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U.S. Excluded China From International Space Projects – It Built Its Own
There was a time when the U.S. was open to international cooperation in space. It gained prestige and influence from these projects. But fear of competition from China and Russia have led to attempts to exclude these countries from international projects.
In May 2011 Congress banned scientific cooperation with China:
A two-sentence clause included in the U.S. spending bill approved by Congress a few weeks ago threatens to reverse more than three decades of constructive U.S. engagement with the People’s Republic of China.
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Representative Frank Wolf (R-VA), a long-time critic of the Chinese government who chairs a House spending committee that oversees several science agencies, inserted the language into the spending legislation to prevent NASA or the Office of Science and Technology Policy from using federal funds “to develop, design, plan, promulgate, implement or execute a bilateral policy, program, order, or contract of any kind to participate, collaborate, or coordinate bilaterally in any way with China or any Chinese-owned company.”
The European Space Agency as well as NASA were at that time favoring future cooperation with China on the International Space Station and on a planned Mars mission.
Since then other laws and sanctions have made the continuing cooperation with Russia on the International Space Station more difficult.
Banned from international space projects in which the U.S. is involved China went its own way. Ten years later it put a lander on the far side of the moon where the rover Yutu, the jade rabbit, is now pounding moon stones in his mortar to look for the elixir of life.
Last year China sent Tianwen, Heavenly Questions, and another rover named Zhurong, a god of fire, to Mars. It landed there in February:
“Tianwen-1 is going to orbit, land and release a rover all on the very first try, and coordinate observations with an orbiter,” mission managers wrote before launch in the journal Nature Astronomy. “No planetary missions have ever been implemented in this way. If successful, it would signify a major technical breakthrough.”
A week ago Zhurong, the fire god, took a selfie and sent it back to earth:
The camera, originally fitted to the rover bottom, was released by the rover at 10 meters south of the platform and captured the video footage of the rover returning to the platform and took the selfie. The camera then used a wireless signal to transmit the pictures and videos to the rover, which beamed them back to Earth via the orbiter.
“China will publish the related scientific data in a timely manner to let humankind share in the fruits of the country’s space exploration development,” said Zhang Kejian, head of the CNSA.
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Yesterday China’s space agency announced another success as three astronauts arrived at Tianhe, the Harmony of Heavens, which is the first module of Tiangong, the Heavenly Palace space station:
Three Chinese astronauts have entered the core module of China’s permanent space station to embark on their three-month mission, becoming the module’s first occupants and pioneers in one of the nation’s grandest space endeavors.
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Tianhe, the biggest and heaviest spacecraft China has constructed, is 16.6 meters long and has a diameter of 4.2 meters. The craft’s weight, at 22.5 tons, is equal to the combined weight of 15 standard size automobiles. It has three parts－a connecting section, a life-support and control section and a resources section.
Meanwhile the International Space Station develops more and more technical problems and is becoming obsolete. Russia is now thinking of building its own one. It may alternatively add its own modules to the Chinese station.
Russia and China will also cooperate to build a permanent station on the moon:
China and Russia have agreed to jointly construct a lunar space station that will be “open to all countries,” the China National Space Administration said in a statement on Tuesday.
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A statement from Russian space agency Roscosmos said the two organizations planned to “promote cooperation on the creation of an open-access ILRS for all interested countries and international partners, with the goal of strengthening research cooperation and promoting the exploration and use of outer space for peaceful purposes in the interests of all mankind.”
The attempts to keep China and increasingly also Russia away from international space projects have only led to them starting competing projects. These are likely to gain more countries to cooperate with them.
The exclusionary policy of the U.S. has not been successful. In the end it resulted in a loss of influence over future projects for which China and Russia are inviting everyone but the U.S.
Humanity would be better off if we avoided such splits.
A Red Ryder #1 who says: ‘Both China and Russia are significantly behind overall.’
This is exactly opposite of the facts. It is the US that is far behind Russia in crucial space technologies like engines and space station tech. China has now surpassed the US in engines [more on that in a moment] and space stations.
