Why Did China Develop A Kerbal Rocket?

I explain why China built a Kerbal Space Program Style Rocket!

#SpaceX #starship #elonmusk #starbase

Editing: John Young, Alex Potvin, Stefanie Schlang
Photography: John Cargile, John Winkopp & Stefanie Schlang
3D Animation: Voop3D
Script & Research: Eryk Gawron, Oskar Wrobel, Felix Schlang
Host: Felix Schlang
Production: Stefanie & Felix Schlang
Graphics & Media Processing: Jonathan Heuer, Felix Schlang

Credit:

⭐SpaceX
⭐NASA
⭐VirtualSpace_3D on X: @Lolomatico3d
⭐The Ring Watchers on X: @RingWatchers

📄Links for this Episode:

[Andrew-fytw]

If it's cheap and seems stupid, but it works, then it isn't stupid. Definitely unorthsdox, but the fact that a brick did that is actually impressive.

[oxygenasturia]

Considering the company is not even 4 years old and made its first flight a successful orbital insertion, this wasn't so bad at all.

[tjmagneto]

Where are all the struts at? Need more struts.

[OrenTirosh]

My guess: surplus and about-to-expire solid rockets from china’s ballistic missile program are sold at attractive prices to Chinese companies that can use them for space launch.

This one is the biggest, but they have a few other all-solid four stage launchers.

[CHMichael]

It works ... hard to argue with that.

[stuarttupp]

You can't actively control the throttling in a solid fuel rocket, but you can pre-program the thrust changes by how you shape the fuel.

[LordOceanus]

Nasa's Scout rocket is all solid rocket motors and had 99 launches over its family service life. The Minotaur rocket family (Minuteman and Peacekeeper ICBMs recycled for space launches) are also all SRBs and has had a total of 39 launches with more scheduled.

[Peteboi]

My mom: What will playing 2 hours KSP instead of homework going to help you with!?
Me: yes

[DECODEDVFX]

Building a whole rocket around SRBs isnt a bad idea at all. We've been doing it for decades. Shavit II, Minataur, Taurus, Long March 11, not to mention just about every nuclear missile in history.

[Swordfish]

Most satellites nowadays have on-board propulsion, so as long as the rocket performs well enough to get the payload to any reasonably stable orbit, the satellite can boost itself to its precise orbit.

The reason this wasn't popular before was that you used to have to carry literally tons of chemical propellant and asociated support structures to ensure the sat could compensate for any injection orbit, and this ate into the mass budget, so it was deemed more cost effective to use more expensive, but precise rockets, and use the weight for the tech in the satellite itself.

What changed: electric propulsion, specifically ion and Hall-effect thrusters. Unlike chemical propellant where the energy comes from the chemical bonds of the fuel, so you need a lot of it, electric thusters use power from the solar panels to accelerate inert gas ions at very, very high speeds. So the energy is now "free" from the Sun, no longer using limited launch mass budget, with a lot less mass actually needed to be used up as propellant.

SpaceX does this too, with Starlink sats typically launched to a 350 km orbit and boosting themselves to 550 km with their on-board Hall-effect thusters using Krypton (an inert gas) as propellant. This also has the benefit of testing the sat's systems for robustness, if it was to fail prematurely, it would deorbit and burn up in the atmosphere much faster thanks to drag from the rarefied atmosphere still present the lower injection orbit.

[blueyellow]

Solid fuel = long term missile silo storage

[Kid_Legend__Life]

I guess the fight for cheap and reliable will always be a running game for us

[ElectroniK]

You can see the paint job of the rocket says HLA, which is a Chinese clothing brand. Looks like a successful advertisement and commercialization of a launch.

[legodragonxp]

Japan and India have both done this already. The Minuteman missile controls thrust cutoff by panels that blow at the top of the rocket motor, zeroing out the thrust.

[dominichines]

This has been done before. Many countries' first orbital launches were on purely solid fueled rockets

[Edgy]

Back when I was in the rocket business my rocket was a two staged solid rocket. That thing was very simple. When the first stage ran out of thrust, the drag of that first stage became so significant that a small cable that was the triggering control cable for the second stage got pulled by that first stage falling away, resulting in the triggering of that second stage rocket motor and off it would go! Many early rockets were so simple you simply couldn’t believe it. They lacked sophistication and that helped them to be highly reliable. The KISS rule was alive and well. Why make something complex when simple works extremely well. The rocket? The Nike Hercules anti aircraft rocket that was assembled on a rail, and due to the solid rocket fuel, the missile was already at supersonic speeds before the thing even left that rail! Back in the day when I got to press the button they were about US$65, 000 each.

[mysteriumxarxes]

Elon musk doing it:
"Visionary"
"Bold"
"Technological Breakthrough"

China doing it:
"Kerbal rocket"

[kohanrains]

It might use a lot of fuel but in terms of cost per launch it definitely IS efficient to use a bunch of srbs...

[Shadowboost]

As someone who designs these for a living, this is far easier than you think. Hell, Minuteman even invented thrust termination ports for precision of ending the final burn in the 60s.

[CAMacKenzie]

Not the first solid fuelled orbital rocket. The Japanese have used solid fuelled rockets to put satellites into orbit, the U.S. had Scout, whose first successful orbital launch was Feb 16, 1961, carrying Explorer 9, and continued to be used for small satellites into the '90s. There have probably been others.