China Completes Record Launch Year With Successful Flight
China completed a busy year that saw the nation tie its own record for launch attempts with the successful orbiting of a remote sensing satellite and a secondary nanosat on Sunday.
A Long March 4C rocket lifted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center at 11:44 p.m.. local time carrying the Yaogan Weixing-33 (R) spacecraft. The spacecraft will be “mainly used for scientific experiment research, marine and land resource surveys and other tasks,” the China National Space Administration (CNSA) said.
Yaogan Weixing-33 (R) is the replacement for a similarly named remote sensing satellite that was lost due to the failure of a Long March 4C booster in May 2019.
A scientific research satellite named Weina Jishu Shiyan was also placed into orbit on Sunday as a secondary payload.
The successful flight was the last of 39 launch attempts for 2020 and the final one in the nation’s 13th Five-Year Plan, CNSA said. China finished the year with 35 successes and four failures.
The 39 launch attempts tied the national record China set in 2018. The nation finished that year with a record of 38 successes and one failure.
China finished second in launch attempts behind the United States in 2020, which completed the year with 40 successes and four failures.
Sunday’s mission was the 69th launch of the Long March 4C booster and the 357th launch of the Long March family of rockets.
31 responses to “China Completes Record Launch Year With Successful Flight”
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It’s interesting that the US is approaching half of the sustained 100 launches a year of the USSR.
hello Andrew…mostly spaceX …hope you are well my friend
Of the 40 launches for the U.S., 5/8ths were SpaceX’s with 25. ULA and Rocket Lab were tied at six apiece. The other three were NorGrum – a pair of Antares-Cygnuses and a Minotaur.
With luck we’ll have some new names contributing a bit to next year’s total.
Yup. We know what US space launch would look like without Space X. Starships to orbit? I’m going to firmly say Starships to orbit AND BACK in one piece in 2022. Starships to orbit and failing on return …. that might happen in 2021.
I agree that Starship is looking good and that it will almost certainly eventually work, at least for cargo. It’s a long way from being manned, as even Musk admits. I also think F9 has been an amazing program that the legacy contractors had zero chance of ever accomplishing.
Where the superfans and I part ways is on the turn around time for boosters. So far, despite Musk’s “aspirations”, neither one day, one week, nor one month turn around has happened. 52 days is the fastest so far for an F9 (twice).
A reason the superfans once used was:
“different customers demand different things, so that contributes to the slower turn around time. When SX starts flying StarLink missions, the turn around times will go way down.”
Well, we’re deep into the StarLink flights, and turn around times seem to have stalled at around 52 days. Clearly there is a lot of refurbishment necessary still.
There is no proof that turn around will be any faster for SS/SH. Even if you cut SS/SH turn around down to 20 days, you’re going to have a big problem operating the system the way Musk “aspires” to. He’s talking about *thousands* of flights for Mars, but let’s ignore that for the moment. If SS/SH indeed takes more than a day to turn around, he’s going to need a large fleet in order to refueling missions for a SS headed to the Moon.
I’d love it if SS/SH could be turned around safely in a day or two so that the system could operate with “airliner”-like turn arounds (except that an airliner turn around is 1-2 hours, not 1-2 days). However, the fact of the matter is that the stresses on both the engines and the structures of a spacecraft, especially one that reenters the atmosphere, are not even close to the stresses on the structures and engines of an airliner. I am not optimistic the SS/SH will ever operate as Musk “aspires” to operate it.
But that’s not a bad thing. Aiming high and then falling short is one heck of a lot better than sitting around never trying anything new at all. Which is what NASA and the legacy contractors have been doing for decades.
SpaceX operates like the West in general operated like during the early 20th cen. Push new technologies forward now and let the needs of the hard details show themselves, then work on those issues during operations. The primes try to do all the engineering all at once and hate the idea of operating in a region of known unknowns. Or at least they like to pretend that’s what they are doing. In reality they are operating like this to gouge taxpayers for up front engineering and minimizing operations expense.
