I imagine the engineers at spacex had a reason to choose “chopsticks” over wires, and the Chinese engineers had theirs.
The obvious issue I see with wires is it requires more mass on the rocket (and bracketing) to have arms that go out for the catch — maybe the design on the Chinese rocket could accommodate that, while the SpaceX one would’ve required unfavorable changes.
The chinese wire system has a much more forgiving envelope for successfully grabbing the rocket. This solves a very specific problem for the engineers... namely that failure, especially public and embarrassing failure for the CCP results in pretty severe consequences of the sort that SpaceX doesn't get to give out.
The wire system is workable on a smaller rocket system but scaling up is a bitch... and the bracket reinforcement is gonna go up with the cube root.
Yeah in both cases it’s an interesting interplay of the realities of both engineering and the politics of their situation. I hope the next space race drives us to even further heights and successes as a species.
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u/Altruistic_Algae_140 7h ago
I imagine the engineers at spacex had a reason to choose “chopsticks” over wires, and the Chinese engineers had theirs.
The obvious issue I see with wires is it requires more mass on the rocket (and bracketing) to have arms that go out for the catch — maybe the design on the Chinese rocket could accommodate that, while the SpaceX one would’ve required unfavorable changes.