Does anyone know to what extent China has advanced the state of the Soviet technology that they have (I assume) licensed? I have been to the Russian Star City training facility, Baikonur Cosmodrome and been in the full-size Mir training module and the Chinese station components look very similar. I am sure getting good information is difficult, but perhaps someone here has some more info.
Some of the features I know from the Chinese space station
- Solar panels smaller in area than ISS but produces similar amount of power, indicating much more efficient solar panels
- Ion thrusters to keep space in orbit
- Automated docking of cargo and crew capsule. Semi-automated docking of large station components like the 23ton labs
- A robotic arm similar to ISS that walk along the joint points on the station. It has expandable attachment system, allowing not only astronauts to attach, but also a smaller more precises robotic arm to attach that can manipulate external experiments.
- It has a crew airlock and a cargo airlock, the cargo one is larger than the one on ISS.
- It can also release small satellites through the cargo airlock.
- Dozens of external experiment attachment points, some (maybe all) has power and control
- What looks like pretty good communication links with the ground. Experiments can be controlled and monitored from the ground, saving astronaut time.
- What looks like some advanced experiment equipment, including three very accurate atomic clocks, near absolute zero cooling systems etc. But I am not well versed in physics to speak on these.
- It will operate a space telescope; telescope can dock with the station for servicing and upgrades, and equipment uploaded by regular space station cargo ship.
I think it is a well-designed system, surprisingly capable in terms of research capabilities. As China's space industry is completely sanctioned by US and Wassenaar Arrangement, all technology here are from Chinese industries and local supply chains: materials, precision manufacturing, communication equipment, sensors used for guidance/automated docking, robotic arm, ion thrusters, solar panels, networking and control system within the station, even to the logistic system of building, launching and running the station. Then there is the whole rocket system themselves, 100% success rate thus far with CZ-5/B, CZ-7 cargo ship, and Shenzhou launch vehicle. And then the global positioning and communications satellite network. And then there is the whole research equipment part. There are millions+ ppl involved in all of the projects here.
> It will operate a space telescope; telescope can dock with the station for servicing and upgrades, and equipment uploaded by regular space station cargo ship.
The co-orbit strategy is excellent, a short trip for repairs and easy to fit into existing schedules if something goes wrong. It's no James Webb but was never intended to be, about the same size as Hubble but with 400x the field of view. Guessing it will be cranking out the discoveries.
It's a great way to have much higher quality microgravity than is possible with a habitable station, in a serviceable module. Low vibration is important for telescopes and some experiments (crystallography in particular). A co-orbiting module was also in the plans for ISS, but like many other planned features it was never implemented.
So for those wondering why no US collaboration, you can blame republican octogenarian Frank Wolf for introducting the Wolf amendment prohibiting any and all NASA collaboration with china that isnt expressly sanctioned by the rest of the geriatrics in congress. he even managed to fuck up the 2013 Kepler Science Conference which resulted in a mass boycott after two chinese scientists were banned.
We had every opportunity to collaborate with chinese scientists aboard the ISS before this crap. The man is a traitor to science.
It's a little more nuanced than being a traitor to science given China's strategy in regards to acquisition of scientific research and technology. China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.
It would be interesting to see some concrete examples of what is claimed in "Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China."
Whenever I search recent research articles about any topic, I see a very large number that are published by China, and which are freely available.
The quality of the Chinese research is quite uneven, there are many papers that are just garbage, but there are also many which are surprisingly creative and original, exploring promising alternatives to those that had already been studied by Western research.
I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.
Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.
And the French getting kicked out is only the second worst consequence of that project! Though for what it’s worth, I think there was Western collaboration with WIV as well.
The first-worst has thankfully not happened yet - China was lobbying that now they had a BSL-4 Lab, they should also have a sample of Smallpox. The consequences of that would have been disastrous.
> I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.
Just because you don't follow them doesn't mean they don't exist. Plenty of ongoing IP theft cases show this is not true. This case closed a few years back that pretty much wiped out a Billion+ dollar US company: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-company-sinovel-wind-...
This example is immensely funny to me, since in the 90s the NSA stole trade secrets related to wind turbines from the German company Enercon and passed it on to the US company Kenetech, who then managed to get a patent in the US.
English sources are a bit scarce, but here's an article that references it:
> Some months later, a former NSA agent admitted that the organisation had secretly intercepted Enercon's data communications and monitored conference calls. The NSA passed all the information it gleaned on to Kenetech.[1]
There's also a report on ECHELON for the European parliament that mentions this case among others[2]. Some more cases became known through documents leaked by Snowden.
To complete this circle German intelligence services would now have to steal trade secrets related to wind turbines from China, but sadly they're explicitly forbidden from conduction industrial espionage - to the chagrin of German companies who are feeling disadvantaged.
what is stopping those naive americans from going to china, buying those "stolen and improved but not shared with us legally" products and sell them on their own back home?
its not like chinese businesses would sue them or anything so whats the big deal as you say?
they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.
Not everyone wants to break the laws. Even of another country.
In China the repercussions for what you described may go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that. This hasn’t applied to doing that in US / Western countries
> go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that
I mean, a few hundreds years ago, the US continent was populated by Savages. They got educated and civilized now.
So give China another 1 hundred years. They'll be as civilized as US today. They probably would routinely threaten nukes for countries not practicing the "wholistic democracy" [1]; they'll also cut supply of key components from global supply chain when India is approaching their supremacy; and sanction Vietnam because they dont act like dogies...
> Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China
I'd like to see sources backing up this claim. Huawei for example has 5G patents and research centers outside China. Hualong-1 nuclear plants are exported abroad.
Seeing that China is big on business and making money, it makes no sense to keep technology for yourself. There's so much money to be made by selling them!
Just one of many examples: The WIV BSL-4 lab in Wuhan was built as a French-Chinese cooperation (modeled after a similar lab in Lyon, France) with the explicit goal to do joint experiments. But once it was built, the French were kicked out.
FRANCE INVESTIGATION
The strange saga of how France helped build Wuhan's top-security virus lab
MAY 31, 2020 BY KARL LASKE AND JACQUES MASSEY
The maximum-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first of its kind to be built in China, and has been the centre of huge speculation since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic which originated in that city. The laboratory, which is equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) including dangerous viruses such as Ebola, was built with the help of French experts and under the guidance of French billionaire businessman Alain Mérieux, despite strong objections by health and defence officials in Paris. Since the laboratory's inauguration by prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve in 2017, however, France has had no supervisory role in the running of the facility and planned cooperation between French researchers and the laboratory has come to a grinding halt.
> French experts and researchers have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in China despite the fact that France helped build the facility and that Paris and Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration, a Mediapart investigation can reveal.
> have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory
> Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration
It seems to me research centers outside of China are used to recruit willing experts from other companies whose knowledge of proprietary information can then be unethically harvested and absorbed by Huawei.
That sounds like... How other research centers also work? If you're not hiring someone for their knowledge and experience on a topic, then what are you hiring that person for?
And when these people leave, they take their experience at Huawei with them. Now some other company benefits from Huawei's experience.
People hire me for my 10 years of DevOps experience so that I can help them implement practices. They don't hire me to reinvent DevOps from first principles without using any of my previous experience.
Just what part of hiring people for their experience is "unethical harvesting"? If there's evidence of people being specifically hired to diverge trade secrets of a previous employer, in violation of NDAs, then you'd actually have a case.
