Weekly Brain Droppings: First in a Series
Weekly Brain Droppings: First in a Series
A short deep-dive into crewed and cargo spacecraft 🚀 updates from Zhuhai Air Show ✈️ and China's space industrial bases 🏭
Dear Readers,
Happy weekend, and welcome to the first in a series of Weekly Brain Droppings, a short, end-of-week post that I’ll be sending across every week except the last week of the month (when I’ll send the usual monthly). The Weekly Brain Droppings will have updates from the week’s news, events, and other musings. And a h/t to the late, great George Carlin for inspiration on the title. Hope it is not copyrighted.
Without further ado, some updates from the week in Chinese space, with a focus on crewed spaceflight 🧑🏻🚀:
The Tianzhou-8 cargo spacecraft launched from Wenchang onboard a LM-7 rocket on 15 Nov, this coming a couple of weeks after the Shenzhou-19 crewed mission. As per usual, we got a bunch of good supplier data showing that the mission was a collaborative effort between several major SOE groups, including CASC, CASIC, and CETC. Highlights include usual suspect AALPT providing six 120t and four 18t liquid kerolox engines for the rocket, and more niche players like the Zhengzhou Space Electronics Company, who provided switches used during the spacecraft’s docking with the Chinese Space Station. In any case, we’re seeing China’s crewed/cargo space program really start run like clockwork.
And it begins to diversify, too, with the recent announcement of the Qingzhou commercial spacecraft, to be built by CAS SECM, as well as the Haolong spacecraft, to be built by state-owned aviation giant AVIC. This joins the rapidly growing startup AZSpace, who has been prepping their B300-L01 to be launched (in theory) this month, and nascent players like Interstellar. Will see where things go, but crewed spaceflight is undeniably hot in China these days.
The Zhuhai Air Show took China by storm from the southern city of Zhuhai. The massive event (~300,000 attendees showing up every two years) is primarily focused on aviation and aerospace, but in recent years has become a major space industry event too. This year saw a massive turnout from commercial and state-owned space companies, with too many to list. A few notable speeches included Galaxy Space Founder and CEO Xu Ming, who mused on commercial space, and Laser Link who exhibited a 4th-gen laser comms terminal, among some other cool kit. CASC announced the usual ¥60B of deals, mostly for state-run programs.
Laser Link’s LPPTP3 laser terminal. Source: https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/dV_IZmSXLvi8AIabUVh26g And last, but not least, fast-rising Chinese space industry news source Hello Space (你好太空) published a fantastic article on China’s space industrial bases. While not nearly exhaustive (no single article could be), it’s a great primer into the depth and breadth of China’s space industrial base across cities and provinces.
And that, as they say, is all, folks. Something I don’t say often enough, feel free to reach out and let me know what you think of the content. What do you like about the China Space Monitor? What do you hate? What makes you cringe? Let me know, I’m happy to receive feedback and this Substack is an always evolving animal.
Until next week,
Blaine