It's obvious to me that China doesn't care that much about the AN-225 design as for the design of the D-18 turbofan. They still can't design or manufacture a heavy turbofan domestically. This has seriously hampered their heavy airlift project (the Y-20, who first flew using Soviet-designed low-bypass 12-ton thrust D-30 fans, which killed its range). The domestic WS-20 turbofan design that was supposed to power the production Y-20 airlifter is still under wraps, which usually means the prototype is not doing well.
Getting access to a 20-ton thrust high-bypass turbofan design is a huge step for them.
Why is it difficult enough that not even a nation state as large and powerful as china has obstacles to develop a heavy turbofan? With respect to other tech they've developed I don't know what is technologically difficult here -- I'm asking genuinely as a layman, it's not a rhetorical statement of disagreement.
Fluid dynamics and combustion chambers. It's rocket science, a long, expensive trial-and-error development process. And unlike other sciences, most of the results are never published so each entity has to recreate the foundations themselves. It takes money, time, and dedicated careers.
Obviously if China wants to buy one the fact that they want to reverse engineer its technology is going to be patently obvious.
Even if China could get a hold of an AN-225 reverse engineering one is a huge task, and at best you only know exactly what this hardware did, not what they avoided, or good ideas they didn't pursue purely due to resource constraints etc.
So what happens instead is that a state like China approaches the Ukraine for a manufacturing agreement like the one described in the article. China hands over a lot of money which covers not just the planes but also the tech, and job are created in the Ukraine as a result.
Modern turbofans only stand up to their extreme operating conditions because of the use of exotic alloys and elaborate cooling techniques. Just because you know what shape a turbine blade should be doesn't mean you can copy the exotic alloy and manufacture it in a way that results in the correct crystal structure.
Not only exotic alloys, but single crystal blades. That's right, the blade is machined out of a single atomistically perfect crystal with no defects what so ever. The main point is that this reduces thermal creep, meaning you can have tighter tolerances and more power/efficiency.
Also, because combustion temperatures can exceed the melting point of the alloy, HPT blades often have a complex set of internal hollows and holes at the surface for cooling air. Air can be passed through to create a boundary layer on the surface that prevents the surface from heating up past the melting point of the alloy.
Also cool to hear them talking about automating as much stuff as possible to remove human error. Incidentally that's also how we go about software release processes where I work.
> single atomistically perfect crystal with no defects what so ever
Nit-pick, but single crystals can (and do) still have defects. Your point about single crystal turbine blades being awesome I agree with completely though :)
Because a lot of the "knowledge" comes from the engineering process much of it is trial and error and often it's not documented in the theoretical books ;)
This is why it's easy to lose the ability to produce something e.g. the big rockets that NASA used to make.
China can make a copy of the engine but it would not gain sufficient insight into why they chosen to design it exactly as it did so making adjustments would not be very easy or possible at all without putting almost as much R&D effort into it as making a whole new engine from scratch and debugging things would also be near impossible.
There is a reason why there are only a few engine manufacturers in the world, it's very hard work, and as far as big engines go then only RR and GE are really in the game.
> This is why it's easy to lose the ability to produce something e.g. the big rockets that NASA used to make.
IIRC, to avoid this when they shut down F-22 production, they crated a huge number of DVDs documenting every step of the manufacturing process, so that knowledge wouldn't be totally lost.
I'm not an expert in the field of reverse engineering but I have read in the past that it can be extremely difficult and end up costing more in time, effort, money than designing from scratch.
China has the luxury of being able to play catch up by purchasing technology. Why spend the next 20 years trying to develop it when you can pay Ukraine who already has the expertise/product and probably gave the Chinese a deal. It's just smart business.
China apparently did something similar with BMW. They bought a BMW factory in Brazil (I think) for a couple of billion and disassembled it piece by piece and moved it to China. It saved them years of figuring out the how to of high tech auto engine manufacturing.
The Chinese buy plenty of U.S. manufactured planes. In fact, in order to convince China to buy large aircraft like the 777, Boeing was more than happy to sign offset agreements[0] that sent a significant portion of manufacturing of smaller aircraft to Chinese subcontractors.
Lest you think I would only throw stones at my former employer, Airbus has been doing that and more. They are actually doing final assembly in China.