As odious as that technology is, as far as I know China is a major supplier of surveillance technology to the world's authoritarian governments.
Belt and Road is an international infrastructure investment (and direct construction) project, not sure how its related to technology. It's also no different from all other nations' international aid programs, in that it both helps the receiving nation and makes them indebted to the originator.
> Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China
Any such actual event happening?
I have heard this stated repeatedly, but my Google search reveals no actual reporting, other than the ones where the foreign party voluntarily exited or being forced aware from their own political pressure (that is not from Chinese side).
I think describing China as one monolithic block in that way is problematic and denies the agency of Chinese people. It is tempting to look at the different political system and lump everything together. You have to distinguish between the government, researchers, and Chinese companies. I know many Chinese researchers who are collaborating fairly, and they have very similar interests and - mixed - incentives as western scientists do.
It is true that Chinese companies do what you described, I think at some point there was even an offical slogan for it. But this is just as much due to the "capitalist" side as to the "communist" side. I'm pretty sure if an American company was behind technologically they would do the same. I recall Tesla poaching battery and car manufacturing specialists for example. Not saying that is great, but it would be naive to assume they would do otherwise.
The people have independent ideas and wills - and not a hive mind - is what I'm saying.
> China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.
Regardless of what strategy the government is pursuing, I know personally that many Chinese researchers do collaborate on an honest basis. They have to put a lot of effort into dispelling the prejudice that they just want to leech technology for their government.
Good for him. Collaborating with the CCP regime is not in the best interest of the US or other Western countries, and in fact, US policy would be better served in the long run by isolating and decoupling from China even more.
The phenomenon isn't all that rare. Both senses of "sanction" derive from its original sense of "decree" - you can decree that something is allowed, or that it's not allowed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym lists several similar pairs, in which two contradictory senses developed from one older sense. (Along with many more pairs that are the results of different patterns.)
It's pretty rare for it to be ambiguous though. Probably only "table" from that list is also ambiguous. Dust could be from a grammatical point of view but it's always going to be obvious from context what is meant.
"table" is an antonym depending upon your location. For Americans, in the context of a discussion, the verb "table" means to set it aside and stop discussing it. For Brits, it means to bring up a topic and discuss it.
That only means "to split". I don't think it can mean "to join together" can it? Unless you mean "cleave to" which is rare and not really the same word.
And if I say I cleaved the halves together, you’d have no chance of thinking that I meant I cut them apart. It’s English, you need context to tell what definition is being used for any word with multiple definitions
> (intransitive, rare) Followed by' to or unto: to adhere, cling, or stick fast to something.
Something can cleave to another thing, but you can't cleave two things together. It's grammatically the same as the word "cling". You can cling to something but you can't cling two things together. It doesn't make sense.
“The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly inflammable.”
— Brian Melley, Anchorage Daily News, 23 July 2022
Sure but by now every rational and reasonable reader must understand that whenever they come across the word "inflammable", the author might have misused it and they need to search for additional signals to identify whether it means "inflammable" or "uninflammable". This is not different than how the rational and reasonable reader treats the use of an autoantonym.
> Solar panels smaller in area than ISS but produces similar amount of power, indicating much more efficient solar panels
I should hope so after over a decade. AFAIK they haven't changed the solar panels since the last one was installed in 2009 and the design was probably fixed well before the first one was installed.
> A robotic arm similar to ISS that walk along the joint points on the station. It has expandable attachment system, allowing not only astronauts to attach, but also a smaller more precises robotic arm to attach that can manipulate external experiments
Canada Arm also walks along the ISS too using alternating ends that astronauts can be attached to.
I've tried and can't find a list of the positions of the grapple fixtures CanadaArm uses on the ISS but I think it could reach pretty far over the Russian segments from the other half of the station.
I did forget about those but they did only cover one small part of the array iirc. Most of the original array is still active.
Just imagine all that effort and resources being spent on the International Space Station instead. I wonder were we, the combined humanity, could have been in terms of space exploration, if we just could have been bothered to work together.
I still think there's room for competition, though. Two groups can want to cooperate but have reasonable and valid differences of opinions on how do do things that are large enough to warrant going their separate ways.
And perhaps some of the things China's station can do are just not feasible to tack onto the ISS, at least not without pushing timelines back past what China might consider acceptable.
Not saying that's what's happened here; certainly China's independent efforts here are largely fueled by isolationism and protectionism. And NASA is prohibited by US law from collaborating with China, unless they get prior approval from Congress and the FBI for each collaboration[0]. But I think, as a general sentiment, sometimes competition can be healthy and push the state of the art forward faster.
Thanks for the super informative reply. I am hoping as there is more activity on the space station, that more information will be coming out. It would be nice to be able to see something similar to the ESA, NASA and even Roscosmos launch feeds and Q&A sessions.
US did sanction all of China's space industry, defense dual use industries since the 1990s, and never let go ever since. That is pretty early. And this is what happens 30 years since the sanctions. But I have no idea what will happen in the future, plus the nature of industry and technology is also different.
As much as it's a waste of duplicate effort, it's likely good for humanity and geopolitics to have multiple nation-states each trying their own approaches.
Avoids path lock-in by exploring alternate solutions lines, and ensures that if one country decides to slow down (because politics) then the world doesn't lose its only leading-edge space program.
agree with this - duplication of effort, but not duplication of approach or method, which means actually it becomes a giant A/B test, which hopefully means faster progress for humanity as a whole.
Sanctions do not matter to China. They will just have their nation state backed hackers hack into aerospace and defense contractors and steal their R&D instead. Thats the Chinese way and MO. Anything to further the Chinese economy.
They have hacked nearly every F100 they needed to and steal hundreds of billions in IP annually already.
It seems unlikely that any country could monopolise any particular weapons technology for long. I assume the US also has programs to extract any innovations from China or Russia.
To be fair, it's not like the US didn't engage in heavy industrial espionage in Europe during the industrial revolution.
We tend to forget this since the US came into its own as an industrial power generations ago, long before China did. While China's form of government is quite different than most Western governments, in a way that gives them a reputation of being isolationist and secretive, that doesn't mean their path to technological advancement has been any more dishonest than that of other nations.
Put another way, we frown on China's technological espionage so much because we view them as an enemy from a government & "values" perspective, not because "we" have cleaner hands. I personally would prefer that China didn't have all the latest tech capabilities because I don't like the idea of increasing the global influence of authoritarian nations, but if China had a non-isolationist democracy, I might not be so upset about this.
You make it sound like that was a distinct Chinese tactic and not every country on earth, foremost one that abbreviates itself to three letters, is engaged doing industrial espionage.
Ah, so the chaos and lack of documentation in my company is really protection against chinese spies! Clever!
On a more serious note, I find it quite unfair that Western conoany go into China to take advantage of loose labour laws and child labour, and then they complain when loose IP laws hit them. Like you knew what the deal was from the outset.
Lastly not every society believes in the concept of intellectual property, it is not even clearly defined - for instance EU does not issue software patents.
You just took one angle. I find it unfair that Facebook is banned by China while China can deploy TikTok in the US market, for example, to demonstrate the opposite.
I mean that's the thing, that wasn't the deal. No company, at all, would sign that agreement. Usually there is an nda, some kind of business agreement that says they won't steal your idea etc. and then they do. It's not like a company goes to China or another lower cost to manufacture country and signs an agreement to give them their business.
Contracts and deals are subordinate to the laws of the country in which we'd like them to be enforced. It's not like a company goes to China and expects tight IP laws.
