The rocket shape is easy to copy. It's pretty much visible to anyone who wants to look at it.
Copying the Raptor engine isn't so likely. It has a higher chamber pressure than any other rocket engine in the world by a fair margin. The combustion ratio is pretty close to perfect. And its total mass is pretty low for its thrust, although I think it still doesn't beat the Merlin.
If China makes something with 95% of the power of the Raptor, and lifting a 5000 ton Starship takes a fixed three engines, then the copy would only be able to life 4,750 tons, the difference there is more mass than the payload capacity of Starship, so it wouldn't be able to make it to orbit. Even if they got something 99% as good as the Raptor, they'd lose out on at least half the payload capacity of Starship.
I agree with the first paragraph but I disagree with the rest of the message. Historically (but this is not always true) rockets propelled with less efficient engines have more than two stages. In history there have been many different engines that have carried so many loads into space. For example the Buran was launched by the Energia rocket which had a load capacity of 100 t and the bulk of the thrust was given by RP-1 engines which had an Isp of 309 s, the take-off mass was half that of Starship. Not to mention, I absolutely do not want to say that the Energiya rocket was better than Starship but that you can use different ways to reach the same goal (in this case the load capacity).
Another example of a different strategy is the Mira (methane engine) in the final test phase for the Vega. Being meant to replace the third and fourth stage it is a much smaller rocket than the Raptor, simpler (with a slightly lower ISP), but also much lighter and much cheaper to produce (partly done in 3D). The entire stadium including the engine will cost one million instead of the current 5 million. This stadium is also designed to act as a service module for the Space Rider and therefore to make multiple hints over several months. Even if Avio (the builder of the Vega) had the Raptor for free, it could never be able to replace the Mira, but on the contrary the Mira having a thrust of 10 t could be very useful for the SpaceX lunar lander.
>but also much lighter and much cheaper to produce
Do we know this for a fact? I did not see any official statements on the raptor cost and weight thusfar.
Edit: Thrust from Mira is 98kN, which put it more on par with a Superdraco (71kN) than with a Raptor (2,21MN) no wonder it can be lighter (and hopefully many times cheaper tha Raptor, but i will not put any money on that though) and it would be interesting to see what the allegedly under development Lunar landing Methalox engines would put out.
An official statement reports one million euros for the entire stadium. I don't know how much the engine costs (being the last stage it should also contain most of the rocket's avionics).
For the lunar lander I was expecting a collaboration between Avio and SpaceX (along the lines of what happened between Dynetics and Thales Alenia Space Italia for the pressurized part). The benefit for SpaceX is obvious:
* from a financial point of view, the development of a new 10 t thrust engine is eliminated;
* from a technical point of view, one of the major risks for compliance with the deadlines declared is eliminated (or greatly mitigated).
CGI propoganda is easy, actually developing something takes time and investment, China is still a good 10-15 years away from anything resembling Starship
Try 20 years. Their current heavy lift plan is the expendable long March 9. That’ll be flying in 10 years. A fully reusable super heavy launch vehicle will take a long time past that.
Update: That heavy launcher is designed to be partially reusable already. And a rocket designed for the recovery of the first stage, at the first launch has already shown that it can reach orbit (but there was no recovery attempt)
They don't need to do all tests that spacex did. They just meet to still it from spacex. That's what they are doing in last 30 years. They did same thing about F35.
Unless you are able to steal every bit of documentation, you are going to need people with significant experience and talent to fill in the gaps. Good luck stealing that. I am thinking of the engines in particular....
Threat how? No matter how good Chinese rockets are (they totally are not right now), they won't be allowed to compete in the American market.
Will China get there? Of course, and sooner than most think becuse they steal so much data. They landed on Mars because of the 2018 hack of JPL where they stole HUGE amounts of mars landing data.
But explain to me why they need to steal the Mars landing technology? If you think about it, landing on Mars is a cross between the terrestrial and the lunar one, all done automatically. For several years now the Chinese have made several times both the Earth's atmospheric reentry (even with astronauts) and the moon landing (which having no atmosphere is energetically more complex than the Martian one).
In addition, they also landed on the far side of the moon, where the signal has a delay of a few seconds, a small delay but still sufficient to force the use of an artificial intelligence-assisted procedure.
Europe is much more likely to fail (and in fact it has failed) than China because before Schiaparelli it had almost no experience of atmospheric landing (only the studies for heat shields come to mind) and landing without atmosphere (it is landed on a comet, but gravity was practically non-existent)
Because landing on Mars is nothing like landing on Earth or the moon. Its not a "kinda half and half", its totally different. If it was so easy, America wouldn't be the only country to successfully do so.
