Chinese Rocket company successfully demonstrates 'landing' of rocket | Hacker News Reader

Chinese Rocket company successfully demonstrates 'landing' of rocket

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28 pointsaerophilic13 comments

That test pad seems pretty close to what seems to be a populated area. I see a couple of warehouses and what looks like an apartment building within a few hundred meters. I would be pretty worried if I was a neighbour.

I'm assuming it is more of an industrial type location.

But yeah the decision to do it that close is interesting.

An awesome achievement.

Nevertheless, am I the only one that is afraid of China and skeptical of each technological advancement the achieve?

Always what I think of is how this cool new tech will be used for Orwellian inner control and to satisfy their imperialistic needs.

I hope I'm wrong, but if I'm not? It already has been bad enough with the US as the leading superpower, I cannot imagine with China.

What do you think?

Elon has been hoping for a real space race, perhaps we will see one soon! This is very exciting.

Note to doubters: don't underestimate China.

This is so cool. Looking forward to see when they can launch it into orbit.

That "WE MADE HISTORY" at the end definitely should be "WE REPEATED HISTORY".

blah

Yes, you are really in the wrong.

ESA is outright stating that the landing rocket they're developing is a "fast follower" copy. So it's not just the Chinese who are following SpaceX on landing rockets.

It's the only logical path for larger rockets. Everyone in that segment will eventually copy what SpaceX has done. Even the laggards like Russia will inevitably get around to it, even if it takes 15-20 years.

There's no shame in building cars with four wheels if you're Tesla, or having a steering wheel. There's similarly no shame in copying SpaceX on landing rockets if you're ESA, China, JAXA, Roscosmos, or Blue Origin for that matter. It's the right decision.

In 1961 Yuri Gagarin of the USSR would become the first man in space. The US would follow shortly thereafter. In 1962 in the USA Kennedy was giving his 'We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' speech on getting men to the moon. 7 years later we'd achieve that - landing on the moon while broadcasting the footage live back stateside. At about the same time these events were happening, people were literally starving to death in China by the tens of millions as the country attempted to migrate towards a socialist society. Having put that aside, they would eventually become the third country in the world to put a man into space... in 2003.

The point I make with this is that you need to judge China in the context of China, and not in the context of e.g. the USA. And their evolution so far seems to be following a metaphor of a child - absorb, mimic, create, overcome. And perhaps most importantly, they are also doing so mostly independently. Countries like Japan and South Korea have also experienced rapid development (though this was again, quite a long time ago) but these periods of development were in many ways externally driven which can end up ultimately retarding potential. China's has been internally driven.

China's already starting to push ahead in a variety of areas. Even things like this [1] (horizontal skyscraper) are just phenomenal and, to my knowledge, unprecedented. They actually have an immense amount of really interesting and novel engineering going on in China in general. They have the world's most productive hydroelectric system, tallest bridge, longest railway tunnels, largest radio telescope, fastest commercial trains, etc. One general point is that they have a population of 1.4 billion, with favorable aptitude distributions, and a general social view of prioritizing excellence above all. It's not hyperbolic to expect them to trend towards becoming the world leader in practically everything should the current trends in development continue.

Doubting China is not something we should do. And indeed I do not think we are. NASA, for instance, recently received a nice fat boost to their funding and I think China's recent list of growing achievements in space are playing a significant factor there. You have to keep in mind when you see things like this. This is not the culmination or end of the Chinese space program -- it is the beginning of it.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tMMpolfy3GU

It’s funny how nation states use their space programs as propaganda and to cast a halo, but one of the constant refrains from those people who have been in orbit is how different the Earth looks, literally and figuratively, from just a couple of hundred km up.

While I'd agree their space achievements make China look good much as our landing on the moon did, I don't really think propaganda is a primary purpose anymore - certainly not externally. In space there's effectively infinite land, resources, and potential technological discoveries out there just waiting to be 'plucked'. And whichever group manages to effectively achieve this first will play a key role in shaping the future of our entire species.

Technological progress tends to shape humanity. Those that develop technology enabling them to move outward and discover, settle, colonize, and ultimately fortify, decide the future of humanity. If you consider alternative histories it could well have been the Native Americans colonizing Europe had they they technologically developed more rapidly. Or even imagine if they had been able to fight off the invaders. The world would be unimaginably different today. As but one example it's extremely likely you and I would not be communicating in this tongue. Or imagine the aboriginal people of Australia discovering and choosing to use that large island off Europe as a penal colony. But of course this is not how history played out. The developments that led to certain groups ultimately pursuing and achieving such technological ends, and others not, likely have their origins on a time scale of millennia. Yet those actions millennia past have had an irrevocable impact on our species of today whose impact cannot be overstated.

And I think the same is true of space, except to an much greater degree. The scale of space is vastly larger than all we currently know as humanity. At some point Earth will indeed be Sagan's pale blue dot, if that, to most humans. And indeed by that point we will have long since moved beyond any notion of our original origins, yet nonetheless our original origins will play a massive role in shaping what we will have become. The most obvious example would again be language. Will the lingua franca be a language that is a derivative of Mandarin or a language that is a derivative of English? Or perhaps something altogether different? And of course, as today, that language would be but a proxy for the cultural, ideological, and other developments brought alongside. In effect whomever ends up dominating space will effectively shape the future face of humanity. For an ambitious nation with a longview, there is but one direction to look - up.

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