And hey, our (American) IP laws were a lot less strict when we were catching up to the British Empire.
Countries generally try to set their laws up to benefit their industries (to the extent possible).
I agree with all this. Where does all the ip theft via hacking fall into this view? By this logic hat should be held accountable to the laws of this country, no?
Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.
I don't think it is possible to simplify it down beyond what has actually happened. Hackers for China in the US fall under US jurisdiction and so they'll be treated pretty harshly. Hackers for China in China -- it's complicated, if they are doing something their government wants them to do, they probably won't be.
Then the US will try to incur some diplomatic cost for China, which does have a pretty bad reputation on this front... it's all part of the big game.
You are telling me giant conpanies with 100 people in legal did not study previous Chinese court cases and did not know that IP laws there are poorly enforced? I knew about this for 20 years and they didn't?
All developing nations, whether China or Russia or Somalia, don't enforce some laws. Sometimes it's lack of strong state, sometimes it's lack of beurocratic capacity, or a concious decision. Anyone going into these countries is aware of this.
IP, Labour laws and bribes in case of China.
Clearly western companies take advantage of the two latter, and cry foul about the former. Massive hypocracy.
Meanwhile western government dont enforce their own laws for any kindof accoutability of major business leaders. Chinese will answer for IP theft on the same day CEO of Nestle will go to jail for taking advantage of child labour and slavery in their supply chains.
So probably we will have to wait for judgement day
I agree Nestlé should go to jail for child labor. The thing is they're a European company. We can't just lump everything into "western governments". That's like half the world.
The thing is,anybody these IP theft cases are also against Chinese law, they his choose to ignore it when it benefits them.
Corruption is everywhere, it's not an excuse to strive for anything less than right and truth. "Bevause they did it" is not a good reason.
That's way too broad, because it depends what it is. Surprisingly, it seems to be easier to build a space station than to compete with Boeing and Airbus.
Because competing with Boeing and Airbus means building cost efficient aircraft in large volumes. Building cost efficient planes in large volume is way harder than building a singular space station with barely any cost concerns.
Rocket engines are simpler than jet turbines, actually. It take a lot of material engineering to get something with both performance and economy. As for the rest, it’s just avionics that china hasn’t developed yet, and that really “just” software.
But really, there’s an order of magnitude more engineering that goes into so many facets of rockets and rocket engines. On paper they’re similar, but the stresses and constraints are much, much higher.
Rocket engines point up and ignite the fuel. They don’t need air intakes, nor can they benefit from them. They don’t need to be reused (SpaceX’s strategy isn’t common). Rocket engines came a few decades before jet turbines for good reason. Heck, there is a good argument they were invented during the Tang or Song Dynasty in some kind of crude but representive form.
It depends. SRBs are pretty simple (yet still incredibly hard to make remotely safe).
Orbital rocket engines are not “point up and ignite fuel.” You’re right, they don’t need air intakes - they need cryogenic liquid oxygen and all the support equipment involved in using it! Jet engines have it easy being able to harvest the oxidizer as they fly.
There are many, many, points of failure in modern rockets . You could argue that jet engines were the precursor to modern turbo pump design.
edit
It’s also worth noting that the turbopump environment is dramatically more hostile in rockets. LOX is really nasty stuff at those temperatures and pressures.
Space stations do not need to comply to international aviation requirements. Also, they may have fewer economic constraints, because they are not operated by something like commercial airlines.
BTW competing with Lockheed-Martin and even Sukhoi seems to be harder, too.
China isn't 60s us or ussr, it's a country countless time richer and more technologically advanced, has all the means to produce all the ICBMs they want.
The sanctions are pretty irrelevant when China has one of the best hacking groups in the world and every US corporation of relevance is strongly connected to the Internet.
I mean, american people is as intelligent as anyone else. By the sheer number, is not rare to think that they should have more people of high training on difficult areas to master.
What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.
Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.
Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? That is their entire MO. The Chinese are also responsible for $200-600 Billion worth of IP theft against the US every year.
They will do whatever it takes to make China #1 and see nothing wrong with doing this.
> Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries?
Or you do both. Start from the point of known technologies and reverse engineering and improve from there. China bootstrapped their high-tech industry with not just spying, but also licensing technology, join-ventures, training students/employees abroad and then bringing them back as experienced researchers/engineers. No need to start from first-principles. Plus even when you do have tech-specs on something, that doesn't mean you know how to manufacture it, or it may need modification to address broader system tradeoffs.
If you start from behind and are trying to execute from first principals you'll usually lag behind too just because you have to relearn all the things countries like the US did on your own.
I guess the modern equivalent of that would be espionage which afaik China has not been shy about executing. Operation Paperclip was somewhat of a fluke historically speaking for the explosion of nation-less (ish) scientists. The next one in rocketry would have been the fall of the USSR I guess.
You got this very wrong. Read up Art of War written before Jesus. Espionage is a very important chapter. Americans are rather weak academic these days. You go to any American university and see how many "Asians" there. You will find a lot of Chinese. It is common for Americans not able to speak English well or just English. It is very uncommon not to find Chinese that can read and write Chinese AND English. There are about 4x more Chinese than Americans population. You do the math, one society has more people and higher ratio of hardworking people and very educated vs Americans that twerks more on TikTok (which is an app by China....and possibly Chinese Military). Heck even westerner GoT series are written based on Chinese history. Look up war of seven princes and Cersei equivalent during Jin dynasty. Americans themselves stoled Nazi Germany tech too. USA days are very numbered (this is foretold in many Eastern prophecies even those in Russia). The great west superpower will get destroyed very similar to Atlantis (perhaps explosion of Yellowstone volcabic activities) mentioned in many of these prophecies.
I think that's unlikely, Yellowstone is monitored and I think it's more likely that US programs to prevent population decline/demographic collapse would work than Chinese programs of the same nature. I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers), even if you think the current official figures are real. Russia has massive HIV rates and is shipping a not insignificant portion of it's reproduction age males to Ukraine, and that's not good for it population in general, and may be catastrophic for it's more rural populations.
> I think it's reasonably probable that China will level out under a billion real population (not including migrant workers)
99.99% of china’s migrant workers are Chinese. I don’t understand what not including migrant workers gives you unless you assume china will import labor from other countries someday?
The problem is that Chinese mentality results in corruption, denialism and other attributes what makes working on R&D almost impossible. For that you need free minds, room for mistakes, no strong hiarchy. All things you won't find in China.
So how did they manage to complete this space station at all when R&D is 'almost impossible'? There is no doubt that China did not develop everything from the ground up, but to disregard the progress that they have made on top of existing technologies is rather shortsighted and disingenuous.
Sanctions on parts for particular purposes are trivial to bypass, you just buy the parts abroad or for a different purpose. Having said that, I wouldn't be surprised if they tried to go as indigenous as possible to reduce dependency on foreign components. They've definitely made impressive advances in the last decade or so.
I can't speak at all to the space station, but my understanding from discussions over beers with American spacecraft MechEs was that Shenzhou resembles Soyuz (and is derived form Soyuz in real ways), but is noticeably larger. This has a significant amount of effects to essentially every aspect of the design making it pretty damn close to a fully indigenous design. They would've had to truly own every piece of the design and manufacturing to make those changes and end up with the flight safety record they currently hold.
"Licensing" is a strong word when applied to China. I'm pretty sure they have advanced a lot and may have surpassed Russian technology in some areas. As far as I understand it, they have more diverse launch vehicles, for example. Hard to compare what constitutes "better", as long as it works. I don't think they are as cost-efficient as SpaceX or even Atlas and Ariane systems.