Should probably begin by saying that there's no fundemental reason why China could not eventually develop their own modern turbofans without outside assistance. But obviously now is better for China.
Designing and building modern turbofan engines is incredibly dependent on your mastery of materials science and fabrication. These are areas of science and engineering that are notoriously "art like" or even "black magic like". The accrued knowledge that sits in Rolls-Royce or GE or Pratt-Witney don't really exist in textbooks, and they aren't taught in classes either. This knowledge and know how was generated over 60 years of trial and error, and are jealously guarded, not just by the manufacturers, but also by their governments.
Things to consider: modern turbine blades are already pushing the absolute edge of lightweight-temperature resistant materials. And then modern designs will run these blades at temperatures that are nominally above the material failure point, because we've come up with ways to cool the structures. Oh, and the temperature resistant alloys in use? Secret. Empirically determined, and likely unique.
This being China...what are the chances they can buy existing designs and reverse engineer them and improve then so they don't start from scratch. They've done it before...
Well, they've almost certainly been trying that. And as the OP said, it hasn't been paying off in a big way. If they've been doing it (I'm guessing they have), then they've probably benefitted, just not enough for the big win.
Once you get into materials and fabrication, having a finished example to examine is rarely going to lead to a big win. If the secret sauce is in the fabrication (HOW do you make a single crystal blade? HOW do you inflate corrugated titanium? HOW do get this type of grain structure with this nickel-iron-manganese mix? HOW do you get a laser weld in this impossible again?), then a single example isn't -THAT- useful.
Reversing engineering a modern turbofan(remember, the basic principles of turbofans are well known) is more akin to reverse engineering Intel's fab process by peaking at a finished i7 (with AFM and electron microscopes) than reverse engineering say... a sensor fusion module once you get the assembly code.
Which is why the technology transfer associated with the engine deal is a big deal. It should (I mean, its possible that the terms are all fucked up) give the Chinese an oppourtunity to learn all of these hows and whys (albeit for a slightly dated design, but still a relatively modern one).
Yep, sending the prints over is just getting started.
Similar to razor blades and little balls that go into writing pens. Few companies can make them well. China has to import little balls from Japan (at least for high quality pens).
Sending over work instructions will help (somewhat). China will need veterans of the process to work with local Chinese vendors, explaining how to do each step.
The Ukrainian staff will resist handing over their work babies. Also, the subcontractors (heat treaters, metal workers) will not hand over their secret sauce.
China will figure it out eventually. This will help. Still many years away from mastering it though. They will have to source from Ukraine for quite a while.
In the field of materials and fabrication? Not that much. Fundamentally, the problem is that for many of the problems that we consider interesting in materials or fabrication, meaningful analogs to say.. the Navier Stokes equations don't even exist.
In the field of fluid and thermodynamics? Probably quite a bit. This is why I tried to emphasize the materials and fabrication bit.
Developing a modern turbofan engine requires deep expertise in numerous domains: fluid dynamics, metallurgy, etc. The basic principle is easy: increase temperature and pressure to increase efficiency. But just because you know that doesn't mean you know how to manufacture a single-crystal nickel alloy turbine blade that can actually work at those temperatures and pressures.
Ukraine has traditionally been the location of most Soviet block aerospace engineering and manufacturing, and much of it is still being manufactured there.
For example, several current models of Russian helicopters and military ships rely on engines made only in Ukraine, and the recent conflict and disruption of the military industrial complex (which used to and still is rather connected between Ukraine and Russia) has caused delays in producing these craft since you can't really replicate it easily, it takes a lot of time, skill and effort.
Also, lots of military rocket manufacture (from shoulder-operated to very large SAM) was and is located in Ukraine. Together with their rather large nuclear industry (currently civilian, but they used to manufacture warheads as well, plus the missile and guidance systems) they probably could be a first-rate nuclear power with MIRV ICBMs if there was a political will to make it so again.
I think the Soviet Union physically based a good chunk of its military industry in Ukraine, which the country then inherited when it became independent. So when we talk about Ukraine in this context, we're talking about a former superpower.
