Elon Musk’s warning to the US government is true: China is getting closer to having its own Starship

SpaceX is in the midst of a dialectical escalation against the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) over the delay in the Starship flight license. One of the arguments that Elon Musk’s company is using is the strategic importance of your rocket in the face of China’s advance in space.

Starship delay “directly threatens America’s position as a leader in space,” he says a long open letter from SpaceX. The letter mentions the importance of accelerating the development of Starship to fulfill NASA’s Artemis program: the return of the United States to the Moon in the midst of a space race against China, and the prelude to the conquest of Mars.

The letter does not mention other strategic interests for the United States, but they do exist. The Pentagon has held talks with SpaceX about renting a Starship for possible military transport missions, taking advantage of the fact that the rocket is designed to fly from one point to another on Earth in just a few minutes.

With a load capacity of more than 100 tons, Starship will also mark a before and after in the deployment of satellite constellationsand will be used both to expand Starlink service and to scale Starshield, the spy version of Starlink for US intelligence.

Chinese Starships

Thanks to public investment and more lax regulation than in the United States, China is the country that More reusable rockets is developing. Some are directly inspired by Starship; others by SpaceX’s Falcon 9, but with Starship elements such as the stainless steel fuselage, methane engines, and reusable upper stages.

The most important project is the Long March 9 (CZ-9), a giant state-owned rocket under development at the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC). It has a similar design to Starship, with 30 engines in its first stage, and is planned to place 100 tons into low orbit before landing.

However, it will still be years away from seeing the rocket in action. Its maiden flight is scheduled for 2033, when it will be used to launch space telescopes, China’s lunar base and other potential applications, such as manned flights to Mars. It will not be the rocket that takes the first Chinese astronauts to the Moon: that responsibility will fall to the CZ-10.

In the Chinese private industry, there are several companies that are looking to have their own Starship soon. The one that is closest to achieving this is LandSpace. Its rocket Zhuque 3 It is smaller than a Starship and has a payload capacity closer to that of the Falcon 9 (20 tons), but it also has two stainless steel stages fueled by methane and liquid oxygen.

A few days ago, the Chinese company LandSpace completed the second test flight a scaled prototype of Zhuque 3. The rocket reached 10 km altitude and reignited its engines for a precision landing, demonstrating reignition and reuse techniques similar to those of SpaceX.

The company Deep Blue Aerospace This week, the US SpaceX also conducted a similar test with a prototype of its Nebula rocket. Everything was going well, but the VTVL (vertical takeoff and landing) test rocket failed landingDeep Blue Aerospace will try again in November.

SpaceX vs. FAA

At home, SpaceX is more concerned about bureaucracy than Chinese competition. In addition to delaying the fifth Starship launch In late November, the FAA decided to review SpaceX’s proposed changes (primarily, catching the Super Heavy booster in flight with the launch tower’s mechanical arms), and proposed fining SpaceX for violating the rules.

Specifically, the agency proposed a fine of $633,009 for two alleged violations during Falcon 9 launches: failing to complete a checkout process two hours before a launch (T-2 in the countdown) and using an unapproved fuel tank.

SpaceX does not accept faults. He excuses himself by saying that the verification survey at T-2 is not mandatory, and that the fuel tank is not new, but has been moved to a safer location, away from public areas. Elon Musk said that SpaceX to sue FAA for regulatory overreach.

Musk, who has been campaigning against the Biden administration and Kamala Harris’s presidential race, is lobbying from his X account of 200 million followers to reduce the bureaucracy of Starship launches. The goal, he says: to send Five unmanned Starships to Mars in two years to attempt the first manned flight in the next transfer window between both planets two years later.

China, meanwhile, is not resting. It has already challenged NASA to launch a robotic mission to collect samples from Mars in 2028. NASA has the Perseverance rover selecting rocks on the red planet, but it has stopped having a plan to go looking for them, so it has asked the private sector for help. SpaceX is one of the candidates and has offered to look for the samples with Starship.

Images | SpaceX, Shujianyang (CC0 1.0), LandSpace

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