Long March 5 Returns to Flight
China’s Long March 5 returned to flight on Friday after being ground for 2.5 years, placing an experimental communications satellite into orbit and seeming to pave the way for a series of ambitious human and science missions.
The nation’s most powerful launch vehicle lifted off from the Wenchang Satellite Launch Center with the Shijian 20 satellite. Chinese media said the mission was successful in placing the spacecraft into a geosynchronous transfer orbit.
It was the third launch of Long March 5, and the first since an in-flight failure on July 2, 2017. The booster successfully placed the Shijian 17 satellite into orbit on its maiden flight in November 2016.
A successful launch was crucial for for a number of future launches. China plans to launch the Mars Global Remote Sensing Orbiter and a small surface rover next July.
The Chang’e 5 lunar sample return mission will follow during the fourth quarter of 2020. Other missions planned through 2024 include:
- test flight of a next generation crew vehicle;
- modules of China’s first permanent space station beginning in 2021;
- Chang’e-6 lunar sample return;
- Jun Tian space telescope; and,
- Solar Polar Orbit Telescope.
Long March 5 is designed to launch payloads weighing 25,000 kg into low Earth orbit, 14,000 kg into geosynchronous transfer orbit and 8,200 kg into trans-lunar injection.
Wenchang is China’s newest spaceport and the only one of the four launch centers located on the coastline.
38 responses to “Long March 5 Returns to Flight”
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They need to use all SRM.
I wish they would too as I have no desire to see the Chinese succeed. Perhaps one can sell the current Chinese on that by pointing out that solid-fuel rockets were a Chinese invention.
After all that time, over a decade, and really we don’t know if it’s done quite yet. And they only barely exceed Falcon 9. Where it does exceed the Falcon it reflects the propellant choices and the fact that it’s throw away. Now the real question, do the Chinese have a steady stream of payloads to keep this thing busy? My bet. No. Long March 5 really brings out Space X’s shining points.
I think LM 5 will have a short life or be redesigned into a reusable mode. I fully expect a Falcon copy from China coming up next.
A Falcon copy would not be a sign of strength in Chinese aerospace. There are a couple of problems with copies. One is that you are doing what your competition did years ago. Another is that copying often does not allow working ones own strengths.
I vaguely remember a short piece on the Soviet TU-4 bomber which was a straight copy of the US B-29. The development was apparently tougher that if they had used a home grown design that was influenced by the US aircraft according to the Soviet source that I can’t remember. This is vague memory. Under Stalins’ orders to build a copy, they had to reverse engineer alloys when they had serviceable ones of their own readily available. Similar with engines, fasteners, connectors, and fittings throughout the aircraft.
IMO, if the Chinese copy, they will not be using to their own strengths. Speculating on my part, they probably have engines in the pipeline that will work but won’t be copies. Engineers and scientists fully capable of moving to the next level if supported and allowed.
The Chinese are in the middle of creating a English style mercantile empire. They won’t be using the a Falcon 9 copy to compete with the Falcon 9 on what’s left of the open market per se. Of course they’ll try, but its main job will be to launch satellites mandated on their colonial holdings. Or satellites to create a service that will then be mandated on their client states. So immediate economic payback will be a secondary consideration. What the Chinese are really interested in is selling the means of 21st cen government and holding power. Digital surveillance at the microscopic level is now a given, and if China provides the infrastructure for that surveillance, they set the terms and even the politics of how other peoples money is spent. It won’t matter how ‘inferior’ the Chinese infrastructure might be. It will be aimed at the purposes governments have in mind. If China can pull this off, they’ll be able to govern the governments and direct the eb and flow of money in their client states and probably beyond.
Interesting thought. I think we both hope you’re wrong.
Me too. I don’t want to be right about that.
Except their Road and Belt initiative is already collapsing as a failure. Unlike the West they don’t seem to have the governmental skills required to create a foreign empire. Indeed, the inability of Chinese to move beyond their core area has been a key theme of their 5,000 year long history.
It seems to be the unbreakable conviction of statists everywhere that statism will always triumph. The contrary history of the world for the last 300 years seems to make no impression.