The Starship program is going to be a series of gaps that will need filling for some time. And that’s okay. It’s so far ahead of the time that would need it, that they have margin to play with. For instance on energy of re-entries profiles. Whatever the state of the art of heat rejection is, SpaceX will likely use the margins of tanking to use propellant as a brake before and during high energy reentries. That of course will hamper the overall effectiveness of a tanker, but it still will open up all kinds of operations options that just don’t exist today. The question is will the market place and the US government support it? If it comes down to a real fight there’s no way ULA and their likes will have a role to play in space launch with the likes of Starship operating. They can play the ‘no monopolies except us’ game with Falcon 9, but once Starship is doing its thing, their game is over unless they get into the ultra-large maritime class launch vehicle game too.
Hello Andrew. see my note to Lee. I think that Musk is doing SS/SH as a leap frog project because I dont think he sees any “leaps” left in the Falcon technology. He cannot reuse the second stage…by either landing it or refurbishing it in space…and my guess is that he wants to move to the next step, and unlike legacy contractors not be stuck in the 1960’s forever.
as for burning fuel. I am just watching the entire act with interest. I have no idea what Musk first plateau where he gets a product he can actually use to make money…but its not going to Mars…or maybe it is
but the notion of burning fuel to reenter…well I am curious to see how that works in terms of total performance…
Hope you are well…and healthy Robert
I’ll check it out. First killer ap for maritime scale space launch? Decarbonizing the worlds economies. Space solar power with no land use impact. Decarbonizing is just the kind of scheme you could use to give maritime scale space launch the work that it needs.
Good Morning Andrew. everytime I think of solar power stations I think of James Burkes’ connections…the notion of which to me at least, is that there is a time when a lot of things come together. And before that moment the thing that they make is not possible and after it, its obvious.
space based solar power might be getting ready for its connections…(or it might not…we might be …I dont think so but we might) be on the bring of harnessing “a star” in a bubble…but anyway)
a lot seems to be coming together for solar power…we are pushing solar cell technology, there is reasonably cheap launch capability and its getting cheaper…and automation in terms of operation and assembly is getting better. and most important the political winds are blowing to embrace green technology and the implications of that.
the entire notion of launching it from the earth where there is a mighty industrial base, particularly if you come up with a device that can work in orbit for say 30=40 years …is somewhat attractive…as is the economic boom to near dead states like NM and AZ (both of which are now blue or semi blue in a blue administration)
well it could be interesting.
I grew up with Burke! When “The Day the Universe Changed” first aired it
was part of my weekly ritual to reserve the TV for that time slot. When he
covered the transition of art from cartoons to perspective techniques I went to the library to learn how to do isometric drawings. Then I signed up for drafting in shop class when I showed my shop teacher what I was doing. I watched “Connections” at the Ft Worth Public Library at the Tandy Center in downtown Ft Worth in their media center. Heady days for a young lad who’d then go outside for a walk downtown to The Water Gardens art exhibit, and catch the bus out to Camp Carter and watch the BUFFS MITO out of Carswell AFB. The F105’s of the TANG were a real show too. The Amon Carter Museum complex near Trinity Park still ranks high on my list of public museums to visit. I’ll never forget my mom got me tickets to the opening night of the first showing of “Hail Columbia” at the newly built Omni theater at the Science and History museum. Ft Worth Texas , such a great place for a young nerd to do some growing up in.
Yes working fusion power would obviate the need for space based solar power. But we’re still in the age of finding out more about the basics of fusion the closer we get. We really don’t know what all the natural processes are yet. The ideas of folks like Focus Fusion and Polywelll are in the right direction, but obviously they are running into basic issues still. I fully expect ITER to run into all kinds of issues too, but that may be the ticket to real fusion generation. If it is, it may likely be too expensive for a city to buy a fusion plant and we could very well still be looking at a 50+ year window for space based solar to carry the load.
as my late wife use to say (bless Marla’s heart) “Robert is stuck in 80’s and 60’s womens fashions…” those were the days
(power suits are making a comeback 🙂 even in her 50’s she would have looked great in them
all the parts might be coming together for a demo solar power plant it would be just the sort of project that launch cost would fade in as the years go by …and it would be an interesting national project to “nationalize” th egrid, which I am for… 50 years would be about right. I noticed that the UK did three days totally on wind power
Europe is turning the corner with several nations going days and in a few cases now even weeks totally on carbon free power. If you’re looking for something to watch in the last days of the holiday season. Catch Season 1 of a Norwegian-French series called “Occupied” or “Okkupert”. It’s a great 2015 mash up of European energy politics and post Trump American isolationism written a year before Trump. Bet you can’t watch just one episode. Season 2 and 3 are okay, but the first season is the gem of the series. If you’re familiar with the history of Norwegian occupation under the Germans you’ll love the overlap of 1940’s European politics with projected post Pax Americana European politics. I consider it great sci-fi.