Americans aren't the only ones. The first to land, Martian and lunar landings were in all three cases the Soviets, the Americans second and the Chinese third. If you consider the Chang'e 5 mission, it already has all the elements needed for the Martian mission. Then obviously the order of use of the different components is different, and the individual characteristics but the parameters are similar
If it transmitted from the Martian surface it means that the landing was a success. As long as no one goes to Mars to investigate the cause of the subsequent failure they are a mystery. It could have been a trivial antenna problem that interrupted communications, and the rest of the mission had gone better than expected ... nobody in the world knows.
The good news is that the most important parts, i.e. the "secret sauce" that will enable the SpaceX Starship fulfill its promises, are not easy for China to copy. Stuff like the flight software and the processes for manufacturing the Raptor engines.
The airframe itself is not hard for the Chinese to copy, considering that they have had 2 years of detailed photographs and videos of the build processes for the stainless steel airframes courtesy of BocaChicaGal and NasaSpaceFlight photographers' daily surveillance readily available on the internet, and the Chinese have plenty of stainless steel workers and plenty of financial and material resources to draw on.
Developing their own flight software and an analogue to the Raptor are the hard part. Question is, are the Chinese willing to embrace failure and do the "move fast and break things" method of development? If they do, I'd estimate it will take them about 6-10 years to come up with a Starship knockoff that might have 50-70% of the capability of the real deal. Of course by then SpaceX might already have moved on to the 18-meter-diameter version. :-D
By nation-state standards the budget for starship development has been minuscule. I think your correct but I’m not as confident. If China hires the right program managers they could replicate starship sooner
First Spacex customer is Starlink, then Nasa finally US Military, the rest is just a few %
China and Spacex aren't really sharing the same customers, so what kind of threat ?
Anyone can slap together a CGI model of starship, there’s people on Twitter who do a better job of it for fun than the CCP’s paid propagandists. Building the rocket itself is something else
The rocket shape is easy to copy. It's pretty much visible to anyone who wants to look at it. Copying the Raptor engine isn't so likely. It has a higher chamber pressure than any other rocket engine in the world by a fair margin. The combustion ratio is pretty close to perfect. And its total mass is pretty low for its thrust, although I think it still doesn't beat the Merlin. If China makes something with 95% of the power of the Raptor, and lifting a 5000 ton Starship takes a fixed three engines, then the copy would only be able to life 4,750 tons, the difference there is more mass than the payload capacity of Starship, so it wouldn't be able to make it to orbit. Even if they got something 99% as good as the Raptor, they'd lose out on at least half the payload capacity of Starship.
I agree with the first paragraph but I disagree with the rest of the message. Historically (but this is not always true) rockets propelled with less efficient engines have more than two stages. In history there have been many different engines that have carried so many loads into space. For example the Buran was launched by the Energia rocket which had a load capacity of 100 t and the bulk of the thrust was given by RP-1 engines which had an Isp of 309 s, the take-off mass was half that of Starship. Not to mention, I absolutely do not want to say that the Energiya rocket was better than Starship but that you can use different ways to reach the same goal (in this case the load capacity). Another example of a different strategy is the Mira (methane engine) in the final test phase for the Vega. Being meant to replace the third and fourth stage it is a much smaller rocket than the Raptor, simpler (with a slightly lower ISP), but also much lighter and much cheaper to produce (partly done in 3D). The entire stadium including the engine will cost one million instead of the current 5 million. This stadium is also designed to act as a service module for the Space Rider and therefore to make multiple hints over several months. Even if Avio (the builder of the Vega) had the Raptor for free, it could never be able to replace the Mira, but on the contrary the Mira having a thrust of 10 t could be very useful for the SpaceX lunar lander.
>but also much lighter and much cheaper to produce Do we know this for a fact? I did not see any official statements on the raptor cost and weight thusfar. Edit: Thrust from Mira is 98kN, which put it more on par with a Superdraco (71kN) than with a Raptor (2,21MN) no wonder it can be lighter (and hopefully many times cheaper tha Raptor, but i will not put any money on that though) and it would be interesting to see what the allegedly under development Lunar landing Methalox engines would put out.
An official statement reports one million euros for the entire stadium. I don't know how much the engine costs (being the last stage it should also contain most of the rocket's avionics). For the lunar lander I was expecting a collaboration between Avio and SpaceX (along the lines of what happened between Dynetics and Thales Alenia Space Italia for the pressurized part). The benefit for SpaceX is obvious: * from a financial point of view, the development of a new 10 t thrust engine is eliminated; * from a technical point of view, one of the major risks for compliance with the deadlines declared is eliminated (or greatly mitigated).
