[FPSPACE] Long March 5 to launch in 2013

[agzak at optonline.net]

Keith:

Always love your thought-provoking comments. I suspect that Chinese space program is still probably a subject to law of economics, which states that flying less frequently does not make it cheaper and, in fact, it makes it more expensive. That's why one Saturn V mission in two years was perhaps even less sustainable than two or four per year.


Anatoly Zak
http://www.russianspaceweb.com



----- Original Message -----
From: Keith Gottschalk 
Date: Wednesday, November 21, 2007 7:29 am
Subject: [FPSPACE] Long March 5 to launch in 2013
To: FPSpace 

> >>>> Paolo Ulivi 11/20/07 9:50 PM >>>
> >The slow pace of the Chinese space program is always amazing!
> 
> Well, since Feng Jishen invented the rocket in 970 AD, it seems to
> have picked up a little!
> 
> Better slow but steady rather than any more Apollo boom-&-
> busts. If
> NASA had continued to send even merely one Saturn 5 per two 
> years to the
> Moon after 1972, we would never have seen the loony Apollo denialist
> conspiracy theory website. Those kids were not yet out of high school
> when the last crew of three returned. ISRO has a similar
> decade-by-decade plan. 
> 
> So by 2013 LM5 brings a Chinese equivalent to Proton, or the
> heaviest-lift variants yet proposed for Ariane 5, Atlas 5, & 
> Delta 4. No
> one is yet going back to a Saturn 5 class launcher, unless Ares 
> gets all
> its budget.
> 
> - Keith
>