Conversation with my good colleague Bob Zimmerman about reusability and the

Long March series of rockets launched by the People's Republic of China.

Bob recently observed Finns on a Long March 2D for satellites from an interior port, meaning

the rocket booster falls on a population or a populated area of China.

Reusability would avoid that problem, but then again where are they?

And this gets into the whole matter of reusability.

China's approach, NASA's approach,

ESA's approach, SpaceX's approach.

Reusability, the key to SpaceX's lead in the booster race right now.

More of this later, thank you.

That they're going on.

They don't have it.

All their long march rockets they presently have and they have a whole fleet of different kinds.

None of them have reusability and they were all designed before reasonably was even considered possible.

China is very innovative with other people's ideas.

So they see that the grid fins and parachutes help control the return of a spacecraft,

of a first stage, and that they have a problem with their first

stages crashing on their systems heads and it's bad PR so they are trying to use

this technology to improve that situation and that's a good thing. At the same time a

number of their pseudo companies as well as the government itself with its

long March rockets are trying to introduce that reusability. They definitely are aggressively trying to do that.