> I don't think they are as cost-efficient as SpaceX or even Atlas and Ariane systems.
It seems unlikely anyone is as cost-efficient as Falcon 9 with reuse.
It appears to me, as an outsider, that Atlas and Ariane are 4-5 times as expensive to operate. There is probably plenty of room for China to operate more efficiently than that. Especially with their launch volume, which is second only to SpaceX.
China is not a high-tech nation. There is a thin patina of bling-bling but underneath they have big trouble between corruption and nobody else trusting them.
China has lots of money (for now...) so they can throw a lot of resources at the problem. In China, quick public successes always take precedence over doing it right.
Your view of China is 10 years behind reality. Corruption was a huge problem, it is still somewhat of a problem, but corruption has reduced significantly and continues to reduce. As for "nobody else trusting them": based on what evidence? Foreign investment into China is at an all-time high. Recent research has shown that while sentiments about China has become much more negative in the west (and its allies such as South Korea and Japan), sentiment in the rest of the world — accounting for 80% of humanity — has become much more positive.
> In China, quick public successes always take precedence over doing it right.
I'd like to see some evidence for this huge, unnuanced claim. Of course they have an incentive to look good. So do companies all over the world. But to claim that that's all they do is to ignore the elephant in the room, namely 40 years of growth in prosperity that's unprecedented in human history.
The ISS collaborators have banned Chinese astronauts. The system is a dictatorship, Xi Jinping has a bigger personality course than Mao. The real estate industry is a mess, mostly because of corruption. "Tofu" projects are rampant. The High Speed rail is too expensive and has the same "Tofu" construction problem (=corruption).
Corruption is still a major problem and there is no signs it has gotten better. African Swine Flu as an example can't be contained because that would need unbribeable enforcement. No-Covid only works (in the enforcement sense) because of draconian penalties. Cronyism is an epidemic disease in itself, you can't advance in China, no matter your qualifications, if you aren't highly connected, and most aren't.
Yes, I'm speaking in broad terms. But I did predict a glass ceiling years ago, because the lack of openness means terrible risk management and sophisticated risk management is crucial for sustained exponential. It has finally happened, growth in China shrank after Covid and the recovery is worse than in the rest of the world.
If you need a reason not to trust China look at what happened to Hong Kong with all the promises made by CCP leadership. Look at the CCP attempts to shape policy, including in western universities. Look at the genocide against the Uyghurs. Look at the issue of organ harvesting, which is partly propaganda and partly the CCP itself hinders any attempts to actually disprove the allegations with their lack of transparency. I am forced to consider the CCP as evil-doers in the same order of magnitude as Nazi Germany. And that is before they try and retake Taiwan, which will be an unbelievably bloody business.
How do you define 'high-tech' here? Would a 'low-tech' nation be able to build a space station like this?
China has a lot of systemic issues stemming from corruption and nepotism, but they also have a large population and a culture of investing in the education of their children. It isn't a coincidence that there is a huge number of Asians at elite US colleges, which would be even higher if affirmative action wasn't so prevalent. Its only a matter of time before China will catch up to the US and reach technology parity.
Much of the countryside is still doing subsistence agriculture, for one thing.
"Catching up" means China is growing faster than the west, both in economy and technological know-how. But at present China is only marginally out-growing the West, even using the CCP numbers.
Ultimately it comes down to a numbers game which we can roughly estimate by looking at the number of STEM graduates generated by each country assuming the research output of each individual is roughly equivalent.
The US does have the advantage in that high performing individuals on the level of Einstein have a higher chance of emerging due to much more personal freedom and social mobility, but that is difficult to account for because someone like Einstein may or may not emerge in the next 100 years.
But STEM graduates from China really aren't the same. And they aren't working in the kind of system that would promote progress. Or even select for performance properly. Additionally it's not like every Chinese high school student has the same access to higher education. It does depend on location, wealth and the guanxi of his parents.
Overall the economic growth is clearly faltering. And with a GDP growth rate that is only one or two percentage points ahead of "the West" the catching up is going to take a lot longer. It's quite the same with education, which is just another industry among many. China is running into a glass ceiling because of its system.
Additionally there is an economic world war raging right now, mostly against Russia. But China is increasingly getting on the wrong side of this, with much of the world opposing China.
> Ultimately it comes down to a numbers game which we can roughly estimate by looking at the number of STEM graduates generated by each country assuming the research output of each individual is roughly equivalent.
Why do you think that's a reasonable assumption to make?
Upon closer examination, it may not be. There is some force multiplier there that I am not accounting for and cannot because there isn't really a good unit of measurement for technological progress or research speed. What seems intuitively obvious is that a country with zero STEM graduates isn't making much headway in research unless they recruit immigrants, so there should be some correlation with the number of STEM graduates and speed of technological advancement.
Have you ever heard of the Transrapid? That was a technology that already worked decades ago, but hasn't been put into widespread use for various reasons.
China has already overbuilt its highspeed rail system. China really doesn't need another solution for a problem it doesn't have.
Yes I have :-) I'm German and once lived near one proposed track, meant as an upgrade to an already existing, heavily used main track, planned with many stops over short distances.
Edit: Maybe they could use this to overbuild their already existing net with a dozen to two dozen strategically located stations, as an overlay of hyperhubs, and use the interconnections to conventional HSR as spokes which branch off of these.
To make it even more competitive to air travel, especially for longer distances.
Yes, their high-speed rail is bling-bling. It's too expensive for most people. Much of the building materials have been substituted for substandard materials so somebody can steal the difference.
I doubt the Russians would share their deep-tech with China. There's quite a bit of enmity b/w the two after the Sino-Soviet split; China for much of recent history was US's weapon against Russia (and India). In fact, it was the US that indirectly help built up the US (much like the rest of East Asia).
[I'm generally surprised by how ill-informed western populace is about their own govts doing.]
That may be the case. OTOH, why did Russia build https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vostochny_Cosmodrome almost right next to the border with China? Wouldn't something like that not be of utmost strategic importance?
... looks like "magnitude" numbers farther below zero are brighter? Who came up with that?
> The scale used to indicate magnitude originates in the Hellenistic practice of dividing stars visible to the naked eye into six magnitudes. The brightest stars in the night sky were said to be of first magnitude (m = 1), whereas the faintest were of sixth magnitude (m = 6) [...]
> In 1856, Norman Robert Pogson formalized the system by defining a first magnitude star as a star that is 100 times as bright as a sixth-magnitude star, thereby establishing the logarithmic scale still in use today. This implies that a star of magnitude m is about 2.512 times as bright as a star of magnitude m + 1. This figure, the fifth root of 100, became known as Pogson's Ratio.
Hmmph. I'd prefer a system where higher numbers were brighter, and probably with a different logarithmic base. Oh well.
The Pogson system was constrained by the compatibility with the legacy star classification.
The stars had already been described for millennia as being stars of the 1st magnitude, 2nd magnitude and so on, from the brightest to the less bright.
Pogson has chosen both the logarithmic base and the sign of the magnitude which makes higher number less bright, so that the magnitudes computed by his formula will match approximately the already existing classification of the stars.
It was fortunate that the simple rule that a difference of 5 in magnitudes corresponds to a brightness ratio of 100 gave a formula which produced magnitude values that, when rounded to integers, matched in many cases the traditional magnitudes of the stars.
