The China Academy of Launch Vehicle technology wants to develop a new superheavy lifter, according to China Daily. The proposal has not yet been approved by the Federal government, however.

Rand Simberg of Transterrestrial Musings believes the new rocket is a waste of money. He does, however, agree with this statement:

China is also researching how to use the boosters and the first two stages of a launch vehicle repeatedly, which could help reduce the launch cost, he said.

Perhaps, but merely researching reusability (rather than implementing it) will not reduce costs. NASA researched ways of reusing Saturn rocket stages during the Apollo program. The methods usually considered were impractical, however, involving enormous parachutes and ocean recovery or mid-air snatch-grab. Other proposals, which might have led to true reusable vehicles, had significant Saturn heritage and component reuse but were effectively new vehicle development programs. Evolving an expendable launch vehicle into a reusable system has been proposed many times in the past but has never turned out to be as straightforward as it seemed at first glance.

Additionally, a reusable vehicle is advantageous only if it is used, frequently. Will China have enough 100-ton payloads to keep a reusable vehicle busy? That seems unlikely. More likely, such a behemoth would be launched only a couple times a year, like the Saturn V. Even if theoretically reusable, it would get very little reuse. That is one of the mistakes NASA made when it designed the Space Shuttle. Reusable launch-vehicle designers (and politicians) who haven’t considered the engineering economics continue to make the same mistake today.

This proposal from the Chinese academy is not surprising. They are the present-day equivalent of computer companies like DEC and CDC who increased their investment in mainframes at a time when microcomputers we’re about to take over the world.

The smart money says the first machine Chinese man or woman on the Moon will be a Chinese American, probably travelling on a commercial vehicle. There’s a good chance he or she will be a citizen explorer rather than a NASA astronaut.