It is easy to understand why the layman would draw the conclusion you have done—due to massive hype in the US media about SpaceX. But consider this: the current US mars mission with the impressive Perseverance Rover got there with Russian engines on the Atlas V rocket. So did the previous US mars mission in 2011 which carried the Curiosity rover, and also the mars mission before that, plus ALL of the high-profile Nasa missions in the last couple of decades.
Despite all of Musk’s lip-flapping about Mars, his spacecraft have never been chosen by Nasa for any mars mission.
The same is true for the US Space Force, which includes the National Security Space Launch program. The Russian-powered Atlas V has flown nearly all of these critical missions, which include the X37 spaceplane, high tech spysats, and even missile early warning sats. Nearly 90 successful flights in all.
SpaceX has been given just three NSSL launches, for only the fairly pedestrian GPS sats. It also launched one out of the six X37 missions. That’s it.
Quite clearly the advanced Russian rocket engine technology is the workhorse for both Nasa and the Space Force, with SpaceX nothing more than a sideshow!
And let’s not forget that the US was unable to fly humans into space for nearly an entire decade! A big Nasa technology contribution finally resulted in the SpaceX Crew Dragon, which has now made three flights—but Nasa is still booking seats on Soyuz, just in case!
And as for the ISS, that is in actuality a Russian space station. From the wikipedia entry on the Russian Orbital Segment ROS:
‘The ROS handles Guidance, Navigation, and Control for the entire Station.’
That is the space station. The American and ESA modules are completely superfluous add-ons. The ROS is in fact MIR2, which was built already by the time the US abandoned its own effort to build a MIR knockoff, called the Freedom space station—which was killed on the drawing board due to serious technical shortcomings.
The US simply bought its way into MIR2 at the time that Russia was in dire straits in the 1990s. China also benefited greatly from the Russian space tech fire sale. Look up the Shenzhou program: they Chinese bought their entire manned program from Russia, lock stock and barrel—including the Soyuz spacecraft, life support systems, astronaut training, even space suits.
The Chinese also bought an advanced Russian rocket engine at that time, the RD120, which they developed into their own YF100. It first flew in 2015 and is an advanced, staged combustion cycle engine that the Russians invented and have been perfecting since the 1960s.
The US has yet to fly a staged-combustion engine, despite getting ten key technologies, plus a license to manufacture their own RD180s. Supposedly, the SpaceX Raptor engine is a staged design, also known as closed-cycle due to its high efficiency. But this engine has yet to fly into space. It is also a much smaller engine, about half the thrust of the RD180. And btw, the RD180 is one half the thrust of its bigger brother the RD170/171, which has been flying for decades, and puts out a monstrous 1.8 million pounds of thrust—the most powerful [and most advanced] engine ever built.
Engines are the heart of space technology, just as they are in aviation or even automobiles. The US is nowhere in this game. A lot of hype, but nothing to show yet. The SpaceX workhorse is the Merlin engine which is only 200,000 pounds of thrust, not even one quarter the RD180, and one-eighth the RD170.
And what about the reusability factor, which is supposed to be a game-changer? Well, nothing in engineering is free. It takes lots of propellant to land that rocket back down—propellant which could have been used to launch a much bigger payload. Go to wikipedia and look up Falcon 9. The expendable payload is 22.8 tons for the latest version, versus just 15.5 tons when landed back. That’s a 46 percent increase in payload for the non-reusable version. And that’s when the booster is landed downrange on a sea barge. If it has to come back to the launch site, the penalty is much higher yet.
Plus those engines must be torn down and rebuilt anyway, so there is little to be gained, except in certain situations where you don’t need the full payload. But this is wasteful in other ways. It does result in lower costs, which is a real advantage—but if you have very valuable payloads that are worth several hundred million dollars, like advanced sats, then your main priority is reliability, not saving a little on launch cost. The Russian engines have an unbelievable 100 percent reliability record in 87 launches.