I have watched the ISS go overhead in the middle of a very sunny cloudless Los Angeles day. It can be very visible, when you know the timing & direction.
If you get this error, you intentionally broke your browser, or are using a browser which doesn't support standard, essential functionality. This is not the same thing as declining or blocking geolocation permission, which is supported and does not cause errors.
This specific error means you deleted the standard functions that implement the geolocation API, which is a completely different thing. That's fine too, you're welcome to browse the web with a broken configuration, but you have to realize that it will break things. You're not automatically entitled to request that every site support your broken configuration. It should also be noted that browsing with a non-default configuration like this makes you an easy target for fingerprinting.
Note that the site absolutely requires some form of geolocation to work at all. Satellite viewing times are location specific and without a precise location the site can't show you anything useful.
You say you're using iOS Safari. I'm interested to know how you were able to configure it to delete navigator.geolocation, apparently without realizing what you were doing. I don't plan to support a broken configuration like that, but if you can figure out the cause then I could file a WebKit bug on your behalf.
Why would it be on OP’s behalf? If it’s just a configuration that WebKit supports it’s either violating the standard or you’re not handling it correctly on your site. It has nothing to do with the OP at that point.
They are the one experiencing the bug. I can't file the bug because I don't know and can't investigate the cause. If they are experiencing an issue, and they find the cause, they should file the bug. But they probably won't bother, seeing as they'd rather blame me. I'm willing to file it for them, and that's probably better anyway as I have WebKit committer status. Bugs filed by me may have more weight as I have filed and fixed many before.
You really should be checking if the location object exists. Pushing the blame to another project is deflecting from a missing check that should happen on your end.
Regardless of whether you agree with what I'm doing, you should agree that WebKit should not delete navigator.geolocation in any configuration. It's a clear fingerprinting issue.
The point is not that one makes available one's site for free. The point is that the quality of the work is sloppy, price of said service notwithstanding.
There are many other ways to approximate a client's geolocation so as to prevent displaying an embarrassing error where one did not first check whether the object's property was truthy or not.
Justifying terrible UX by saying, "it's free," is a terrible strategy, tbh. Free shit is still shit.
It's not just that the key isn't populated; it's that it's undefined. FWIW, my browser (Chrome) works on the site even if I choose not to share geolocation; I assume because the API is populated even if it then refrains from sharing.
Your point isn't quite wrong but it also isn't quite right; geolocation is supported by every browser listed on Mozilla's documentation (https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Navigator/g...) so if a browser isn't at least stubbing out that API these days, it's not w3c-compliant, and non-w3c-compliant browsers will sometimes just break on some pages.
It is, of course, still incumbent on the developer to go that extra mile if they want to catch that last 1% of users, but users of exotic browsers get an exotic experience also.
None of the browsers on my iPhone will render this site, W3C compliant or not.
In any event, I would never tell my users that it's their fault that my app didn't check the truthiness of the object's property. Seems particularly hostile to one's users and customers, free product or not.
FYI: renders on iPad with iPadOS 16.1 (iPad so no GPS). Either way, you are coming across to me as somewhat petulant - you could be right but politeness has its place too.
You could of course offer the site's author some friendly advice on how to fix this rather than throwing a tantrum and making accusations about sloppy work and user hostility. Your comments aren't a great look.
But, all moral posturing notwithstanding, is it not also true that if the OP just gets a browser or a browser version or a browser configuration that supports geolocation that they will be back in business?
It's a shame it's so far south! The ISS is in a far more inclined orbit. Tiangong isn't really much above the horizon for anywhere north of about 42°N.
Wait, in order to build this, they've launched half a dozen rockets up with no idea where the boosters would come back down and land? That seems up there amongst worst ideas I've heard for a while, "good luck everybody else."
Edit: didn't realize this would be a controversial comment; per the article, the "norm" is to have a burn again after releasing their payload, to "control" / direct the return. The Chinese aren't doing that, which has apparently lead so far to a village-damaging crash in the Ivory Coast. If the US has done a similar thing, if this was common practice in the past, I'm not familiar with it as I'm entirely naive on the topic.
Yes, they have been doing that. Yes, it's a dumb idea. Yes, the US had something similar happen in the past with Skylab coming down over Australia and killing a cow (we also learned that it's not a particularly good thing to do and are more careful these days).
The problem is that the rocket in question has the large 'main' tank go all the way to orbit. Thus they probably can't also include enough propulsion to put it in a controlled deorbit. Meanwhile most other rockets are designed so the core stage is dumped before reaching orbital velocity, so the remaining stages aren't likely to survive the trip back down in big pieces even if they do fail to deorbit and since they're smaller/lighter it takes less to deorbit them in the first place.
The risk to people is very low and it tends to be sensationalized, but it's still more responsible behavior to make that risk as small as possible. China has a good bit of work left to do on that front given that they were still dropping hypergolic stages on villages until just a few years ago.
Huh, I didn't realize that hadn't been Skylab! Looks like it's a somewhat popular myth arising from some stories about Skylab's reentry mentioning the cow incident.
Each launch costs hundreds of millions of dollars. The cost of bringing the rocket down in a targeted way can be substantial, in terms of R&D, fuel, and mission constraints. And the risk is absolutely minuscule: Exactly one person has ever been hit by orbital rocket debris after tens of thousands of launches over more than half a century, and it was a tiny piece (which is usually all that survives re-entry) that didn't cause injury:
And of course, the launching nation is responsible for compensating anyone injured or who has property damaged by space debris, and paying for clean-up.
These days the standard behavior of other nations is to keep enough reserve fuel and power to perform a controlled reentry of any spent stages or to design the vehicles such that the part that reaches orbit is small.
> Typically, the core stages of similar rockets that reach orbit fire their engines again after releasing their payloads. That allows them to be aimed at unpopulated areas, like the middle of an ocean, when they fall from orbit.
If this is not accurate, my mistake. I took them at their word and don't really know anything more than that about the process.
The frustrating aspect for me about CNSA is how little PR they do, at least towards west although I don't think even inside China they are giving that much extra info on the missions and their progress. Just compare the media spectacle around e.g. Perseverance rover wrt Tianwen-1. Sure NASA has more material to work with but still we are getting frequent mission updates and almost daily new pics to ogle; meanwhile there are just couple of press photos from Zhurong and barely any news gets around.
Western media cherry picks negative stuff about China. Or they add their favorite caveat, "Experts say there could be military applications to China's ambitions." Ya, just like every fucking tech advancement in the US?
Western media cherry picks negative things about any country that isn't under the US's thumb. It's wild how much xenophobia US media causes that people aren't seeing, especially around Russia and Russians. Americans think of Russian leaders as awful people while also praising liberal US presidents that have continued death and destruction on foreign countries too.
> probably so we dont see how fast they are progressing.
The problem is we don't know either way. They could be super advanced, or it could be that they are covering up shortcomings.
It feeds into the bigger question of: why do this stuff? If it is to advance human knowledge the results should be shared. It the results aren't being shared it's an exercise in nationalism with limited significance.
A similar situation arose in the history of computing. Colossus might have been the first programmable electronic computer, but it is a historical curiosity since it was kept secret until the 1970s. Humanity already had microprocessors by the time it was made public. Despite being a "first" it made little contribution to progress and is arguably of little import. Any secret research program runs the same risk.
> If it is to advance human knowledge the results should be shared.
