/sci/ - Science & Math

>>5164668
China's Long March lineup. This year Russia/Ukraine will have 35 launches, China 20 launches, and America 15 launches.

>>4971509
Not right away, Soyuz currently holds the monopoly (which is why their prices have risen 3x since the shuttle retired!) China has manned capability (a soyuz clone, basically; the rightmost rocket in pic) but it is only designed to go to their own space station; they are not an ISS partner.

The earliest projection is for SpaceX to have manned Dragon ready for flight in 2015, but that is very optimistic.

They already have overtaken the US.
>2011 US launches: 18
>2011 Chinese launches: 19

and they are neck-and-neck with Russia so far this year with ten launches each.

And for the future, they are opening a new launch site (Wenchang) and developing two new generations of launchers. And there is this space station they are currently visiting, a stepping stone to their long term plans for lunar colonization.

Firefly got it right: future generations will be swearing in Chinese because they will dominate future space exploration.

>>3823455
>frequent launch problem

The CZ-2C was pretty much a very reliable work-horse for more than 15 years. This was the first launch issue in all these years. Nothing big to worry. The problem has been identified as some issue on the steering nozzle, which is nothing to serious. And it has been fixed too.

The space-lab was launched by the CZ-2F, which is a heavier brother of the 2C, which is rather used for smaller satellites

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_(rocket_family)

And the entire series is very reliable indeed:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Long_March_rocket_launches