It’s your inability as an individual to realize that China is not a communist country in the flavor of the USSR. It’s postwar Japanese MITI’esq backed by government printing presses and an ability co-opt Western private enterprises to execute their policy in a way Japan never could. You’re blind to America’s surrender of shipping, large infrastructure, communications, huge losses in aviation, manufacturing and energy to hybrid ensembles of governments with ‘free’ enterprise. Your world view is blind to it. Emotionally I want to see the separation between free enterprise and the state. I think the state should be regulatory not for profit. However I’m not blind to how well government for profit works. You are blind to its successes and free enterprises total inability to deal with it or resist it except threat it as a force of nature and give into it.
The Tu-4. Stalin wanted a bomber “now”. He knew that any modifications could come later and did not want to enter any local technological development programs. From his POV the Americans had made a ‘proven’ system.
That was also done for the V-2. The Russian Chief Designers chafed a bit at that.
Then too, when was the last time space advocates in the West had a Beria to do wet jobs on Proxmire types? 😉
Now now, be careful what you’re asking for. We have the American version of “The Dictatorship of the Proletariat” going right now. The cult of personality is already looking to start a purge of American internal security organs and populate it with ‘his men’. You may get your Beria yet.
Projection being the defining psychological dysfunction of the left, you look at Trump and see yourselves just as the USSR used to do anent the U.S. Hence all the retrospectively amusing stuff like the Soviet notion the Space Shuttle was designed to nuke Moscow.
Trump is, quite modestly considering the roto-rooter job actually required, attempting to get rid of the worst of the arrogant Deep State traitors who, even now, are still pressing their failed coup attempts. The Obama administration did its best to establish a Dictatorship of the Proletariat and nearly succeeded. The motley collection of leftist whack-jobs now seeking the 2020 Dem PresNom have been vociferous in their descriptions of their own various notions for completing their versions of the People’s Democratic Socialist Republic of the United States. Trump is working to disassemble, at least in part, the aparrat aimed at advancing this goal stood up under Obama.
Well that went crazy quick.
I agree about what Stalin thought. The source I vaguely remember considered it a mistake.
A technologist who considers R&D to be the end all be all would consider it a mistake. A manager who executes policy, or a dictator who want’s their will executed, would not. Western Europe was threatened. The effort was a success. In the case of the Tu-4, the managers were right.
Apparently it was thought it it would have taken far less R&D to design their own inspired by, but not copied from.
Such speculation is always easy to raise as a question and almost impossible answer. Soviet aviation had a lot of dead ends, and some amazingly wrong turns like the M-4. Copying the Americans gave the USSR and Communist China a window on strategic aviation I don’t think they would have had otherwise without religious copying.
I don’t remember enough of the argument to keep going so I think I’ll concede the point.
They also may not really care about reusability–just cadence. There even seem to be payloads for CZ-9 now:
https://interestingengineer…
LM-5 can also play a role in fitting that out.
In the case of SpaceX, reusability turned out to be the secret sauce for upping their cadence. And it really was a secret sauce. No one saw it coming, or if they did, they kept it to themselves.
Musk’s constant pronouncements on the importance of rapid reuse served as an unintentional head fake. Graditis reuse turned out to be quite impactful. Yet we still see opinion pieces alleging that the economic value of reuse has yet to be established. I just read one.
You mean there’s someone out there besides our own dear RGO still attempting to peddle that line of crap? If you have a link, I’d appreciate you providing it. I’m always up for another good laugh.
Now I can’t find it, nor remember which site it was. But it was just a thrown in disclaimer, pointing out that the numbers are not available and thus the question is not settled.
Given that the PRC regime is massively unlikely to still be in business in 2035, I don’t think I’m going to lose any sleep over the still-very-much-notional LM9 and its even more notional payloads.
But what they learned did enable them to build the TU-16 which the Chinese copied to build their H6 which is still their frontline bomber…
Actually, thinking about, virtually all the Chinese military aircraft appear to be copies (licensed or unlicensed) of foreign ones.
As are their submarines, aircraft carriers, rockets, trains, etc.
Even their cars and EVs are copies.
Well, the EV’s, at least, are originals. 🙂
To date, copies may be the rule for them. My concern is that the sections of their economy that have become somewhat disengaged from central control may attract the serious talent that moves beyond that.