It’s easy for us to imagine that this day and age there are no competing civilisations and that every country will wholeheartedly share their progress. I suspect China, as Russia and perhaps India at some point, sees itself as such a competing civilisation. We assume that those times have ended but i think they haven't. In this context China does it for its own benefit. I somehow doubt they are not already either actively probing, or considering probing, mars, the moon and asteroids. Japan does it - we know this thanks to, albeit anaemic, coverage in the western media. If China has even a little bit of respect for its thousands of years of history it knows that the next meaningful territorial and resource expansion is space and it is only natural that it will try to outcompete us. Secret or not from us it makes no difference for china. Colossus may have been secret but the science that lead to its development wasn't and thats more important than the product itself. Just as the uk had fertile ground for developing it and later on for developing many computing advances, China is now creating fertile ground for space tech. We should keep an eye on it, and promote news about their progress, so the average joe will understand that unless we invest even more in space development then we are on track to becoming a secondary civilisation, ridden by debt and petty goals.
What do you mean "we don't know either way"? People can visit China and look around. China also sells technology so you could buy stuff and see how it works.
They might be "covering up their shortcomings" but why would would they do that if that makes them lose customers? You can't sell technology based on hot air. It doesn't make any sense.
What use is technology if you don't widely deploy it and commercialize it? It's not like China isn't one of the biggest trading nations in the world.
> It feeds into the bigger question of: why do this stuff? If it is to advance human knowledge the results should be shared. It the results aren't being shared it's an exercise in nationalism with limited significance.
The point is to advance _their_ knowledge, not to share it with all of humanity. To establish a regular presence in space that they can build out from. If space is the next colonizable frontier, China would surely want to be getting in on the action as soon as they can. It's an exercise in nationalism in the sense that it's meant to advance their national interests, but whether it's of limited significance is for the future to know.
It's not so much that this is censored but merely that the reporting on this is very selective/biased. Most news is simply interest driven. Also, the Chinese don't really seem to particularly care how the rest of the world feels about what they do in space.
People like Scott Manly and a few others report on rocket launches around the world regularly on Youtube. The last few years China has really stepped up the number of launches. They are at this point not dependent on other countries to get stuff into orbit; or anywhere else in our solar system.
I'd not be surprised if the next person on the Moon would be launched there from China. They have multiple unmanned lunar missions coming up in the next few years and several successful missions in the past few years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...
I've wondered about this as well. I remembered there were tons of news last year or so when their re-entry was "uncontrolled" and could potentially fall on populated areas. The news outlets made an absolute story out of that one, but barely any news about the station itself. I wonder if this is because there isn't enough info provided from the Chinese side in the first place, or if the (Western) news outlets just don't care.
The latter. Try following western China reporters for a while. You'll notice that a lot of them are only interested in pushing non-stories that portray China negatively, rather than reporting facts.
For example a couple weeks ago they made a huge amiunt of noise about Xi being couped. After Xi showed up they simply dropped that narrative and moved on to the next hysteric story.
I've been following various journalists for years and journalistic quality seems to decline rather than increase.
I hope mankind can move beyond building space stations as a handful of modular small cylinders, and start building space stations the way they appear in science fiction: dozens of rooms, cubical exteriors, hallways, human height doors that open and close, stairs, elevators, hangars, a nuclear reactor instead of solar panels, and modules that rotate around an axis to create artificial gravity. And a more diversified color scheme than all white, which is sterile.
That requires a truly astounding amount of material. Unless the cost to place it in orbit gets within an order of magnitude of our current terrestrial freight, it's not happening.
Best bet is to construct these things in orbit, with materials sourced in orbit. But now you have a chicken and egg problem - need to send an incredible amount of material (and people) in order to (potentially!) save in the future.
I want a country to make one. Any country. I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station. You have no idea how badly I want to live in the kind of futuristic future depicted in science fiction.
> I would gladly pay for a ticket for a week long stay on an aesthetic space station.
How much would you pay? Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Staring out the observation bay for hours on end with my favorite mood music playing through my headphones. Then going for a spacewalk, before heading back inside and having dinner with my friends in the rotating orbital restaurant. After that, I'll play an online video games with Earth-based players. To conclude my day, I'll return to my luxury pod, lay on the side in bed while looking outside at the planet through the port window, a mere inches from my face, and let my dreams, and the low humm of the station's machinery, take me to sleep.
> Because the capital cost of building it was hand wavey thrown out as $500B and the operating costs of facility would be exorbitant.
Yeah, estimated using the inflated cost of the ISS and other historic projects... give a tenth of the money to a private company not bound to political pork interest like NASA/ESA and they'll manage it just fine. Alternatively, give NASA/ESA free rein to do things the efficient way.
The problem at the root is that, historically, space access never was a plain "we need task X accomplished" - there always was the political interest of those with decision power to spread R&D and construction far across the country, so that everyone got a little piece (and every politician could claim of having brought jobs to their voters). That caused enormous inefficiencies - stuff needs to be shipped three times across the continent (look at Airbus supply chain, it's insane), there's an enormous amount of red tape and coordination efforts required, and turnaround times are insane. Meanwhile SpaceX has like two manufacturing plants and four launch sites and especially they manufacture a lot of what they need completely on their own so they don't have the typical delays you have with a classic vendor-supplier relationship, and they save on profit margins of all the intermediates as well.
I think you're seriously overestimating Chinese economic capabilities. They are still constrained by the same economic realities as everybody else, and -- much as we wish it were possible -- they cannot afford to just do whatever.
Presumably the problem there is that even a sea of expendable labour's useless, if what you need is a Von Braun[1]-esque figure and a paddling pool of engineering talent... .
Space stations and exploration can be a difficult proposition to justify to any economic system; democratic, socialist, communist, etc. For China to want to "beat" us, building bigger and better space stations would somehow have to align with the current and future five year plans.
I would rather have China and the US pouring tons of money into space stations and exploration, but it is hard to figure out the rationale for such a massive investment. China seems to make rational decisions, those of which I am not defending. I am trying to figure out how rational a $500 billion dollar investment in a space station would be to Chinese interests.
The space race was motivated by competition with Russia, notably the imperative to establish a tactical nuclear advantage. We could conceivably see another space race between the US and China, but maybe not if "space" doesn't have the same tactical appeal?
I suppose it could lead to a race to build a new generation of heavy lift vehicles or other propulsion systems. Maybe a return to the NERVA[1] engine! That technology was an interesting story point in the "For All Mankind" series alternative timeline.
Presumably everyone already has access to enough nukes such that there isn't much of a point in investing in nukes, whether terrestrial or satellite? The arms race might lead toward building more, better interceptors?
That will probably require finding an efficient way to extract building materials in space (possibly from the moon), moving those materials to where you want your station (probably a Lagrange point), and building with those materials. These are non-trivial problems.
Also solar is far more efficient in space, without any annoying atmosphere in the way, it makes perfect sense to use it there.
To stay within the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, habitable stations are put in low earth orbit. Low earth orbit entails atmospheric drag, and bigger stations have more drag as well as larger propellent requirements to boost.
Even if the cost to launch would be way cheaper, that weigth allowance would be used for useful stuff like laundry machines, more "sterile" modules as you call them for more research, and potentially for industrial applications like factories to build low-gravity-only components and low gravity biomedical applications.
Your vision is useful for tourism and little else.
While I too look forward to that day, at least for awhile longer due to physics, we are going to continue to have “rounded cylinders”. The main reason for this is very simple: Pressurized vessels. If you look at any type of air tank, and there is a reason they are a certain shape. The moment you do any type of “point” or “edge” it becomes a weak point in the design.
