Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to re: Home-grown space technology

China's Long March series of boosters didn't copy from Soviet technology
Larry J — (archived)

Let's give credit where credit is due. China worked for decades to develop their own family of boosters and missiles. They did this after they split their relationship with the Soviet Union. There's a good book on the subject that you might want to read, "Thread of the Silkworm", a book about Tsien Hsue-shen. Their Long March booster family has evolved into a capable suite of boosters. They also have been using cyrogenic upper stages for longer than the Russians, so they couldn't have copied the technology from them.

Their manned spacecraft does share some design features and technology with Russian spacecraft, but it has some pretty interesting features that are unique. I'll see if I can find some unclassified references to what I'm talking around.

As for US rocket development, quite a bit of it was independed of von Braun. For example, the Atlas and Titan families were not developed by the von Braun group. I'm not certain, but I don't think the Thor IRBM (later evolved into the Delta family) came from them, either, but it did incorporate some technology from the Army's* Jupiter IRBM.

*In the 1950s, von Braun worked on Army missiles. The Atlas, Titan, and Thor were Air Force projects.

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