China official reusable rocket are even further away.
And in fact its not that China is closing the gap, its actually that SpaceX is INCREASING the gap. SpaceX is not standing still, going from landing to doing it 100+ times successful and 20+ times with a single rocket.
And in addition SpaceX is already moving on to Raptor engines and Starship, further increasing the gap.
So lets be clear about the fact, China is not closing the gap, they are falling further behind.
Small correction here - the leading Falcon 9 first stage has done 18 missions. Which is still the stuff of Sci-fi, but I checked when you said 20+ as I wasn't sure of that and it is actually 18. (B1058)
I think you're letting your hatred of China blind you to the fact that they are definitely chasing SpaceX's coat-tails - but don't forget that this answer was in response to "is anyone else doing anything like SpaceX in the world today?", and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX' progress and it is making its own progress, just as SpaceX did 10 years ago, in building reusable rocket systems. Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place. Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
How exactly do you know I 'hate' China? Because I actually don't. I'm Swiss very natural, China is just another evil empire like the US.
> and the answer is an emphatic YES: China is watching SpaceX and it is making its own progress
Ok, but I am watching SpaceX too. And so do many other people and agencies. Watching is meaningless.
In terms of progress, there are many others that are doing as much. RocketLab and Relativity space are working on things more advanced then anything China is currently working on. Even BlueOrigin is building a more advanced rocket.
The iSpace vehicle is barley more advanced then European tests that will launch in the next few years. And that is not much more advanced then what NASA did in the 90s. The rocket the iSpace demonstrator was supposed to be for is already canceled by the way, because the company knew they wouldn't have a market. iSpace also had issues with its smaller launch vehicle.
> Nobody else is catching up as quickly as China, in the new space race.
Again, everybody is falling further behind. That was my whole point. SpaceX is innovating faster then anybody else is catching up.
What I recommend to you is to actually look at what China is actually doing rather then just assuming they are great and fantastic.
Because while China is launching a fair amount most of their rockets are not very advanced, mostly copies of former Soviet rocket. The same goes for their human space flight. The rocket engines they are using aren't very advanced.
Non of the private space companies in China are particularly advanced either and its not clear they have much of a market. I would say all of them are behind the major US companies, Firefly, Relativity, ABL, RocketLab.
Neither US, Europe, Korea, Japan or India wants to launch on rockets from China. Even if these companies had launch capacity.
Its a real question if China has enough commercial launches as the state still uses its own rockets for the most part.
> Also don't let the myopia blind you to the fact that whatever SpaceX innovates, others will commercialize. That's the entire point in the first place.
Well, SpaceX will commercialize it first. And maybe years or decades later others will copy it.
Sure eventually these technology will be commodities.
But you are moving the goal post. That wasn't the argument I object to. I object to the idea that China was hot on SpaceX heels and catching up fast. And that's simply not the case.
> Musk has stated multiple times he'd open source everything if he was allowed to ..
Maybe, but designs on paper are a small part of what it takes to actually build many rocket.
SpaceX is not using lots of part you can just buy. Its pretty much all costume designs by SpaceX all the way down. Up to SpaceX having their own materials. And the suppliers SpaceX does have are American suppliers that China can't easly buy from.
So if China steals everything they still have to reverse engineer everything and then also reverse engineer the manufacturing.
And the other thing is, China has its own existing Aerospace industry and government. These people are proud of their own things and NIH is very, very real. The idea that they would just throw away 60 years of China history to copy an US company and spend billions trying to reverse engineer the exact same rocket just isn't gone happen.
And of course given that SpaceX is a huge supplier to the US military, such an act could be a huge international relations crisis and the US could retaliate in many way. So China would have to hid the fact that it did so in some way.
Therein lies the crux of why we can't have (as a species), nice things.
Too bad about that. But on the flip-side it means that when China finally overtakes rocket flight (like its done with manned space station missions), it'll give the US military a reason to exist.
There is a very, very, very big gap between a operational heavy and super heavy rocket that has proven re-usability up to 20 times.
What 'China' ie iSpace did was build a tiny hopper, did a mini-hop and demonstrated landing. Those things are totally different dimensions.
SpaceX has done test like that in 2012, and that was with far more advanced engine technology:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_9_prototypes
China official reusable rocket are even further away.
And in fact its not that China is closing the gap, its actually that SpaceX is INCREASING the gap. SpaceX is not standing still, going from landing to doing it 100+ times successful and 20+ times with a single rocket.
And in addition SpaceX is already moving on to Raptor engines and Starship, further increasing the gap.
So lets be clear about the fact, China is not closing the gap, they are falling further behind.