That said… you can always make a really large pressure vessel and put things inside…
It sounds like you're saying that a bigger space station would enable more experimentation quantity and quality. I would still say that the benefits need to justify the costs. We've gotten better at being frugal/scrappy with how we use space resources, whether that's small experiments on the ISS or cubesats.
You should check out videos from inside Skylab if you haven't[1]. You can see people jogging around the perimeter like in 2001. It was so big that they worried that people who ended up in the middle would get stuck and have a hard time getting back to the walls.
Zero g tends to expand living spaces in general due to them becoming truly 3-dimensional. The volume of a tiny room on Earth can easily accomodate several people in orbit. Large spaces don't make much sense in these conditions, not just because of inefficiency, but because of the inconvenience of being stranded in the middle. You need some kind of handles or separators within the immediate reach - why not have actual walls then.
Floors and ceilings are concepts that only make sense in the context of gravity. The reason that science fiction movie space stations look like that is because they were filmed on earth.
Isn't this a logical fallacy? Rocket scientists and engineers are going to best suited to getting stuff into orbit, they aren't simply going to be able to go a solve a "more important problem". Other people are already working on those things and are likely specialists.
It's hard to make items that achieve their function and can be transported into space. There are still improvements to be made with functionality and launch-ability. It's more important to focus on those - if you can make something fit a subjective standard of beauty at the same great. Except that's only 1 person's ideal so who cares.
It's true in a way but just pushes things back a level of causality: if we train more people as aerospace engineers, then we will have fewer trained people in other specialties. We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change. The best answer of course is "do both" and make sure more of our young people are happy, enthusiastic, and able to access necessary training and education.
There are also skills that overlap: every welder that SpaceX or Lockheed employs is one less welder able to help install a water treatment plant somewhere. Here again, the solution is to train more welders.
You don't have a finite supply of people. Because people get to choose what they do. Even the dictatorships can't order people to become a good X if they don't have the interest.
It's the height of entitlement to think you're able to demand more of some profession come into existence. The worst regimes on earth can't manage it. The most you get to do is incentivize and make available the training and access and process to maybe get more of that. That's it.
We absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scientists and engineers, and nobody was coerced into anything. We trained enough engineers in that short time to staff a literal moonshot program plus every half-baked weapons system idea that crossed a desk anywhere in the Pentagon plus tons of other more speculative stuff like packet switching networks (aka ethernet, the internet, etc.).
It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.
It's extremely hard to join large structures airtight, with joints being stronger than the material itself.
Soviet, and Russian spacecraft, and modules were traditionally made with extremely uneconomical method of machining the vessel from a single giant piece of aluminium to not to worry about joints, and their strength under space conditions.
The difficulty is not about joining large structures airtight. otherwise we would have trouble with building commercial aircraft.
the problem is when you want to make something out from the absolute minimim weight possible due to economy of putting things into space, then you can't do with any connections whatsoever.
The pressure of -1 bar isn't particularly challenging engineering wise.
I am somewhat curious what the (MRE-like???) pre packaged/factory-sealed Chinese astronaut food looks like, in its containers and when prepared for eating. And what the variety of the menu is.
Have we actually had the announcement that Russia is going to switch from sending cosmonauts to the ISS to sending them to China's instead? Or is that just kind of assumed, without announcement?
The claims about Russia cooperating on a space station refer to some hypothetical second station as Tiangong is not at an inclination where Soyuz would be able to reach from where it normally launches.
IIRC there was some speculation that they might work with ESA to launch crewed Soyuz from other locations, but that's obviously going to be completely off the table for a while now. So the only other option they'd have is launching from China, which doesn't really make much sense.
Besides that, recently (mainly after the last guy who ran Roscosmos was 'promoted' to some position related to the Ukraine war) Russia has pulled back on its "we don't need the ISS" rhetoric. Now they claim to be interested in sticking with the station beyond 2024 until their own station is ready, similar to NASA's plan of trying to have the ISS hold out until the 2-3 private space stations in various stages of development/construction are operational.
The issue of course being that it's highly unlikely that Russia will ever finish a replacement space station as their space industry has spent decades in decay struggling to get any non-military projects to make significant progress. Thus it's pretty likely that they won't have a station ready and will effectively lose their crewed spaceflight capability from not having any place to go to with it.
assumed? Where did you even get this idea? China's station has never been discussed in this context, and the current plan is to continue flying to ISS as is until '27 inclusive, then launch a new one.
I'd prefer countries to cooperate more. There's no need to have dozens of national space stations or even launch systems. Some diversity is Ok, but it's just too damn expensive.
> I'd prefer countries to cooperate more. There's no need to have dozens of national space stations or even launch systems. Some diversity is Ok, but it's just too damn expensive.
The reason the Ariane (rocket) program exists is because the US put restrictions on European satellites if they wanted to launch on US rockets.
I'm all for cooperation, but often times you need a strong alternative in order to negotiate effectively.
I think that was the hope for ISS in general with the rationale being that the cost would be just too expensive for any one country to bear. And ISS, not completely unlike the globalization and connections between countries would force some modicum of cooperation.
I think we were way too optimistic about ourselves as a species. Our cooperation does not last long.
The ISS still makes Russians cooperate with other nations. That's quite remarkable given the underfunded state of Roskosmos and the insane dictatorship that is the Russian Federation.
If launches have nation state level prices then of course the only entities that could afford them would be nation states for the most part.
Right now I'm pretty sure Starlink is the biggest customer of a private space launch company. Yes I know it's pretty much the same company but look at the other satellite internet providers that are also using SpaceX: Viasat, Echostar (Hughesnet), Iridium, Inmarsat, Intelsat, Globalstar. That's most of the providers that are out there. This goes hand in hand with commercial space launch, as launches become cheaper and more available the share paid for by private business will increase. This is a good thing! Don't you want a college or even a high school to be able to afford to put a small satellite in orbit to do simple experiments? The only way people are going to get interested in space exploration again is if they themselves can actually do things in space, in person or remotely.
Yeah I agree. But competition breeds advancement. It has roots from capitalism all the way down to natural selection and survival of the fittest. It works.
There's no doubt in my mind that part of what's driving China in not just the space race is the fact that they want to beat the US.
In space exploration competition is just wasted effort. There may be some benefit, but only when the majority is dropping the ball. Cost effectiveness is already a major driver in innovation, and even inside a national space program there always is a high degree of competition between ideas and concepts.
All competition is wasted effort. Perfect collaboration always wins. But competition is what motivates humans, and unfortunately this inefficient way of working is what drives humanity forward.
China would not even bother with half the stuff they accomplished for space if it were not the existence of a competitive goal. The irony is what the US tried to do to contain them in actuality enabled them.
The current economic implosion in China also brings the future of this station into question. One of Xi's biggest dreams for the future was his vision of the Xiong'An new city which has recently been abandoned after being only partially constructed. Big projects get shelved in hard times.
I'm sure you didn't mean to, but your comment was nationalistic flamebait that predictably set off a nationalistic flamewar. Please don't do that. From https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html:
Are you implying that Chinese nationalism prevents the collaboration? Look into why China is not part of ISS, despite its desire to join. Spoiler: the US has blocked it. It's a small miracle that Russia is part of ISS, not in small part because the US wanted to get cheap access to the Soviet Mir-based technology and expertise.
