China reveals reusable cargo shuttle design for Tiangong space station (video)
www.space.com
Haolong will be a low-cost option for getting cargo to and from China's Tiangong space station.

China has unveiled the design of a new reusable shuttle to take cargo to and from the country’s space station.

The Haolong space shuttle is being developed by the Chengdu Aircraft Design and Research Institute under the state-owned Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC). It is one of two winning projects stemming from a call for proposals from China’s human spaceflight agency, CMSA, to develop low-cost cargo spacecraft.

China currently uses its robotic Tianzhou spacecraft to send cargo to the Tiangong space station. But, taking a leaf out of NASA’s book to encourage commercial resupply options for the International Space Station, CMSA wanted new, low-cost ideas that can also return experiments and other cargo to Earth, unlike the Tianzhou, which burns up on reentry.

Haolong will launch atop of a rocket and land horizontally on Earth on a runway. The space shuttle measures 32.8 feet (10 meters) long and 26.2 feet (8 m) wide, and weighs less than half of the Tianzhou capsule, which has a mass of up to 31,000 pounds (14,000 kilograms). The winged spacecraft is now in the engineering flight verification phase, meaning its design and systems are under review before being built.

(Update: the video seems not to work for me, but I found the right video on youtube showing how a flight would work.)

  • GiorgioBoymoder [none/use name]@hexbear.netEnglish
    18·
    10 days ago

    It will be hilarious if China builds the Space-Shuttle-That-Should-Have-Been, rather than the abomination that NASA was forced to build. Scale it up & put this on top of a reusable booster and you have a fully reusable system like SpaceX is currently testing.

    EDIT: Ah I see this is small in scale, like X-37. Would love to see it reach the size of Dreamchaser or bigger.

    • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
      12·
      10 days ago

      It will be hilarious if China builds the Space-Shuttle-That-Should-Have-Been, rather than the abomination that NASA was forced to build.

      No kidding! The way the US Air Force treated NASA during the design phase of the Space Shuttle is disgraceful, and the root cause of all other space shuttle issues. I don’t blame NASA for the design flaws of the space shuttle, I just blame them for operating it unsafely while knowing those design flaws. For those unfamiliar it’s a pretty crazy story that deserves its own effortpost. The really short version is that the USAF promised to fund development and operations of the space shuttle in exchange for the space shuttle being designed to be able to capture enemy satellites and bring them down to US soil intact. This came at the expense of drastically increased complexity and size, mostly for the oversized cargo bay, which in turn required it to be launched on the side of its disposable fuel tank with additional dangerous solid rocket boosters (SRBs) strapped to it, instead of safely on top of a purely liquid-fueled rocket.

      Most early space shuttle concepts were like this, a fully reusable system without SRBs, which more closely resemble the Starship/Super Heavy design. Two vehicles with purely liquid-fueled engines, of roughly equal sizes and stacked vertically. But with large wings for runway landings of both ship and booster, instead of Starship’s vertical tower-catch landings and stubby flaps and grid fins just for aerodynamic control.

      And just as soon as the design was finalized and construction began, the USAF gave NASA a figurative middle finger and pulled out, deciding that they didn’t care about capturing satellites and wanting to launch their own satellites on regular uncrewed rockets instead. But it was too late for NASA to redesign anything, because the additional cost could have killed all funding from the US senate. They were stuck with the dangerous, difficult-to-fly monstrosity bolted on the side of a super-cold hydrogen/oxygen fuel tank that always dropped chunks of ice and insulation foam on every launch. The 27th shuttle flight almost ended up like the Columbia disaster due to heat shield damage from debris during launch. By pure dumb luck the damaged heat shield sections were over more sturdy parts of the spaceframe and Atlantis landed intact.

  • someone [comrade/them, they/them]@hexbear.netOPEnglish
    10·
    10 days ago

    The ability to return experiments to Earth will be huge for their scientific programs. Right now the CNSA lacks that capability. Their current cargo vehicle (Tianzhou) is a variant of their space station modules, which themselves are modernized variants of the USSR’s Salyut station module design. I doubt Haolong will be developed into a crew vehicle but I would bet that the lessons learned from it will be used in future crew vehicles.

    Update: Found a working video of how a typical flight will go. I added the youtube link to the post. I really like the idea of integrating the solar panels and radiators into folding panels on the top of the spacecraft. That will help immensely with keeping costs down and turnaround time quick. The American Dream Chaser, which is a broadly similar design for a similar-sized uncrewed cargo spaceplane and is due to launch soon on its first test flight, launches with a disposable power and propulsion section that needs to be rebuilt from scratch with each flight. That keeps R&D costs down but it increases per-flight costs and increases the turnaround time.