The bottom line is that the US capability, when examined from a professional perspective, has huge gaps in core technologies. That’s not to write off SpaceX—they have a decent small, old-technology [gas generator cycle] engine in the Merlin and the Falcon 9 has made 121 flights, with only a few failures. It’s a pretty good step up from where the US was after those two Shuttle disasters.
But it’s still a long way from the technology that Russia has. And yes, even China has built on the Russian tech to now surpass the US in both engines and space stations.
Posted by: Gordog | Jun 18 2021 21:09 utc | 23
@ Gruff #78 who says: the clustered smaller engines on Musk’s Falcon 9 and potentially the Super Heavy, an added benefit is some degree of fault tolerance.
Not really. The more engines you have, the higher the mathematical probability of an engine failure. No engine can be guaranteed to be 100 percent failure-proof. Even if the engine failure probability is just one percent, having nine engines increases the overall chance of failure of the entire launch vehicle to nine percent.
This has been proven in aviation, where more engines means more of a chance of an inflight engine shutdown.
The ability to increase power on the remaining engines to make up for the loss depends on the amount of reserve power available, which, in turn, depends on the payload. If you are near full payload, there will not be much reserve power available. The loss of one engine will most likely mean that the orbit will not be achieved, since orbit is a function of SPEED, and speed is a function of engine power. In the worst case, the engine failure takes out the entire vehicle.
The fact is that not most SpaceX launches are nowhere near the maximum payload, so the engines don’t have to work as hard. This is what is mostly responsible for the Falcon 9’s good track record—although it has had an inflight catastrophic failure in 2015 with the CRS [commercial resupply services] flight to the space station, plus a launch pad catastrophic failure in 2016. Also a failure in 2012 that resulted in the loss of a sat due to failure to achieve orbit [so it can probably be chalked up to an engine issue].
The Falcon Heavy has only flown three times, and its heaviest payload was the 6.5 ton Arabsat in 2019, just one-quarter of its advertised payload to the high geosynchronous transfer orbit [GTO]. By comparison, the Atlas V with the single RD180 engine has lifted 4.75 tons to GTO on numerous missions, which is 100 percent of its advertised payload.
The Falcon Heavy has 27 engines, and is advertised as being able to lift ~64 tons to LEO. Each of those strap-on side boosters is basically a Falcon 9, with 9 Merlin engines each. This vehicle has NOT yet been certified by the NSSL:
‘[Falcon Heavy] is not certified for all of our most stressing national security space orbits. Thus, the USAF is working with SpaceX to mature their Falcon Heavy’s design.’
—Lt Gen Thompson, commander of the Air Force Space and Missile Systems Center.
Look folks, it takes TIME and many flights to perfect rocket engine technology. Soyuz has flown into orbit 1,700 times. Proton has flown over 500 times. SpaceX has just under 130 flights at this time, [btw, a good chunk of those SpaceX flights were to launch its own Starlink internet sats]. The Saturn V rocket of the Apollo program flew just 13 times before it was abandoned. The Shuttle flew 135 missions, with two catastrophic, inflight failures, which caused it to be abandoned.
The Russians have been steadily developing the advanced closed-cycle technology they invented since the 1960s. These engines are now bulletproof. They are in fact designed for reuse. The big RD171 is designed for multiple reuse and has been tested for 20 consecutive runs.
The US is just now starting to develop its own closed-cycle engines. I have already talked about the challenges of that in my #45 post above. SpaceX was not even able to develop the turbopump, which is the heart of a rocket engine, for its Merlin engine. It was designed and built by Barber-Nichols. No word on whether that capability has since moved in-house, since SpaceX is incredibly secretive and publishes nothing in the professional literature.
@ Mighty Druken #77, who says: Russian engine tech was by far the best but hasn’t moved in 20+ years.
Where did you pick up that information? Are you an aerospace engineer who has consulted with Russian rocket engine firms like Energomash or Chemical Automatics? Have you even traveled to Moscow or Samara [aka Rocket City] to take a tour of some of the facilities?
You don’t get a PERFECT flight record like the RD180 by accident. [And as I mentioned above, most of these launches are with close to full payloads, unlike Falcon 9]. Which is why they are the go-to engines for both NSSL and Nasa.
