China’s next generation space program | Space News

Welcome aboard Station 204. That is enough vacation for me because it's time to come back and school you a little bit about China, talk about SpaceX blowing up some more things, cover the past week's launches and fart back at the sun during our space weather report with Dr. Tam, let's go. Now before we officially get started, don't forget to like the video, smash that subscribe button and hit the notification bell so that it's louder than five F-1 rocket engines at full song. I'm Jared Head and this is your Space News for February 3rd, 2020. As China prepares for an upcoming flight of their heavy lift Long March 5 rocket, which will test its capabilities in lofting space station modules in a new crewed deep space vehicle, the standard line has been trotted out, which is that the United States and China are locked in a space race. But let's be realistic about that. That's not real. The Long March 5 is a critical part of China's space ambitions. It'll loft a lunar sample return mission, China's first homegrown Mars mission, and a future modular space station. Yeah, China has said they have a long-term goal of getting their own astronauts to the moon and eventually Mars, but much like the United States, over the past two decades, China has been in no rush to do this. The Long March 5 is about to take its next flight though, with upgrades and a new crewed vehicle to test in space. China is looking at making this capsule its workhorse for flights to its upcoming modular space station and further out into deep space. Planned to be reusable, it'll be flying a mission profile similar to Orion's Experimental Flight Test 1 in 2014, launch to above low Earth orbit, then return at speeds similar to what you'd expect on a return from deep space. Albeit instead of three hours like Orion, China will be letting their capsule fly for a couple of days. It's an interesting time to be a space fan. We're about to see the beginnings of a space station from a country that has only flown modules solo in orbit around the Earth. On some nights you'll be able to look up and see the International Space Station as it orbits above you, and then maybe a little bit later you'll actually be able to see China's space station as well. But when we look up at the sky and see that, is that something that we should be concerned about? In my opinion, no. China has ambitions on the record of Chinese astronauts being on the moon in the 2030s, which is a time frame that will likely see private companies already there, and hopefully NASA and maybe a private company on its way to Mars. I mean, China has still got to get its Long March 9 super-heavy lift rocket set first, and that's not going to fly until 2030 at the earliest, and we all know that the very nature of aerospace means that will most certainly slip to the right. Now China has expressed interest in using the moon and asteroids for resources, but the grunt work hasn't even started for them, while a multitude of companies in the United States like Blue Origin are underway in earnest to make cislunar space economically viable. Even for scientific missions, China is pretty well behind. They're about to launch their first mission to Mars, and we all wish them the best of luck and we're hoping all the data it returns is amazing. But NASA did that in 1976, and made it a core tenant of its robotic exploration program starting in the mid-1990s. That's not to say that China is some kind of a pushover, they certainly are not. You could make a very valid argument that China is actually the global second power in space. But when it's compared to what the United States are doing, China is not really a threat if you even would want to use that kind of a word to describe it. China's ambitions and schedules and methodologies, they're just not the same as what the United States does. Now when it comes to China's military space ambitions, well, that's a whole other can of worms, and I'm not sure I'm ready to go fishing with that yet. And earlier I talked about blowing things up and SpaceX, so let's go ahead and hand it over to Ryan for this week's SpaceX update. SpaceX have been blowing more stuff up this past week, but don't worry, it was all intentional, as they were testing the pressure capabilities of the second Starship test tank. At the test stand down in Boca Chica, Texas, the second Starship test tank was doing an overpressure test to see if new building and welding techniques could help give it more leeway pressure-wise and allow it to reach the 1.4 bar safety limit required for human flight. Elon Musk and all SpaceX have said on Twitter that the test was a success, as it was meant to reach 8.5 bar, however I really hope that it was a success, as it will take us one step closer to seeing the enormous Starship and Super Heavy combo reach for the sky. Even the launch animation makes me excited. SpaceX have also launched another batch of 60 Starlink satellites this past week, adding to the 180 launched on the test launch back in May 2019, and Starlink-1 and 2. They weren't testing any more special coatings to try and reduce the albedo effect for ground based astronomers, however, as always, the Falcon 9 booster did perform a flawless landing on the droneship Of Course I Still Love You. This booster was also used on Demo Mission 1, which was the first orbital flight of the Crew Dragon capsule, and it was also used for the RadarSat Constellation launch back in June of 2019. But the booster wasn't the only piece of flight hardware SpaceX said to be brought back down to the Earth, as they also managed to catch one of the fairing halves on the fairing