Japan was noted for producing copies and cheap junk at one time. Now they are more noted for high quality. Even with a stagnant economy Japan is a major player. If portions of the Chinese economy can follow a similar trajectory, there will be some surprises in store.
It depends a lot on how much top down organization remains in place in the future. Top down restricts the very visionaries that are necessary to move forward.
In answer to your last, presumably rhetorical, question, just look for your answer in terms of what the Japanese government was like in the 50’s and 60’s vs. what the Chinese gov’t. is like now. There’s your answer. And it doesn’t favor the Chinese.
Yes, and much more importantly, Japan has a much different culture. When their economic meltdown occurred the nation pulled together and shared the hardships. So there was no civil unrest.
In China it will be different, with every one for themself just as occurred during similar eras in the past, while the surrounding nations, also staying true to history, will get out their knives and carve chunks out for themselves.
Yes, in robotics and electronics, but not their aerospace industry.
The Chinese won’t be going the TU-4 route anent Falcon 9 for the very good and thoroughly sufficient reason that they have no way of getting their hands on an original that they can break down and copy. And their much-vaunted cyber warfare troopies seem unable to steal the necessary engineering docs from SpaceX – as witness the lack of any F9 copy in Chinese livery. So, there being no available shortcut, the Chinese will have to invent their own version of F9 the same way SpaceX developed the original – grind it out and accept that there will bumps along the road to practical reusability.
When they start landing their boosters on barges in the ocean the regime will probably name the vessels in some official government way, such as ‘Glorious Motherland’ or something similar.
My granddaughters have witnessed me watching several SpaceX launches and landings. During the latest Kacific mission my five year-old was listening intently. She watched me watching the video with rapt attention and was trying to understand what was happening. I was explaining the events to her as well as I could. She then asked me why the controllers were using the word “love”. The landing barge was called “Of Course I Still Love You” and she picked up on that. The name is whimsical, but that’s not an easy concept to explain to someone so young.
So, it will be easy enough in a relative way for the current Chinese regime to duplicate the engineering aspects of reusability, but I don’t see them copying whimsy.
I’d have to disagree on both scores. I don’t think the Chinese are going to find it especially easy to duplicate even SpaceX’s current capabilities, never mind what is imminent anent SHS. And on the whimsy front, the Chinese have already named their lunar exploration missions after fanciful characters from Chinese myth rather than stick them with dreary and leaden Mao-era names like the “Righteous Struggle of the People” lander or the “Triumph of Socialism” rover.
Mao was a singular aberration in Chinese history because, intellectually, he was European, not Chinese. His successors, including Xi, are simply reversions to old-fashioned Chinese emperors. They’re far more about maintaining the absolutism of their rule than of advancing the allegedly glorious cause of world socialism.
As usual you provide excellent rebuttal. Their naming scheme on the lunar landers hadn’t occurred to me. Your knowledge of Chinese history is impressive.
Anent LM5 payloads, there is the Chang’e 5 lunar sample return mission and two or three missions to launch pieces of China’s 3rd LEO space station already queued up. Beyond that, who knows?
I think the big question is how fast can China build LM5’s? If the capacity exists to build several per year, then China can clear its extant LM5-required mission backlog fairly quickly and push on into missions not yet vouchsafed to we in the West – mostly Moon-oriented one would expect.
If LM5’s production rate turns out to be more SLS-ish, though, that will have a very significant speed-limiting effect on how quickly China can proceed with its broadly described but non-detailed plans to “dominate” cis-lunar space. It would also imply that the eventual production rate of any new and larger expendable monster rocket – e.g., the notional LM9 – would be even mingier.
We’ll have to see how this plays out now that LM5 is back in service. What happens – or doesn’t – LM5-wise in the coming year should be a pretty good gauge of how much the Chinese can realistically get done on their cis-lunar version of Belt and Road in the years beyond 2020. If LM5 flies only once or twice in 2020, after its 2-1/2-year layoff for partial engine redesign, that would suggest that the rise of China in space is not something the U.S. need overly concern itself with. And contrariwise of course.
And, as must always be noted anent anything having to do with the PRC, all such plans are contingent on its continued survival as a a ruling regime. The odds of that continuing to be the case at any specific future date diminish appreciably as one looks forward.
Time for some EOR action