"it carries a world record payload of 250 tons (to put this into comparison, it can carry around 300,000 lbs more than the US military's Boeing made C-17"
What was the writer thinking? My readers won't understand what 250 tons is, so I'll use imperial metrics, too? Net effect is that this only makes full sense to those who understand both metric and imperial units.
(I think a pound is 454 grams ('easy' to remember because that's the unit most jam is sold in in the EU (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metrication_in_the_United_King...). That would make 300,000 pounds about 135,000 kg or 135 tons, so it carries about double what a C17 can carry)
It's also unclear why they compare to the C-17 instead of the C-5, which is larger and handles a heavier payload (by about 100,000 lbs). Heck, even a 747 has a higher payload than a C-17. Being the biggest wasn't the C-17s goal.
Might as well tell us how much more payload it has than a Cessna 172
Given the publication, I would imagine he's an American author writing to an American audience. I didn't think twice that 1 ton = 2,000 lbs so it made perfect sense here.
Makes sense it would be confusing to people on the metric system, but I doubt he thought twice about it.
I think the author just isn't very good at weights and measures. According to wikipedia the max payload is 253,820 kg which is 253.8 tonnes or 280 US tons or 560,000 lbs.
A C17 can carry 170,900 pounds so it carries 339,000 lbs more approx.
Reminds me of one of my high school geograph teachers who gave the length of the Grand Canyon in miles and the width in km because he couldn't do the conversion.
If it actually gave both versions of the same number, that would be fine. But this way is just confusing. It would be like saying "Mt Everest is nearly 6 miles high, or in other words more than 16000 feet higher than Mt Fuji"
The AN-225's little brother the AN-124 was once used to fly a diesel locomotive from Canada to Ireland. It worked out cheaper for the train manufacture to pay to have it flown over, and meet the contractural delivery date, rather than shipping it by sea and paying the fine for missing the deadline.
The PLA is trying to establish a power projection capability.
There are very few militaries in the world that can routinely operate on a large scale a long way from their home bases. The US can and does. Russia can do it with difficulty. Britain can do it on a small scale. Beyond that, few armies have the logistics capability. China is gearing up to join the club.
There's also the PLA Navy's aircraft carrier program, which is progressing slowly. They have one refurbished USSR aircraft carrier in commission for training purposes, and two ramp-type carriers under construction.
This doesn't seem to be the PLA's big effort, though. Most of their new weapon systems are for sea dominance in China's coastal waters, broadly defined.
From the title, I thought this was going to be about the Spruce Goose, but it turns out the Spruce Goose was designed only for a 75-ton capacity, not the 250 tons of the Ан-225. The Spruce Goose had a larger wingspan (97.5 m rather than 88 m) but the Ан-225 is longer (84 m rather than 66⅔ m).
It's interesting to reflect that the previous "world's largest plane," and still the one with the widest wingspan, dates from WWII. In a sense this reflects changing social priorities, and in another sense it may reflect a generalized form of Conway's law: giant aircraft are produced by giant monolithic bureaucracies brooking no dissent, like countries in wartime or totalitarian governments.
If that's the case, maybe we'll see more such planes if the wars in Syria and other places continue to spread, pushing countries like the US and the EU powers onto more of a wartime footing. But it's not clear they'll be strategically beneficial for fighting in the Drone Age; they're too hard to build and too easy to destroy.
I don't think of it as a "world gone to hell scenario" so much as a "World War II scenario" or a "Bronze Age collapse scenario". Smaller cargo planes should be somewhat more survivable than bigger ones in an environment full of Angels' Teeth and other micro-drones, but downing 250 large cargo planes still only requires landing 250 small robots on them and cutting a fuel line or something.
Oh, I agree! But I think we've seen a trend away from things like the 747-400 and the Ан-225 already over the last decades, and not just in the military, and I wonder why that is.
It seems likely that the current war, if it really takes off, is going to be more significant than WWII. In WWII, major parts of Earth were not battlefields: the Americas, Antarctica, Australia, most of Africa, India, Mongolia, Siberia, parts of China, and orbit were spared. And there were no nuclear weapons on the table until the end of the war, and no precision-guided munitions at all anywhere.
