Comments by "shazmosushi" (@shazmosushi) on "Can China’s Space Startups Challenge SpaceX?" video.

If anybody wants a 15 minute firehose of information about China's older Long March (Chang Zheng) series of rockets, I highly recommend checking out Scott Manley's video titled "Every Chinese Rocket Design Explained!"
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 @WasatchWind The video was available on Patreon Early Access for a month and when "unlisted" YouTube videos are made public the release date gets reset but all the comments remain.
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M.O.K. SpaceX cofounder Tom Mueller worked at TRW for decades designing, building and testing rocket engines on the government's dime (none of which ever flew because Old Space are dinosaurs). The skills he learned at TRW, and at the Reaction Research Society amateur rocketry club built his liquid fueled rocketry skills which he applied to great effect at SpaceX. Also the original turbopump for the Merlin 1A engine used on the Falcon 1 first stage was very similar to NASA's Fastrac engine design (official technology transfer) The skills and experiences of an expert workforce gained from decades of experience from previous employers can't realistically be called technology transfer, but I'd argue that Fastrac engine and NASA's involvement on the Dragon capsule (I believe including SpaceX's PICA-X ablative heatshields) can definitely be called tech transfer from the public sector. But the sanctions argument is completely different. The sanctions are because the commercial space industry will fund China's military. But yes, the same argument can be said that buying a SpaceX launch helps subsidize the United States launching of National Reconnaissance Office satellites by increasing SpaceX's launch cadence etc
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I'm sure overcharging Chinese taxpayers for launching military satellites will be a very profitable niche -- it's what SpaceX and United Launch Alliance (Boeing/Lockheed joint venture) already do for American taxpayers :) One customer isn't enough. As with every industry, you need to achieve high launch cadence to bring costs down. As you mentioned in 1:56, China is locked out of the global commercial market: they are not allowed to launch satellites containing restricted US technology (which tends to be all of them), so instead China finances developing countries to launch their own indigenous satellites designs. This actually sounds like a Belt And Road type project by the way (I'm actually OK with that if there are no predatory loans, bribery and the delivered service is good quality). But there's no reason why the commercial providers can't do similar things. Admittedly most of the SpaceX launches which serve developing countries tend to be for private companies like AsiaSat, ABS and Thaicom rather than governments, but in 2018, SpaceX launched Bangladesh's first satellite Bangabandhu-1, which was manufactured by the French/Italian Thales Alenia Space. It's used for broadcasting satellite TV, and also (high latency geostationary) satellite internet.
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@douginorlando6260 First flight in 2030s? What's the fuel and engine selection? Will it be even partially re-usable? It sounds like a great competitor to NASA's Space Launch System (SLS). But LM9 seems like vaporware right now, and even the SLS isn't vaporware. If it's the "Elephant in the room" it's the "white elephant" in the room. China doesn't yet have an answer to the Falcon 9's reusability yet. Maybe they will one day, but until then you may as well call Long March 9 the "New Armstrong". They call such systems "paper rockets" for a reason. The rocket only exists on paper.
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@citizenofdaworld7582 I'm saying SpaceX already serves the "Global South" (I hate that term). So China's private rocket companies don't really have any international markets. Where is China's competitive advantage here? SpaceX is operating at costs far below the rest of the industry. It would take China tens of billions of dollars to match them. And then what? Still no international markets.
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I'm not a fan of the seemingly pervasive idea that China is moving fast in its development of space technology. They put people into orbit in 2003 but 18 years later they've done little else. China's new super-heavy lift moon rocket (Long March 9) won't even be ready until the 2030s! That's the kind of snails pace that NASA's Space Launch System works on. By contrast, it look America just EIGHT YEARS to go from launching a person into space in 1961 to Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969! That was of course spurred on by the Soviet Union during the first Space Race. For those of us who want to live through a new space race back to the moon and onto Mars, I hope China lifts their game and soon!
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