Futuristic strategies of Chinese space programme

financialexpress.com:

By Dr (Prof) Nishakant Ojha

The story of China’s launch industry as it pursues what almost all launch companies are striving for at the moment – launching, landing and reusing Rockets. Rocket reusability is not a new concept. One of the emblematic examples of this was the American space shuttle retired in 2011 with the shuttle landing horizontally and the solid rocket booster is being refurbished. But it’s fair to say that the real surge in the popularity of Rocket reusability is linked to the success of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 coupled with a growing market for large satellite constellations.

This reusability fever picked up very quickly in China around 2014-2015 coinciding with SpaceX’s historic achievement of the first vertical Landing of the Falcon 9. At the time, China had started opening its space sector to commercial companies with new policies, with regulations and white papers supporting private and basically what we could call non-state-owned Enterprise entrepreneurial initiatives. The consequences would materialize very quickly and in the case of launch with over a dozen Chinese commercial launch companies founded between 2015 and today- all striving for a piece of the commercial launch market. The pattern for a new commercial launch company would very often be the same.

A group of senior Engineers from Chinese state-owned Enterprises or the Chinese Academy of Sciences would lead their jobs to establish their own rocket company. And then they would soon announce a family of rockets assemble a team, aided by seed money raised from local venture capitalist funds and often supported by Municipal and Provincial Governments, eager to attract high-tech talent to their territory and Implement National Policies pushing for