The Russians have not only kept perfecting their unique closed-cycle technology in existing engines, but have brought a number of new engines online in recent years, like the RD190 family, which was started flying in 2009. This engine is half the thrust of an RD180, and one quarter of the RD171. It is also exported to the US, and is the main engine in the Northrop Grumman Antares Rocket. Thrust is about 450,000 pounds [double a Merlin].
There are several other brand new engine designs, but I’m not going to get into all of that here. But what you said is complete nonsense. Russia graduates twice as many engineers as the US [Forbes ran a story on this] and they are the undisputed leaders in rocket engine technology. And by a very big margin.
As for using a lot of small engines, like SpaceX does, this has an inherent disadvantage that I already mentioned. More engines equals more chances of one failing. So SpaceX has been consistently flying with much smaller payloads that don’t tax the engines. And btw, used engines must still be torn down to be INSPECTED.
The reason they don’t make big engines is because that is much HARDER. Big engines bring big challenges. For instance combustion instability in those big combustion chambers. The F1 engine on Saturn V was plagued by combustion instability that caused serious vibration issues. Look that up, there is plenty of meaty technical material on this.
The RS25 hydrogen-burning engine for the Shuttle had the same kind of combustion instability problems. In 2018, an RS25 engine burst into flames on a test stand at Nasa Stennis after shaking violently. This was part of engine tests to revive this engine for the SLS project.
This vibration due to combustion instability was originally addressed with acoustic resonance chambers on the RS25, and a similar workaround on the F1, but this is not a true fix. The solution to combustion instability in big engines was found by the Russians decades ago, and it is to have a curved, or hemispherical injector surface where the fuel and oxydizer spray orifices are located, instead of a flat injector plate as used on American engines. The Russian hydrogen engine developed as an analog to the RS25 for the Buran shuttle never had any instability problems, and also produced higher specific impulse at a lower production cost due to simplified design.
Some of those design elements were copied by Rocketdyne when it developed the RS68, which is a bigger, but simpler hydrogen engine [Used in the Delta IV rocket]. Notably the thrust chamber regenerative cooling scheme was lifted directly from Russian practice. The US previously used tubes that were formed into the bell-shaped chamber shape. But the Russian method of inner and outer shells with corrugated surfaces on the inside where the fuel flows through, results in much more effective cooling than running the flow through tubes. This is due to the physics of heat transfer and has to do with greater surface area resulting from the folded corrugations and that surface area being in closer proximity to more of the fuel molecules flowing past. Also things like Reynolds number and other technicalities that I’m not going to get into right now. But tubes are far from ideal for heat transfer because most of the fluid flow is in the middle, far from the wall surface where heat transfer takes place by means of the kinetic motion of the molecule colliding with the wall.
This is just one example of the absolutely fascinating details in Russian rocket science. There is also amazing metallurgy and much much more.
The Russians are true masters at rocket engines. After many decades of world-leading engineering, it is deeply established in their institutional DNA in places like ‘Baumanka.’
That doesn’t just happen overnight, especially in some kind of for-profit scheme. A well-kept secret is the high turnover rate of engineers at SpaceX [there is some discussion on Reddit]. The pay is low and the hours long and the benefits nil. Once the novelty of working on rocket engines wears off, engineers go elsewhere to make a decent living, after an average of about two years.
But Musk doesn’t mind spending big on publicists and PR hype. That’s not how you build a rocket company. Most everything he says is basically self-touting BS.
I have just touched the surface here. For an in-depth professional-level discussion one could write a book about how huge the gaps are in US space technology and how far behind it is. Other than Falcon 9 and the mostly NASA-developed Crew Dragon, everything else is solidly in the vaporware category. Those new engines from Musk and Bezos are going to take years to shake out and prove themselves. And in fact, I have little confidence that they are ever going to demonstrate the kind of measurable performance we see with the Russian engines.
Posted by: Gordog | Jun 21 2021 17:13 utc | 79
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