China has upped its game in the space race, testing a new rocket engine that is twice as powerful as its U.S. competitor.
The ground test was carried out with “complete success,” the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation said Tuesday.
The engine will be used to launch Long March 9 rockets and propel astronauts in future missions to the moon. The Long March rockets are a family of expendable launch system rockets. It is named after an event during the Chinese Civil War in 1934 in which embattled Chinese communists broke through national enemy lines and began a fight from their headquarters in southwest China.
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Beijing’s newest rocket engine can produce a 25 ton-force, which is more than twice the thrust generated by the RL10, an American-made engine that is expected to take U.S. astronauts back to the moon.
CASC called Monday’s test the “world’s largest closed expander cycle engine test run” and claimed it was a major breakthrough in the development of a key technology for launch vehicles, the South China Morning Post reported.
Closed expander cycle rocket engines are believed to be the most efficient power source for human space travel because the engines can turn a small amount of liquid hydrogen fuel into high-pressure gas using waste heat, which then forces turbines to raise the pressure of hydrogen and oxygen in the fuel pumps. From there, the gas enters the top of the combustion chamber and is used as fuel. It is a much more efficient way than the now-used combustion process because it does not require the rocket to carry extra gas.
The United States and China are competing to see which country can get its astronauts to the moon.
The NASA-led Artemis program projects it will put astronauts on the moon by 2025. To do that, NASA has built its most powerful rocket ever, the Space Launch System, which was grounded last week.
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China and Russia have teamed up to build an international research station on the moon and want an astronaut on the lunar surface before 2030.
