China is working on its own reusable rocket technologies, a source close to the research told Xinhua on April 21,2016.<\/p>\n
Chinese experts have already built a prototype model to test theories on the reusable rocket booster’s landing subsystems. They have completed “experimental verifications” using “multiple parachutes” supposedly attached to the booster, a source with China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technologies (CALT), developer of China’s Long March rocket series, said.<\/p>\n
“The experiment has laid solid foundation for the realization of reusable rockets in the country,” the source said.<\/p>\n
The remarks came weeks after the reusable main-stage booster of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket made a historic landing at sea earlier this month.<\/p>\n
Ma Zhibin, deputy director of CALT’s aerospace department also confirmed to Xinhua Thursday in a separate interview that Chinese scientists are working on reusable rockets, although the technologies they employ may differ from those of SpaceX.<\/p>\n
“There is of course more than one way to do this … I believe we could see some serious results during the 13th Five-Year Plan period,” he said, referring to the five years between 2016 and 2020.<\/p>\n
Still, Ma said it could take a considerably longer time before reusable launch vehicles could replace the current expendable rockets for good.<\/p>\n
“This is not a one-day job, making rockets retrievable and reusable,” agreed rocket scientist Han Houjian, a designer of the Long March-1 rocket which carried China’s first satellite Dongfanghong-1 into space in 1970.<\/p>\n
“Even (SpaceX founder Elon) Musk admitted that they had to reduce the payload of Falcon-9 to make it (the sea landing) happen,” he said.<\/p>\n
“The current expendable rockets will continue to serve as our main launch vehicles to space for now,” he said.(Xinhua)<\/p>\n
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China is working on its own reusable rocket technologies, a source close to the research told Xinhua on April 21,2016. Chinese experts have already built a prototype model to test theories on the reusable rocket booster’s landing subsystems. They have completed “experimental verifications” using “multiple parachutes” supposedly attached to the booster, a source with China […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4532","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4532"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4532"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4532\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4532"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4532"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/starpath.global\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4532"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}