We had no doubts about the capacity; of China to be able to insert itself among the major players in the aerospace sector and after having demonstrated it with the Martian mission Tianwen-1 and the lunar ones Chang & # 39; e, also the private segment & egrave; ready to show his teeth. Today we are talking about the Chinese company Space Transportation, which with its project designed to reduce the duration of intercontinental travel and promote suborbital tourism & egrave; ready to step on the toes of giants like SpaceX, Blue Origin and Virgin Galactic, and wants to do it within a few years.
Space Transportation basically wants to make it real. that Elon Musk wanted to do with the terrestrial version of Starship, but adopting a type of vehicle that is much more reminiscent; up close, the spaceplane solution introduced by Virgin Galactic.
The Chinese company has already embraced an idea with great potential; exhibited by others, it is developing it seriously and now we just have to see if everything filer & agrave; smooth and the ambitious project will be able to to come alive. But what is it really about?
Artistic reconstruction of the spaceplane with a winged rocket as the first stage
The idea is; develop a fleet of & quot; winged rockets & quot; completely reusable for intercontinental transport through suborbital journeys . Few details at the moment, but an animation on their official website (in SOURCE) makes the goal clear. Passengers are shown boarding a spacecraft connected to a kind of winged first stage.
After a vertical take-off we see the plane detach itself from the first stage and continue its suborbital journey, then once it arrives at its destination it is; able to land vertically with a final flip maneuver that is so reminiscent of the one performed by the Starship prototypes (but completed only once). Meanwhile the animation shows the first stage completing the return journey by landing on the ground. In the animation above we talk about a 7,000 km section that can be covered in 60 minutes, really not bad.
The Space Transportation company, whose full name is; Beijing Lingkong Tianxing Technology Co., Ltd., revealed that it is in an advanced stage of development and that the first ground tests are expected by 2023, with a first empty flight in 2024 and a manned flight in 2025.
The first official flight could arrive already; in 2030 but considering the proportions of the project & egrave; It is reasonable to expect a delay on the schedule. All of this & ograve; it would seem almost unthinkable for a company born in 2018 and whose plans have been shared out of the blue, yet in August 2021 Space Transportation announced that it had received $ 46 million in funding to develop this technology. They would already be; Some hypersonic tests have been started, but given the sensitive nature of the information very little or nothing is known about it (are these the famous UAPs identified by the US military?).
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