Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".

suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.

So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.

And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.

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sigmoid10 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.

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Liftyee an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.

If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".

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mwambua 9 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...

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buckle8017 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Be serious, you don't really need a citation to know the CCP is using industrial espionage to advance their defense industry.

	▲	bryanlarsen an hour ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Sure, they're trying. But there's no evidence they've succeeded in stealing anything other than open source intelligence from SpaceX. There's a lot of open source intelligence about SpaceX rocket designs available.
	▲	throw310822 23 minutes ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Be serious, do you think defense industry normally respects other nations' industrial secrets?

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joe_mamba an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.

Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.

In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."

Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.

Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.

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pie_flavor 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.

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jopsen 11 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

> but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.

How many starlink clones are there really customers for?

Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.

Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.

Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.

	▲	db48x 7 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :) But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.

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IshKebab an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.

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standardUser an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

China is a full blown superpower and it should surprise no one when they catch up to or surpass the West in technical feats.