The one catch there is that Musk has long been on record as regarding space solar power as a pointless boondoggle. I think there are other large-scale projects that SH-Starship would enable that are far less problematic than solar power satellites. Really big space stations look like a better bet.
those strike me as pretty good and valid comments. I think that Musk knows where he wants to go with SS/SH but I am not sure that he (and this is OK) has a solid grasp on the technology to get him there…but its putting it together piece by piece as he goes along…hoping that this yields him some sort of breakthrough in terms of cost…and takes his product to the next level in terms of cost and turnaround (what ever that is) ….in large measure because I think he believes he is there with his current technology.
but where that is, is I think one thing for the fan boys and one thing in the back of his mind…
as you point out in your last graph…we are going no where with either NASA or the legacy contractors…to them it will always be some version of the 1960’s….Musk is thinking on a level they cannot
Happy new year I hope you are healthy and well
Thanks. I hope all is well there. We are doing well here (trying to be ultra careful). Are you at the farm or still in Turkey? Or a mix of both? Happy New Year!
Just got home to Houston from my one and only long haul this month…a few weeks “off” so at the farm working on things…Happy New year can hardly wait till the predictions thread.
I wish I knew more about Xray stars. 🙂 a person in Boulder (a government type) has some money and he is paying me (not a lot) to record the down link whenever it is overhead from the two remaining Vela satellites operating…he is doing some sort of Xray studies…and the satellite cannot record its data any more…so its either get it or lose it…and I get it whenever it is in range. Just sent him a weeks worth of data 🙂
stay safe 🙂 nice comments
Reentry is going to be the next major hurdle and will tell us if maritime scale space launch is going to work now. Maritime space launch will have four major phases for it to mature as a technology. Ultra high performance engines (Raptor), reentry and heat absorption/rejection, in flight refueling, nuclear power for off Earth operations. Another 50 years for all this to flesh out. Musk has to change engineering practice of doing all the engineering all at once and get Western society to operate with gaps and fill them in during operations. I’ve been wondering if he’s behind that new ‘6th’ gen combat aircraft that’s supposed to be flying.
the engineering practices change is essential.
the US is at a virtual standstill on large government engineering programs and this is starting to bleed over into commercial applications…because 1) management and 2) the techniques used to achieve engineering goals…
you can look across the board…LCS, SLS, the Ford etc and they are all utter failures in large measure because of the same reason
Musk is at least pushing the envelope of knowledge gain.
Your assumption that F9 turnaround is “stuck” at 52 days plus-or-minus a bit seems based on the notion that refurbishment of recovered 1st stages is the key limiting factor on launch cadence. We don’t know that.
SpaceX launched 26 F9s in 2020 – one every two weeks on average. Next year the expectation seems to be of doing 40 or more. With a half-dozen S1 hulls in the rotation, each will have to be flown 6 or 7 times in 2021 to accomplish that. Seven times a year means an average time between launches for a given S1 core of – whaddayaknow, 52 days.
I think the real limits on yearly cadence are 2nd stage production and pad turnaround. To manage 40 falcon missions in a year requires a new 2nd stage every nine days. To do 48 missions a year requires a new 2nd stage not quite once a week. Pads also have to be able to be turned at these same rates. I believe the fastest SpaceX has ever turned a pad is nine days so seven+ day pad turnarounds are probably within reach. With the majority of F9 ops slated to be Starlink deployments in 2021, drone ship turnarounds are going to be an additional limiting factor that needs to come down to an average of one per week – a two-week cycle per drone ship. Failing that, a third drone ship needs to be added to the fleet.
So we don’t actually know how long it takes to inspect and refurb an F9 stage 1. Just “maintaining an even strain” over the entire available S1 core fleet next year doesn’t require flying each any more often than has already been done.
Pictures of the interiors of SpaceX’s HIF buildings at Kennedy and Canaveral often show used F9 cores hanging from the rafters. They are, presumably, put there once their turn on the inspection/refurb station is complete after a prior use. We don’t know how long that inspection/refurb process really takes or how long the inspected/refurbed cores “hang out” once that processing is completed.
