearby sources of all the stuff they’d need to run launch ops. They won’t find any of that in Kenya. So it would all have to brought in for each mission. Lots of extra time and expense. You’d probably have a cheaper and easier time of it trying to operate the Stratolaunch Roc from Kenya.
Since the Chinese have made it known they’re going to copy the Falcon, I’ll bet this turns into a fleet of 4 ships along the lines of Sea Launch. A ship full of boosters that tows the launch pad, and a ship waiting to receive boosters that tows a landing pad, or perhaps a custom ship along the lines of what Blue Origin has in mind. If the booster tender ship can do refurb of the boosters you could imagine a “Launching Circus” where payloads and 2nd stages are flown in on Y-20’s. Fitted to the boosters. Then meet a RP-1 tanker in route, have a LOX farm onship, and just shuttle from latitude to latitude to meet your customers needs.
Doing that at sea is a big stretch though. The Sea Launch command ship had room for three launch vehicles but never attempted to carry any out to the launch area; all transfers to the launch platform were done at Long Beach, in the port, with calm seas. Doing a transfer at sea, with higher sea state, was never attempted. The launch vehicles were too fragile, and fully loaded with hypergols, and the alignment of the two vessels was not rigid enough to perform such an operation. And they had limited RP and LOX in that program, which might be an easier problem to solve.
I’m sure they could eventually figure out how to transfer launch vehicles at sea safely, but the task is not trivial.
Chinese shipping yards make the entire spectrum of shipping platforms known to the world. They’re not all first class, but they do everything. Whatever they decide to do, they’ll be able to do it.
Now for Sea Dragon, China!