It seems like this war, if not stopped quickly, could lead to the end of territorial monopolies on force, and thus geopolitics as we know it. What will it look like? Both the war and its aftermath are literally unimaginable. We can't even say it'll be better or worse than WWII — precision-guided munitions mean there's no more need to expensively Dresden a city to destroy its industrial infrastructure, but it also means you could be killed without warning at any moment because an IA misinterpreted your Facebook status or your cellphone metadata, like Malik Jalal.
Interview with Alfred Werner, Liberal Judaism 16 (April-May 1949), Einstein Archive 30-1104, as sourced in The New Quotable Einstein by Alice Calaprice (2005), p. 173
Differing versions of such a statement are attributed to conversations as early as 1948 (e.g. The Rotarian, 72 (6), June 1948, p. 9: "I don't know. But I can tell you what they'll use in the fourth. They'll use rocks!"). Another variant ("I do not know with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones") is attributed to an unidentified letter to Harry S. Truman in "The culture of Einstein" by Alex Johnson, MSNBC, (18 April 2005). However, prior to 1948 very similar quotes were attributed in various articles to an unnamed army lieutenant, as discussed at Quote Investigator : "The Futuristic Weapons of WW3 Are Unknown, But WW4 Will Be Fought With Stones and Spears". The earliest found was from “Quote and Unquote: Raising ‘Alarmist’ Cry Brings a Winchell Reply” by Walter Winchell, in the Wisconsin State Journal (23 September 1946), p. 6, Col. 3. In this article Winchell wrote:
Joe Laitin reports that reporters at Bikini were questioning an army lieutenant about what weapons would be used in the next war.
“I dunno,” he said, “but in the war after the next war, sure as Hell, they’ll be using spears!”
It seems plausible, therefore, that Einstein may have been quoting or paraphrasing an expression which he had heard or read elsewhere.
So this was originally made to carry the USSR's Buran space-shuttle-like project. I'd never heard of Buran before, but I have heard many critiques of the US's space shuttle program. Yet Buran looks almost identical from a cursory view.
> Why would the Soviet's independently develop a highly flawed project?
Probably a few reasons:
* At the point of starting Shuttle operations, the flaws of the design weren't as apparent, especially not to general public.
* Even though it LOOKS similar, it's actually not all that similar in design. The main difference is that it doesn't actually carry engines (which are the most expensive and problematic part of Shuttle due to their planned reuse) - Buran was taken into orbit by an expendable Energia rocket, which "solved" the problems with expensive engine rebuilds and testing.
* At the end of the day, Buran never got past the prototype stage. It flew a single mission (empty, fully automated), landed and was then shelved. Only two prototypes were ever built.
It's not just rebuilding engines it's returning their weight that's a problem. The high temperatures are a result of pressure not friction. A smaller and or less dense craft has a vastly easier time during reentry.
A shuttle actually works fairly well at around 1/5 the size. Lower thermal stress means no tiles. It would have a single ideally swappable engine large on board fuel and no external fuel tank. Still needs SRB's but those actually work fairly well.
My understanding is that it got fatally compromised as either a 3 letter agency or the pentagon wanted to use it for satellite maintenance/retrieval. Never happened, but it still resulted in a hybrid design that was basically suitable for neither. In the end it may well have continued flying as a kind of "national pride" issue.
Speaking from memory, but AFAIR the biggest impact of those military requirements on the Shuttle design were coming from the "nonstandard" orbits and orbital schedules those missions would require.
The Air Force requested the ability for the shuttle to take off from Vandenburg Airforce Base, go into polar orbit, and then land back at Vandenburg at the end of that one orbit. This required that the Shuttle have ~1000nm of cross range (that is that once it deorbits, it needed to deviate from its ballistic path by 1000nm). This required big ass wings (which the shuttle got).
The Airforce also helped drive the payload (weight and dimension) requirements, but I feel that this is secondary to the cross-range requirement.
A shuttle actually works fairly well at around 1/5 the size
As I'm sure you know, the USA actually has an operational tiny "shuttle". But for others here, I wanted to link to it, because it's cute. It looks just like a baby shuttle.
I put the word "shuttle" in quotes, because it's actually not a shuttle, but an unmanned reusable orbital spy spaceplane. Or is it?