SH-Starship turnaround is also unlikely to be critical-path dependent on inspection/refurb once regular operations begin, though that probably will be true early on in testing. Airliners are still given human eyeball walk-arounds. I suspect Super Heavies and Starships will probably get robotic “walk-arounds” with the video fed to Tesla-style AI that looks for anything off-nominal or just unusual. With Musk now talking of “catching” Super Heavies just before they would otherwise land, he is obviously looking to support as short a turnaround between SH missions as it proves physically possible to manage.
“Several missions per day” sounds a bit “out there” right now. But there were many who said the same of landing F9 booster cores just five years ago. SH-Starship ops five years hence? I’m not inclined to bet against Mr. Musk.
Ok, just a couple of comments here:
1) If you plan on refueling SS on orbit, you can’t have 50 day turn arounds. Or 9 day turn arounds. Or your posited 7 day turn arounds. No matter how you build a fuel/oxidizer tank, you’re not gonna keep them cold for more than a couple of days. You’re a smart guy. Learn some basic Physics. There is no evidence that a SS/SH can be turned around any faster than an F9.
2) I’m not the one saying that “several missions per day” is the standard for SS/SH. That’s your idol Musk. He’s talked about landing these things back on the launch pad, refueling, and relaunching in less than 24 hours. There is nothing that indicates that that is even remotely possible, other than his THC induced dreams.
3) Your “pad turnaround time” argument is BS. If Musk had wanted to turn around an F9 in a day, which he has claimed in the past is possible, then he could have launched from Pad 40 one day, then launched from Pad 39A the next. He has not. Which tells me it is not possible.
Any Starship that spends more than a few hours on-orbit or in-transit is going to need active measures to prevent propellant boil-off. The equipment to accomplish this is, therefore, already baked into Starship’s minimum engineering requirements for all Starship types except the Earth-to-LEO tankers. Said equipment will be powered by solar panels and heat rejection will be via radiators that will most likely be back-to-backed with the solar panels.
The “evidence” that a Super Heavy or Starship can be turned around much faster than an F9 lies in the SH-Starship stack needing no expendable bits freshly manufactured and checked out as part of said turnaround. The minimum interval between gas-and-go operations will be entirely a matter of how fast a fresh SH-Starship stack can be placed on a given launch mount and filled with propellant after the previous launch – along with how durable said launch mount is. Assuming launch mounts that require no more routine maintenance between operations than an airport runway, a Super Heavy that comes back to the launch site and is “caught” by the service structure might see only a 10-minute interval between launch and return. Lifting and lowering a fresh Starship of some kind onto the returned SH could take less than an hour. Add, at most, another hour for refilling the tanks of both vehicles with propellant and multiple such turnarounds per day seem quite feasible.
Of course it’s perfectly possible to launch F9s twice within 24 hours by using two pads. SpaceX, in fact, has planned such “double-headers” on a couple of occasions, but weather or some other problem always delayed one of the two launches so it has never quite come off. There is certainly no reason rooted in fundamental physics why such a thing cannot be done. But, using F9, what cannot be done is a sustained launch cadence of one F9 per day. SH-Starship has no such intrinsic limitation.
Good to see our estimates closing their former distance. I still think we’ll see a Starship orbital launch and return or two in 2021. 2022, I think, is the year in which a Starlink-deployer Starship starts to earn its keep while development of other variants continues and some them actually fly to orbit also – and perhaps even to the Moon.
Regardless of which of us has the better of our efforts at prophecy, there seems certain to be much to smile about over the next 24 months.
There’s a lot of good things to look forward to with Starship. Maritime space launch is believably within sight. I’d say given how soon it’s making its way to stage, it does not matter how late it is as it leads the payloads by so much that even if first orbit and return don’t happen until 2024 as long as the Musk money machine keeps rolling, I now believe the case will close. In the past I was not sure the Musk money machine could keep the dollars flowing to close the case. I think the twain shall meet, it’s just a matter of when.
