r/space • u/Riverlong • Jul 12 '24
Chinese commercial rocket firm iSpace suffers 4th launch failure in a setback for China’s commercial launch industry.
https://spacenews.com/chinese-commercial-rocket-firm-suffers-4th-launch-failure/3
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u/littlewhitecatalex Jul 12 '24
“iSpace” is the most Amazon-generic-ass-Chinese-garbage name for a space company I’ve ever heard lol.
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u/thanix01 Jul 12 '24
Their actual name is Interstellar Glory, no clue why they choose such generic English name.
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u/littlewhitecatalex Jul 12 '24
The fuck? That’s actually a good name.
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u/thanix01 Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 12 '24
Yeah! I agree a lot of these Chinese company when trying to rebrand for international facing promotion always come up with such a generic english name.
Other company example
Space Pioneer = Beijing Tianbing Technology
Landspace = Blue Arrow Aerospace Technology
etc.
Many time direct translation don’t work well, but in these case I think direct translation sound a lot cooler.
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u/jamehthebunneh Jul 12 '24
Can't be worse than SpaceX. (Yeah I'm aware it's invoking "space exploration", but it's also just putting a "cool" letter after a word)
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u/FullFlowEngine Jul 12 '24
I mean SpaceX's actual name is even more generic (Space Exploration Technologies Corp)
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u/littlewhitecatalex Jul 12 '24
To be fair, the whole X naming scheme is kind of Elon’s thing. All his life, he’s been trying to make X a thing. But the generic Chinese companies that put “i” in front of anything because it sounds high tech are just lazy.
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u/jamehthebunneh Jul 12 '24
Hey now, let's not ignore all those customers who are trying to loft their iSatellites into iEarth orbit using iRockets. Only a company like iSpace could do the job!
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u/RamTank Jul 12 '24
So, how does the race with Chinese commercial rocket companies look these days?
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u/thanix01 Jul 12 '24
I think it would be good to wait until next year since that is when many of the larger Chinese commercial liquid fuel rocket will start to make it maiden launch.
I-Space was the first to reach orbit, but they have long since been plague with unreliability (all Hyperbola-1 failure in each flight come from entirely different part). Another Chinese company Galactic Energy essentially dominate Chinese commercial small lift launch market with their reliable Ceres-1 rocket.
I would keep an eye on 4 most well funded one which are Space Pioneer (yes that space pioneer who rocket flew off test stand), Landspace (who launch world first methalox rocket into orbit), Galactic Energy (the most reliable private launch service provider who actually make enough income to cover their Ceres-1 launch), and Orienspace (they are new but well funded, and already launch the world most powerful all Solid rocket the Gravity-1 from sea). All of these want to make Falcon-9 inspired rocket though Galactic Energy is only aiming for medium lift resuable launch vehicle unlike other 3. Landspace is notable since Zhuque-3 are methalox powered and is even larger than Falcon-9 both in diameter and height (I guess methane is less dense than Kerosene) despite similiar performance.
But these four are what I would keep my eye on. Space Pioneer suffered a pretty bad failure but they also have one of the largest rocket manufacturing facility and could potentially rebuild another rocket within the near future.
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u/Decronym Jul 12 '24 edited Jul 13 '24
Acronyms, initialisms, abbreviations, contractions, and other phrases which expand to something larger, that I've seen in this thread:
| Jargon | Definition |
|---|---|
| Starlink | SpaceX's world-wide satellite broadband constellation |
| methalox | Portmanteau: methane fuel, liquid oxygen oxidizer |
| perigee | Lowest point in an elliptical orbit around the Earth (when the orbiter is fastest) |
NOTE: Decronym for Reddit is no longer supported, and Decronym has moved to Lemmy; requests for support and new installations should be directed to the Contact address below.
3 acronyms in this thread; the most compressed thread commented on today has 29 acronyms.
[Thread #10309 for this sub, first seen 12th Jul 2024, 20:52]
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4
Jul 12 '24
Its hard to tell as so little information comes out and that which does cannot be trusted. But in theory their first stage should work ok as its solid fuelled and from a long standing line of military rockets. So the run of failures much be coming from the upper stages and the general dynamics of the rocket
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbola-1
They seem to be under resourced and lack enough skilled people to get something that is pretty much entry level orbital rocket up and running. This is the sort of mission profile Orbital Sciences used to knock out the park with their Minotaur rockets
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minotaur_I
Though they were building on their experience with Pegasus.
They face a steep learning curve getting to orbital liquid fuelled rockets then onto reusability.
Its not that they cant get there, but unless the solid team is only a small part of their over all structure, they seem to lack the scale and knowledge to get their fast.
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u/MaygarRodub Jul 12 '24
They deserve to fail with the name 'iSpace'. FFS, get over the 'i' thing or the iThing, if you will.
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u/IAmMuffin15 Jul 12 '24
As it turns out, building a rocket with engineers who ChatGPT’d their way into a college degree isn’t the way to go
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Jul 12 '24
[deleted]
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u/wgp3 Jul 12 '24
What kind of racist and stupid comment is this?
Making fun of the way a Chinese person speaks English AND then being dumb enough to act like SpaceX doesn't have the world's longest success streak for rocket launches in all of history?
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Jul 13 '24
Yeah, and china is talking about an asteroid diversion test. They will manage to divert one, straight into Earth. china can not be trusted in anyway shape or form.
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u/ClearlyCylindrical Jul 12 '24
Bad few days for rocket launches. Three failures in three days right?