Source: There are Chinese Chauvinist who mistakenly never paid attention to what the Chinese are actually doing versus long abandoned, past practices. This is a clever launch retrieval system and capitalizes on carrier aircraft recovery systems. Very impressive. I look forward to a Chinese version of StarLink. A recoverable rocket with cheap launches of large payloads is key. This rocket approaches StarShip scale. Bob Wilson
NASA similarly panicked when SpaceX poached their (dissatisfied w/ constipated bureaucratic leadership) best engineers
I hold high regard for chinas Tech capabilities, that’s why I am concerned about them, and hope our government is as well
Or the ones let go after Shuttle and other propulsion projects were shutdown. Huntsville is the home of Marshall Space Flight center and I remember the job market chill when shuttle was being shutdown. The irony was the “Delta Flyer” propulsive landing and methane rocket engines were programs at Marshall. When they ended, SpaceX was hiring. Bob Wilson
"A recoverable rocket with cheap launches of large payloads is key." This seems accurate, as far as it goes. Cluttering low-earth orbit with tens of thousands of starlinks and even more numerous networks being developed by others leads to very large risks.The purpose of all that is commerce of course. To make terrestrial communications more convenient and widespread so that corporations may profit. Or in a darker view, to bring terrestrial communications more under control of governments or entities that benefit from its control. Not leading solely to direct financial benefits. Now it may be that so many LEO transponders is a way to benefit the human enterprise that no other could accomplish. Of that I am not convinced. For example, doing the same from geosynchronous orbits would add 0.1 second of latency, and pose other engineering challenges. But LEO represents a shell around the earth of much smaller volume than GEO. So much littering in this much smaller volume does not seem to me a well thought out decision. Cheap launches of large payloads certainly have potential to benefit the human enterprise, including in ways not yet known. For such they are certainly key. Use them mainly to induce Kessler Syndrome in LEO? Not a fan. -- My other 'angle' is that earth observation from LEO offers benefits other than transponding communications. Some already well known and others probably not. This vast potential could be denied by LEO mega constellations leading to a debris shell.
