Last weekend, China celebrated its sixth “National Space Day”. As part of the celebration, the leaders of the country’s space industry announced the name of the first Mars rover, which is to land on the Red Planet in May this year. However, more interest was aroused by the stand on which the China Rocket Research Institute demonstrated the potential of suborbital flights. It’s a concept in which a vehicle is launched from Earth, flies into suborbital space, and lands on the other side of the planet in less than an hour. The video, which was posted on social media Weibo, shows two different concepts of achieving a goal over two decades. One of them bears a striking resemblance to the SpaceX Starship spacecraft.
Elon Musk’s company first introduced this concept in September 2017. Starship is designed for long-distance space flights, for example, to the Moon and Mars, although SpaceX initially considered the possibility of intercontinental flights. The Chinese ship, like the Starship, is made of stainless steel, its first and second stages are also seamless.
The second concept involves the use of a horizontal take-off and landing vehicle, for which some kind of electromagnetic catapult is used. Both of these concepts are part of China’s previously announced plans to develop global suborbital flights by 2045. In line with the goals set, China intends to deliver goods around the world by suborbital flights by 2035, and passengers by 2045.
This is not the first time that a Chinese space program has been inspired by the success of US SpaceX. The country has been following Elon Musk’s company from the beginning, especially in terms of re-using the first stages of missiles. Rumor has it that during the very first launch of Falcon 1 in 2006, the Chinese spied in the ocean near where the first stage of the rocket was supposed to enter.
China is developing a Long March 8 rocket (Changzheng 8) to land on an offshore platform, which effectively replicates the Falcon 9, and pseudo-private Chinese companies such as LinkSpace and Galactic Energy seem to mimic SpaceX’s launch technology. The country is now busy designing the Long March 9 super-heavy launch vehicle (“Changzheng-9”), as well as an accelerator similar to that of the Falcon Heavy.
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