It's rammed with fantastic photos by Ralph Mirebs of the hangers at the Baikonur Cosmodrome used to house it (complete with an ageing, abandoned Buran inside).
Is an aircraft of this size economical, or is it a fuel hog useful only for carrying huge single-piece cargos that smaller aircraft cannot? Is it useful, or is it sheer size-vanity?
I doubt there's enough heavy commercial cargo in the world that would support a fleet of these aircraft. While the current AN-225 is busy, it doesn't appear to be busy enough to financially justify restarting construction on the second airframe.
I expect this is desired for a few reasons - heavy military airlift, to match what the US has had since Vietnam with the C-5 Galaxy. Access to licensed construction of the D-18 engine (as mentioned by ovi256). And ego.
There is a known big problem of transporting big rocket stages from the place where they are manufactured to places where they are launched.
Saturn-5, one of the biggest rockets so far in the world, was manufactured near a river and transported by a big ship. This sidestepped the problem of roads.
Energiya, the Soviet heavy rocket which launched Buran, had its huge second stage flown by a plane to Baykonur.
In 1960-s, USSR was looking for a good solution to this problem. They considered building a huge canal to use ships; they were thinking about using an aircraft; they played with an idea of building an exceptional - biggest in the world, if I'm not mistaken - automobile to carry it over desert. Eventually they decided to build rocket near the launch complex - that's the reason N-1 has the unusual shape.
Today, SpaceX keeps lengthening Falcon-9 modules - but it can't make them wider, because existing roads won't allow it. Long stages have their share of problems - they could be less efficient by mass, they could have unwanted dynamic characteristics - imagine a long thin-walled container pushed from behind through the atmosphere, it way vibrate...
In short, just the rocket industry of the world alone - that's currently about under hundred launches per year - could provide the market for big planes. At least this is a possible option.
Blue Origin says their next body (New Glenn) will be 23' (7 meters) in diameter. They're building a new facility near Cape Canaveral Air Force Station for it.
It's not just the size, it's also the shape of such airlifters that makes them non-economical for commercial use.
For example the USAF's own data shows that the C-17 burns more fuel per hour than the KC-10 but carries 20 tonnes less payload by weight, all because of the fat rear-loading-for-tanks fuselage ( that's seldom used for such ) and thick wing.
Both the C-17 and the C-5 were touted on the civil market but had zero uptake.
This particular aircraft ain’t economical by today’s standards.
Here’s some comparison to a popular modern cargo plane, based on public data: https://1drv.ms/x/s!AKpTxXHPN4XIj9tN
As you see, fuel economy is somewhat worse compared to that Boeing.
I don’t think the main problem is size or weight. I think the main one is age. AN-255 is 30 years old, Boeing 747-8 is 6. That’s almost 25 year or progress in aerodynamics and engines development.
The unassembled one pictured towards the bottom of the article seems to have some refinements to the design, not being built with the requirement to haul the Buran around-- they mention a single tail specifically. It might not be as out-of-date as you'd assume.
The article seems to think that it will have military use, but I personally don't see the big advantage of lugging 4 tanks in one plane instead of splitting them across two planes.
If the plane were economical for general cargo lift they would have made more than one.
There are other military uses for stupid-huge planes, beside quantity of stuff you carry:
1. You can carry huge tanks (instead of several smaller ones), including ones that were NOT intended for that, meaning you can surprise an enemy by deploying some weird weapon where he doesn't expect.
2. You can carry trains, and then use those to carry the rest.
3. You can carry other airplanes, for example if you end in a war of attrition and need to crank out planes as fast as possible, it might be an interesting idea to make them even far from the front, and ferry the plane parts to the front (then assemble there, and use them).
4. And most interestingly, it can carry gigantic parts of whatever you need, warship propellers, munition factory machinery, and so on...
It is tempting to think it would be interesting to use as bomber or paratrooper plane, deploying a huge amount of bombs in the same place and levelling it completely... but this would be a terrible idea, a plane that big is probably a huge target, people would attempt to shoot at it even with small arms, and it is not impossible to get lucky with them (happened at least once in Iraq War for example, when a random farmer downed a US helicopter right on the start of the war with his hunting rifle... the chance of it working was tiny, the rifle didn't even had the range to ever reach the helicopter, but somehow, it did...)