You are not entitled to rights or privileges in a country you are not part of. For example I wish the US and the UK would stop spying on me with their dragnet, but alas I am not a US citizen so I am not privileged to be protected by their own laws
The USA requiring China to invent something on their own rather than Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V the USA's work is helping them grow up. It's a long-term win-win. We don't "blame" parents for asking their children to grow up into independent adults, nor should countries enable codependent behavior.
Ok, it doesn't change the fact that since 2011, Congress has forbid NASA from working with and Chinese government/organization without explicit approval from the FBI and Congress.
Nationalism, any forms of it are evil. There is no "benign nationalism" that is just people being proud for their country or whatever. It all leads to sorrow and, ultimately, destruction. Paraphrasing Voltaire, we should squash it. It is not beneficial and people can absolutely "reach for the stars" in all senses of it without nationalism. The only thing nationalism, in any form, moderate or extreme, is good for is for a small group of people (government, etc.) controlling a larger group of people (country's population) by irrational means.
Unfortunately, we won't see anti-nationalism coming to the same level as atheism even in our lifetimes. When I express this kind of view even the more liberal people in my circle say this is too extreme.
I am not advocating for any kind of anarchism, or saying government is bad. Nationalism is.
Hypothetical Nation A allows democratic freedom of expression and respects human rights. Hypothetical Nation B has a tyrannical government that censors and imprisons anyone who questions it and constantly violates the rights of its people.
Nation A and Nation B go to war. Do you care who wins? If you don't care, there's something wrong with you. If you do care, people will accuse of being a nationalist.
At the end of the day we need to distinguish between racism and nationalism. Some nations are simply better places to live than others.
> Hypothetical Nation A allows democratic freedom of expression and respects human rights. Hypothetical Nation B has a tyrannical government that censors and imprisons anyone who questions it and constantly violates the rights of its people.
Both countries are, as you said, Hypothetical.
> Some nations are simply better places to live than others
I have the same feeling. Most people are quick to be anti nationalist shenanigans but then are quicker to defend things like "keep jobs for <insert nationality>" type rhetoric as if the people who are taking those jobs aren't humans of equal worth.
I wish we'd just get done with it but I have the same sadness that it's going to take a few more hundred years at least.
The problem with “love your country and fellow citizens” is that even the most benign form of it becomes “my country and fellow citizens are better than everybody else”.
That’s a great sentiment to have about your family maybe but not about an abstract concept, as it becomes as evil as religion and any similar instance.
I typically define that as "patriotism". In other words, patriotism is loving your country and wanting to make it better. Nationalism is loving your country and thinking it's better than all the others.
> Unfortunately, we won't see anti-nationalism coming to the same level as atheism even in our lifetimes.
Neoliberalism is clearly anti-nationalism, and it's been the dominant ideology for at least 3 decades. Neoliberalism seeks to eradicate borders, weaken states, and empower transnational corporations to privatize and exploit the resources of once-sovereign countries.
There's been a "war on nations" since WW2 and the rise of the superpowers, and only in the last decade has the tide started to turn.
A key fact is that Reagan was not a nationalist, he was an anti-nationalist that used purely performative, aesthetic nationalism to disguise neoliberal policies.
Yes, neoliberalism's failed economic model has set anti-nationalism back at least half a century. It threatens people's livelihoods by directly inhibiting the state's ability to improve the majority of their citizens' lives. Until the economic model is shifted, nationalism will continue to be seen as the antidote to neoliberalism, unfortunately. Neoliberalism and US hegemony are two sides of the same coin, so both of them are the biggest threat to human collaboration across borders.
couldn't agree more. Space is like therapy these days, earth being what it is right now. lets hope we - as a species - can get it together and truly explore what's out there, as collaborators and colleagues
I hadn't noticed that, but it is interesting yeah. I have to assume cultural differences must play a role here. I don't know Chinese culture; perhaps it's more modest? Perhaps they'd find celebration in mission control untimely? Perhaps putting things in space is jut not as fundamental to Chinese culture, so people there treat it more like "just a job"?
The USA is a nation built by explorers that colonized frontier after frontier, and the space race is a legendary two decades where they explored the final one, pulled ahead of the USSR "not because it was easy but because it was hard", planted a flag in the Moon beating their nemesis in the process, and overall reaffirmed in their ethos this mythical American exceptionalism that's so often talked about. I think space still carries this mysticism to it in the USA; there's a lot of badass jobs out there, but none quite as badass as being an astronaut. There's a lot of hard jobs that require incredible planning and precision out there, but none quite like rocket science. There's a lot of science and engineering agencies, but none quite like NASA. All these have "cool" and/or "hero" status to them in the USA psyche.
Hollywood has certainly spread this sort of sentiment around the world (especially the "Westen" world), but I wonder how true this is in China. I will say though, there's a lot of jobs that don't awaken strong passions that are still done very well in the USA, so I can only imagine, even if they're not jumping up in elation, it'd still be possible for the Chinese to be at least competitive with the USA on matters of space. As an aside, I also wonder what makes Chinese people feel that pride, celebrate that brotherhood and passion, and if they perhaps thinks it's weird that the USA doesn't feeling the same way about whatever that is.
You can’t really judge other cultures by their outward happiness. That’s really just a US thing. I think what it all comes down to is the probabilistic numbers game - how many clever people do you have hacking at various problems. Some % will succeed, and the larger the population the more results will emerge from it. That’s China’s fundamental advantage. They can still fuck it up though with poor political structure, as they did for several hundred years up until the 2000s, and may yet revert to under Xi Jinping. But they’ll have to really screw things up to lose the numbers game.
Does completing a space station not count as success? Also, here's a video of this launch, people look pretty happy to be honest: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xcgT93s08o
3:52, 5:00, 5:13. Compare to 6:15 of this recent SpaceX launch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7qAbM5Noq48. How will SpaceX ever succeed with such miserable, unmotivated staff??!?
Have you seen what China has become in the past 2 decades? The technological growth and development is unlike anything ever seen in the history of mankind. Not only are you wrong. You are gravely wrong. The likelihood of China surpassing the US in the space race is actually quite high.
It's a technological shithole. Half their countries tech doesn't is not made based on proper rules and regulations. Resulting in poor performing and dangerous tech. The amount of accidents is astronomical and nobody seems to care. Most of their machines are direct copies of western equivalents.
So no I am absolutely not impressed by their achievements.
You fail to see the magnitude of what occurred to china. Yes there's a market for cheap knock offs. But there's also the fact that how almost 90% of Americas manufacturing know-how has moved to china.
> During a Chinese launch I see super strict hierarchy. People looking damn serious. How can you ever succeed without having motivated , out of the box thinking people.
It matters when people think China is a High-Tech powerhouse. Until 2017 they weren't even able to produce ball-pens domestically. They had to institute a five year long program to figure out how to make the small balls that go into the tip of it.
Also China is unapolegitically militarizing it's space presence, and that should bother you a lot more than any US ambitions in that regard.
Yes. And they are a basically a democratic country, usually honor their treaties and are allied with my country. Generally countries who are "friends" with the US fare a lot better than "friends" of Russia or China. I do trust the US way more than China.
Also there is a big difference between recon satellites and hunter-killer satellites.
Russia is threatening to destroy Starlink satellites over support for Ukraine. In my opinion that has voided any treaties or intentions of not weaponizing space in a more direct way. The US (and its allies) now need to figure out how to clean up orbits wrecked by Russia and how to disable Russian satellites without wrecking useful orbits.