recovery boat named Miss Tree. Sadly, the other fairing half didn't land on the other recovery ship, Miss Chief, so it had to be fished out of the ocean. But at least the fairing half they did catch from this mission did end the 5 month streak of not recovering any fairings from Falcon 9 or Falcon Heavy missions. Anyway, with SpaceX not blowing anything up this last week, it's time to see what else has been happening in the world of aerospace. Thanks Ryan. As the wise Dutta once noted, if you're not blowing things up, you're not testing. Now to talk a little bit about that deployment of the Starlink satellites as well, with 60 of them added on to the fleet, that means that there's now a constellation of 240 in Earth orbit, which actually means that SpaceX is now the largest operator of commercial satellites. And to talk a little bit about the launches that happened this week, let's get right into our Space Traffic Report. Leaving the beautiful Launch Complex 1 on the Mahia Peninsula in New Zealand, Rocket Lab had its first Electron launch in 2020 on January 31st at 0256 UTC. Carrying the NROL-151 payload for the United States National Reconnaissance Office, no purpose or design was discussed. But we do know NROL-151 is a part of the NRO's new Rapid Acquisition of Small launch program. Rocket Lab continued their experimental tests of Electron Stage 1 recovery, with a successful survival through atmospheric entry. Lisa suggested to call it a flop and drop, so much like turn and burn, which I quite like, it stayed. We wrap up this week's traffic on orbit at the International Space Station, where Cygnus SS Alan Bean departed from the ISS on January 31st at 1436 UTC. It tested a new position to release Cygnus cargo vehicles from, and also was the first ground control release. After leaving the vicinity, over the next few days, SS Alan Bean will conduct science experiments and deploy CubeSats, while operating for about a month on orbit. This will allow Northrop Grumman to learn valuable information about what it takes to operate long-term in space. At the end of that time, it will be safely deorbited. And here are your upcoming departures, with a little of that firewalking. And to cover this week's space weather, here's Dr. Tamitha Scope. We're calming down from a solar storm that we've had over the past couple days that has brought us up to active conditions and brought aurora down to parts of the UK and even some over Canada, but the fun isn't over yet. As we switch to our front side sun, you can see we have a bright region, that's region 2757, we're saying goodbye to it as it rotates to the sun's far side, but we do still have the active region from solar cycle 25 to contend with, and we're keeping an eye on it to see if it's going to give us any solar storms. Now right behind it is a finger-like coronal hole that's going to be rotating into the Earth's strike zone here in the next four or five days, and it could give us yet some more fast wind and give us another chance for some aurora, so stay tuned. Now as we switch to our far side sun, while there's not a lot going on on the far side because this is stereo, it's looking at the sun kind of from the side here, but we do see as of the 31st, we do see a couple bright regions that are rotating into stereo's view. Now they're not doing too much right now, so it looks like things are going to stay pretty quiet, and that's a good news for all the space traffic up there, and especially for space launches. And now for your LEO, MEO, GEO orbit outlook. As we switch to our low energy particle environment, these are the particles that charge up the outside of spacecraft, including the solar arrays that then can cause discharges and electrical short circuits. You can see strong fluxes in and around the GEO orbits that even penetrate down into the MEO orbits, and you're continuing over the past couple days to see these injections and the pre-dawn hours, so you satellite operators, especially in the pre-dawn region, expect to contend with these surface charging issues, and that could easily extend over the next couple days because we have yet to get maybe some more solar storming. Now as we switch to our higher energy particle environment, these are the particles that actually penetrate to the interior of the spacecraft and can cause electronic upsets and anomalies. We are also seeing some enhancements inside of the GEO orbits, and these are going to continue, and we even see a little bit of enhancement in the LEO orbits, so you satellite operators and anybody dealing with space traffic expect to have to contend with both internal charging and surface charging issues easily over the next couple days before things begin to calm down. For more details on this week's space weather, including when and where to see Aurora, and how radio communications for launch and space traffic is going to fare, come check out my channel or see me at spaceweatherwoman.com. Wrapping up this week's Tomorrow Space News, we just want to give a huge thank you to all of the citizens of tomorrow. Without your help, we wouldn't be able to make these shows possible. Each and every one of you who does so, you're amazing and it's greatly appreciated. If you'd like to help contribute to the shows of tomorrow, you can head on over to youtube.com slash tmro and see how you can. But remember, watching our shows, liking, subscribing, setting up notifications, and sharing us everywhere you can is also an incredible help as well. That officially wraps up this week's Space News. It sure is nice and comfy to be back here in Station 204 and we'll catch you on our next episode. So until then, keep exploring!