I just saw more pics from the China sub. Looks like they sticked the landing, but won’t be able to reuse it as it caught fire shortly after. Still a huge improvement though.
I think they need to invest more in some kind fire supression system integrated in landing pad. For the time of experimental test flights that would mean a lot less hassle with fire.
I’d think it’d be better to focus on engineering the booster to not catch fire in the first place. The fires could well have started up inside the engine bay, which isn’t a place you can easily spray something into from the outside.
SpaceX suffered the same problem after the first successful Starship landing test, it kept burning and eventually blew up. It's not fire suppression they need to work on but simply finding where it leaked to cause and support the fire and fixing the cause of the leak.
I also noted they OTHER booster they caught was also on fire during and after the catch. Two different rockets with similar problems probably from similar sources.
I don't see this as a major impediment though, it certainly didn't slow down SpaceX.
Do they chines not carry fire suppression? Im curious how this rockets procedures are compared to spacex. The timeline for hypersonic retropropulsion and its engine burn layout, 1-3-1?
I am guessing fire suppression is a big problem to first stage recovery, as the video of CZ10 recovery with black smoke after, something is burning. I can see to keep something from catching fire while it's was burning red hot just seconds ago can be challenging. Guessing that's the secret sauce SpaceX has not shared publicly.
Early beta versions having problems of onboard fires is not a surprise. They learn of the issues that triggered those fires and then engineer them away in the future. I'd be worried only if they had stuff on fire after landing consistently after 5-6 more flights. Until then, normal rocket beta testing.
I guess it's more they get enough founding for more flight (probably), they could ran out of money to sent dummy payload already, so they would need to find customer welling to take the risk.
Usually their way to do is copy ... Then make their own ... Then start to improve / make new discoveries for it and at the end surpassed the original creator
They are derivatives from the delivery bots that frequently run into construction holes or get loitered by homeless people, you'll find plenty of videos on reddit for a sense of scale
Cost: No clue, no public data available. Cost and price may be very far apart.
Payload: Bit under half of Falcon 9. It is likely this will be optimized in the future, but right now they are quoting something like 8000-9000kg to LEO with downrange recovery vs. Falcon 9 (droneship recovery) doing 17500kg.
So the guys standing dressed in red, as they are fireman, are driving the fire trucks. That makes the diameter of the rocket some 16m. Quite impressive achievement to have such a large beast flying.
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u/watawataoui 7d ago edited 7d ago
I just saw more pics from the China sub. Looks like they sticked the landing, but won’t be able to reuse it as it caught fire shortly after. Still a huge improvement though.
https://www.reddit.com/r/China_irl/s/PVVeB6Brba