Kitt Peak is starting to operate again, and I’m running my fav scope. So all is well. Have a happy new year too.
wonderful. hopefully it will be a great year. this year I look harder for Explorer 35 to see if it is still in lunar orbit 🙂
The USSR never sustained 100 launches per year. During the USSR’s tenure as a spacefaring nation – the 35 years from 1957 to 1991 – it averaged 66 launches per year. It only exceeded 100 once, launching 101 times in 1982. It managed 99 launches in 1976 and 98 launches in three different years – 1977, 1981 and 1983. Since 1992, Russia has averaged about 30.5 launches per year. This year’s Russian total was less than half that – 15.
The U.S. did 40 successful orbital or deep space launches this year – 41 if one counts the deliberately “unsuccessful” and suborbital Crew Dragon 2 In-Flight Abort test. Next year, SpaceX could well do as many as 40 on its own and the U.S., as a whole, could do 70 or more – 40-ish for SpaceX, a dozen-ish for Rocket Lab, 7 or 8 for ULA, 4 or 5 for NorGrum and a handful of others for Astra, Virgin Orbit, Firefly and Relativity.
The U.S. single-year launch record is 73, set in 1966. 2021 could easily prove to be a 2nd-best all-time U.S. record and, if all goes very well, perhaps even a new outright record, though that will more likely have to await 2022.
Let’s go by your numbers and admit to ourselves that Russia is not the USSR. They are totally different governments, run by totally different people, with totally different goals. So The USSR by your own numbers launched on the order of 90 launches a year in ’76, ’77,’81,’82,’83. What about the other years until the end? I have not gone to verify yet, but I’ll bet it’s really really high. Like 80+ launches a year. They had to. They were using film to monitor a world that was changing beyond their ability to cope. The USSR was launching a LOT of hardware for the last 15 years of the Cold War.
You’re pretty close on the numbers. The USSR launched at least 80 times per year every year from 1971 to 1988 except for a dip to 74 launches in 1972. The foreshocks of the USSR’s collapse became noticeable early in 1989 and the USSR was officially gone by 3Q 1991. Launch stats for that interval were 74 for 1989, 75 for 1990 and 59 for 1991. The slide continued with 54 in 1992, 47 in 1993, 48 in 1994 and 32 in 1995. The next 20 years averaged about the same launch cadence as 1995 – low 30s. The last five years, Russia has averaged less than 20 launches per year. More than half of those missing dozen or so launches per year are pretty much what SpaceX has taken out of Roscosmos’s hide. The rest can be chalked up to increasing national penury and the slow-mo collapse of its space manufacturing infrastructure
As to how different the USSR and Russia are, Russia has diminished to less than half the USSR’s population at its peak and has lost a lot of land area too, though it is still the largest nation on Earth. But both nations share pretty much the same goal – to defend and extend the imperium. That was the USSR’s goal during ts entire existence and it has been Russia’s goal ever since Putin took power 20 years ago.
Starship may suppress the 2022 launch total. Five times as many Starlink satellites per launch should result in one fifth the number of Starlink launches, assuming that satellite production is the limiting factor. For the sake of historical comparisons, we’ll have to resort to total tonnage launched.
Satellite production is running well ahead of launch cadence at the moment. Production can also be increased by adding more capacity and staff, something that will certainly be necessary if SpaceX gets cleared to take the entire constellation up from 12,000 to 42,000 sats. There aren’t even 1,000 in orbit yet. If SpaceX can up its Starlink F9 missions from this year’s 14 to 24 next year – seemingly quite doable – there still won’t be 2,500 on orbit by year-end 2021. Even if a Starship variant designed just to do Starlink deployment enters service before year’s end 2022, it would just be supplementing the Starlinks SpaceX would still have been deploying with F9 – and maybe even with the extended-fairing version of FH – during 2022.
Once SpaceX gets cleared for 42,000 birds, it’s going to have to launch at a cadence capable of lofting over 8,000 new birds per year given their five-year expected useful lives. And that will need to be done indefinitely. At 400 Starlinks per Starship, that means 20 or more launches per year. So I don’t see the transition from Falcons to Starships really doing much to diminish SpaceX’s yearly launch totals.
When looking at flight rate quantities we should also keep in mind other qualities too.
A Block 5 Falcon 9 is technically a heavy lift launch vehicle, in the same payload class as the Soviet Proton launch vehicle.
I suspect the vast majority of Soviet/Russian launches have been medium lift class Soyuz launch vehicles.
A quick check, shows the Proton has successfully launched at least 378(!) times. That’s pretty impressive.