Hm, the words "fuel" and "economic" do not occur in that article.
You can infer something from phrases like "flying super heavy cargos" and "by bringing infrastructure ... that are normally too big for airlift" but it would be interesting to see if anyone has something to add directly on that topic as to what exactly the drawbacks to that scale are. The fact that only one was ever made also implies that the uses are limited.
shrug it's honestly going to be a bit hard to compare. But for a rough guess, the AN-225 can lift like 300,000kg, and the AN-124 (from which its derived from) can lift like 230,000kg. The AN-225 has 6 of the same engines that the AN-124 has, so naively assuming roughly the same fuel use, the lift ratio is ~ 1.34 to 1 and the fuel use ratio is ~ 1.5 to 1. And the AN-124 is sufficiently cheap to operate to be in use commercially.
So by those rough guesses, the AN-225 should be ok.
That said, the moment you have a too heavy, or too big load for an AN-124, then the extra fuel cost of the AN-225 has almost infinite value.
The drawbacks to scale always have to do with complexity, and ground infrastructure. The AN-225 can't operate from as wide a variety of fields that the AN-124 can (though this shouldn't be a huge concern from commercial use).
Structurally, the modifications from the AN-124 to AN-225 aren't super complex. They basically added plugs before and after the wings to extend the fuselage, and added a wing extension. While these aren't trivial changes to an aircraft, they're basically the simplest type of structural change you can make. Oh, I guess there's a tail modification, but that's not that risky either.
I mean I guess the point is that you probaly would not want a whole-scale replacement of AN-124 class lifters with AN-225, but keeping a few around enables entire types of lifts (and therefore operations) that simply aren't possible. The key would be to estimate what the appropriate amount of AN-225 are.
For an example, the famous Beluga Airbus enables a form of manufacturing distribution (for good or for bad) that simply isn't possible without it existing. You would never want a giant fleet of Beluga, but having it is invaluable.
"Fuel" and "economic" do not have to be used explicitly in the article, or is reading and comprehension a lost art?
Take the following paragraph, for example:
> For China, the An-225 would open whole new frontiers in commercial and military air transportation. A fleet of civilian An-225s could quickly ship heavy and bulky cargoes of massive scale, ranging from construction equipment to consumer goods. For humanitarian purposes, the An-225 could support disaster relief operations, able to fly in not just large amounts of aid, but also by bringing infrastructure like power generation and water treatment that are normally too big for airlift.
That spells out in plain language why possession of the An-225 and its technologies make economic sense for China. And the paragraph after that state the military reasons why China would need the An-225.
Practically every single paragraph in that article, including image captions, either infer or directly address the economic reasons for why China would want the An-225 and its technologies.
Yes, nobody's disputing the idea that there are times when you need a single large cargo hold. The question is whether the plane would be economically competitive in terms of regular cargo. In other words is China going to build 3 of these and have them spend most of their lives sitting in hangers or are we going to be seeing hundreds of these flying all over China? That's something the article doesn't try to address.
Imagine how much it's going to save the Chinese to fly in all those raw materials from Africa and South America on an An-225, instead of shipping them.
(My initial complaint was just with the units mismatch. But, as is often the case, this is just the tip of the iceberg. My rule of thumb remains in force: any time an article mixes up metric/imperial/US Customary units, you can basically ignore that part of it.)
(I think the typical reader will have little intuition for the cargo capacity of the C-17, so the more instructive comparison looks at the most capable operational US plane.)
The comparison to the C-17 rather than the C-5 seems rather deliberate to me (along with using lbs instead of tons for the unit). It's more sensational if a future Chinese military cargo plane "beats" a US cargo plane in cargo capacity by XXX,000 of anything.
Any time they don't translate between units, or mix different types together, I assume the writer is not only functionally innumerate, but also just repeating what somebody else has told them to say...
Also note that (according to Wikipedia) the capacity is 250,000kg - so 275 tons, or 551,155 lbs.
The C-17's cargo capacity (again, from Wikipedia) is 77,500kg - so 85 tons, or 170,858lbs. That looks a lot more like a difference of 380,000lbs than 300,000lbs to me, which, with some journalistic licence, could surely become "almost 400,000lbs more". You may well be correct about the sensationalism aspect, and here they are leaving some of that on the table.
