French media: China's Blue Origin Aerospace Challenges Musk's SpaceX to Build a Reusable Rocket System
Chinese commercial aerospace company Blue Origin Aerospace is accelerating the development of reusable rockets, openly taking Elon Musk's SpaceX as its main benchmark, aiming to create a "Chinese version of SpaceX" in this key technology field.
Reuters reported that Blue Origin Aerospace, headquartered in Beijing, completed China's first flight test of a reusable rocket this month. Although the "Zhuzhou 3" rocket failed to successfully recover, this progress is still regarded as an important milestone for China's commercial aerospace. The company is also preparing to go public to raise funds to support subsequent rocket and engine projects.
Dai Zheng, the chief designer of Zhuzhou 3, told Chinese state media in an interview on Monday that SpaceX has driven technological breakthroughs through continuous trial and error and rapid iteration, providing an important reference for Blue Origin Aerospace. He admitted that one of the reasons he joined Blue Origin Aerospace was to help push forward breakthroughs in China's reusable rocket field.
Blue Origin Aerospace's technical goal is to develop a low-cost launch solution similar to SpaceX's Falcon 9, reducing the cost of entering low Earth orbit significantly by recovering and reusing the first stage of the rocket. This capability is considered key to supporting China's future large-scale commercial satellite constellation construction.
Elon Musk, founder of SpaceX, had previously publicly commented on the design of Zhuzhou 3, pointing out that the rocket introduced stainless steel structure and "methane-liquid oxygen" propulsion system, which are derived from the "Starship" technology. He stated that this combination is competitive in performance and cost, but at the same time emphasized that SpaceX's "Starship" is still at "another level."
Analysts pointed out that stainless steel structures, methane-fueled engines, and recoverable first-stage rockets have become core technological directions in global commercial aerospace competition. For Blue Origin Aerospace, the real challenge lies in continuous flight tests, tolerating failures, and completing the engineering closed loop.
In this recent flight of Zhuzhou 3, the first-stage booster failed to ignite as planned and crashed. Blue Origin Aerospace said it will arrange the next launch as soon as possible after summarizing the data. Reuters noted that SpaceX also experienced multiple failures before its first successful Falcon rocket recovery in 2015.
Source: rfi
Original: toutiao.com/article/1852885694964747/
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