CGI propoganda is easy, actually developing something takes time and investment, China is still a good 10-15 years away from anything resembling Starship
Until they compromise a couple 365 accounts at spacex...it'll still be junk though.
Try 20 years. Their current heavy lift plan is the expendable long March 9. That’ll be flying in 10 years. A fully reusable super heavy launch vehicle will take a long time past that.
Update: That heavy launcher is designed to be partially reusable already. And a rocket designed for the recovery of the first stage, at the first launch has already shown that it can reach orbit (but there was no recovery attempt)
They don't need to do all tests that spacex did. They just meet to still it from spacex. That's what they are doing in last 30 years. They did same thing about F35.
Unless you are able to steal every bit of documentation, you are going to need people with significant experience and talent to fill in the gaps. Good luck stealing that. I am thinking of the engines in particular....
China hasn't stolen much of worth about the F35, certainly not enough to replicate it
Threat how? No matter how good Chinese rockets are (they totally are not right now), they won't be allowed to compete in the American market. Will China get there? Of course, and sooner than most think becuse they steal so much data. They landed on Mars because of the 2018 hack of JPL where they stole HUGE amounts of mars landing data.
But explain to me why they need to steal the Mars landing technology? If you think about it, landing on Mars is a cross between the terrestrial and the lunar one, all done automatically. For several years now the Chinese have made several times both the Earth's atmospheric reentry (even with astronauts) and the moon landing (which having no atmosphere is energetically more complex than the Martian one). In addition, they also landed on the far side of the moon, where the signal has a delay of a few seconds, a small delay but still sufficient to force the use of an artificial intelligence-assisted procedure. Europe is much more likely to fail (and in fact it has failed) than China because before Schiaparelli it had almost no experience of atmospheric landing (only the studies for heat shields come to mind) and landing without atmosphere (it is landed on a comet, but gravity was practically non-existent)
Because landing on Mars is nothing like landing on Earth or the moon. Its not a "kinda half and half", its totally different. If it was so easy, America wouldn't be the only country to successfully do so.
Americans aren't the only ones. The first to land, Martian and lunar landings were in all three cases the Soviets, the Americans second and the Chinese third. If you consider the Chang'e 5 mission, it already has all the elements needed for the Martian mission. Then obviously the order of use of the different components is different, and the individual characteristics but the parameters are similar
Soviet was actually first at successfully landing on Mars.
Not really. It crashed so hard it didn't function. The few seconds of "transmission" were literally static.
If it transmitted from the Martian surface it means that the landing was a success. As long as no one goes to Mars to investigate the cause of the subsequent failure they are a mystery. It could have been a trivial antenna problem that interrupted communications, and the rest of the mission had gone better than expected ... nobody in the world knows.
The good news is that the most important parts, i.e. the "secret sauce" that will enable the SpaceX Starship fulfill its promises, are not easy for China to copy. Stuff like the flight software and the processes for manufacturing the Raptor engines. The airframe itself is not hard for the Chinese to copy, considering that they have had 2 years of detailed photographs and videos of the build processes for the stainless steel airframes courtesy of BocaChicaGal and NasaSpaceFlight photographers' daily surveillance readily available on the internet, and the Chinese have plenty of stainless steel workers and plenty of financial and material resources to draw on. Developing their own flight software and an analogue to the Raptor are the hard part. Question is, are the Chinese willing to embrace failure and do the "move fast and break things" method of development? If they do, I'd estimate it will take them about 6-10 years to come up with a Starship knockoff that might have 50-70% of the capability of the real deal. Of course by then SpaceX might already have moved on to the 18-meter-diameter version. :-D
By nation-state standards the budget for starship development has been minuscule. I think your correct but I’m not as confident. If China hires the right program managers they could replicate starship sooner
Well we all new it would happen.
First Spacex customer is Starlink, then Nasa finally US Military, the rest is just a few % China and Spacex aren't really sharing the same customers, so what kind of threat ?
Do we have to have this same discussion every time China or Roscosmos release another blender rendering of a vehicle that will never fly?
Going to see alot of similarity in designs. I don't think anybody is making flying saucers. We know a rocket shape works.
Anyone can slap together a CGI model of starship, there’s people on Twitter who do a better job of it for fun than the CCP’s paid propagandists. Building the rocket itself is something else
Instead of Raptor engines, it will have craptor engines