Bradley Perrett covered China, Japan, South Korea and Australia. He is a Mandarin-speaking Australian.
Before joining Aviation Week in 2006 he was a macroeconomics, politics and aerospace journalist with Reuters. Perrett holds a bachelor’s degree in law from Macquarie University, Sydney. He left Aviation Week in 2020.
China, now making a limited volume of high-grade carbon fiber that it cannot buy from Western countries or Japan, plans to build a plant with 20 times as much capacity. The cost of the fiber, of T800 grade, will be 1,600 yuan ($262) per kg, compared with the 4,200 yuan per kg cost of the established Chinese product, T300, the new plant operator told a conference in Beijing, although it was unclear whether the operator was referring to output from its present facilities.
BEIJING — The lander of China’s Chang’e 3 lunar mission should reach the Moon’s surface around the middle of this month, officials said following a successful launch on Dec. 2. A Long March 3B launched the spacecraft into a lunar transfer orbit with an apogee of 380,000 km (240,000 mi.).