So I don't really know what's going on. Like I said, functionally innumerate... (Though of course, calculation error at this end is always a possibility! But nobody's paying me to do this, so I'm going to go with my gut here.)
Nice to see this incredible cold war era plane not go the way of the concord. But in its case there is still a possibility of a profitable market for transporting very large and heavy machinery via aircraft.
The main problem for most post-Soviet production has long been that the supply chain now includes 2+ countries. Antonov is a prime example - had AN-124 and AN-225 been "Ukrainian" planes, we would have seen more production and commercializations.
The problem is that these are Soviet planes and with the current Russian-Ukrainian relations in shambles, the production has stopped. Much of avionics and those turbofans are (were?) made in Russia: http://foxtrotalpha.jalopnik.com/ukraines-antonov-will-weste...
In my view, this is just thrashing in a frantic bid to keep the company alive. Sad, given its storied past.
There is very little chance that story is even remotely true. The story had 2 sources - Saddam Hussein, and Mohammed Saeed al-Sahhaf aka 'Baghdad Bob' (if you don't remember him, look him up - he was a meme before the Internet made memes a thing). On top of that, the story changed from a farmer to a few peasants and back again depending on who was talking and when.
It was propaganda to make the US military look weak and ineffective - the same kind of propaganda that let us watch a split screen of al-Sahhaf's press conference saying the US hadn't taken Baghdad airport and US forces strolling around its tarmac.
The above comment was probably in reply to the following:
"...a plane that big is probably a huge target, people would attempt to shoot at it even with small arms, and it is not impossible to get lucky with them (happened at least once in Iraq War for example, when a random farmer downed a US helicopter right on the start of the war with his hunting rifle... the chance of it working was tiny, the rifle didn't even had the range to ever reach the helicopter, but somehow, it did..."
To make it possible Ukraine and Chine will need to redevelop many technologies that were used to build Mriya. The technologies were gone when USSR collapsed.
Not that many the bulk of manufacturing was done in Ukraine what was sourced externally can be sourced from subcontractors. For example engines are manufactured by Motor Sich (Ukraine based) which is still a fairly large engine manufacturer etc.
Hydrogen engines for Energiya, RD-0120, were made in Voronezh by KBKhA, which is still producing rocket engines. However this particular engine is practically lost - can't be recreated without extensive R&D program.
It's not enough to have the original manufacturer survive... Can Rocketdyne manufacture another F-1 today? So it's quite possible - though not certain - that Motor Sich wouldn't be able to create a unique enough engine, even if it did that in the past.
The engine is not unique to Mria it was used on AN-124 and Motor Sich has a modernised version going through testing Д-18ТМ so should not be any issues on that front
Tyler Rogoway (formerly of Jalopnik's FoxtrotAlpha and now writing for TheDrive.com) had a take on China's goals(1). He seems to think that the plane's ability to act as a launch craft is a notable. I've found Rogoway to be a pretty good source of digestable and non-sensational military tech info.
Air launch is an incredibly tricky operation. Even something as trivial as a 500 lb. bomb undergoes lots of trials before it is accepted for use.
The US Space Shuttle program only ever did glide testing of the orbiter off the back of the 747 carrier. A real launch of an orbital vehicle off the back of an AN-225 would mean serious envelope pushing and would be putting an extremely expensive aircraft at risk every time.
Can't see the article. It redirects me to http://www.popsci.com.au/?src=redirect with an error: "Oops! Something went wrong. Please scroll down to find your content."
Yes, it's a super dumb redirect on their side - the US Pop Science redirects to the Australian Pop Science which does not have the same content because the AUS Pop Science licenses the US Pop Science content, but not all of it.
There are Grease Monkey scripts to stop the redirect or use a proxy, it's too much work for me to bother reading their content.
Yeah, strangely this article isn't available on the Australian version of PopSci, but you can't view the US/Intl version from Australia.
If you have an overseas VPN, you'll be able to see this article, or do a Google News search for something like "China AN-225" for other articles on the topic.
Getting access to a 20-ton thrust high-bypass turbofan design is a huge step for them.