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Comment by rich_sasha | Hacker News Reader

To the (flagged) comments about China stealing research: I’ll abstract from lack of evidence.

Just stealing isn’t enough. Russia, I believe, ended up admitting stealing research on the Space Shuttle, and despite that their own project never really materialised. Even. You steal, that lets you catch up, not overtake.

So even if China is helping themselves (again, I don’t know), they still have to innovate and improve. Good on them if they do. And then, their own technology is also ripe for the taking if that’s how the game works.

It’s all progress one way or the other.

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The stone cold fact is that China has n-times engineers than USA, mostly working for the same American companies who outsourced their RnD, and engineering decades ago, and working on mostly the same things.

It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.

It's not just a numbers game (though as Stalin said - quantity does have a quality all of it's own).

Life is rarely that simple - there are also sociological/societal causes plus the required surrounding infrastructure.

China has made dramatic leaps in technological capability but they still can't make a good competitive jet engine and they've been pouring resources into that for literally decades.

Even if you have the plans (and realistically they probably do) just the metallurgy alone is an absolute nightmare.

There are a handful of countries that can do it reasonably well and only a couple of companies that can do it approaching the state of the art.

General Electric and Rolls Royce (with P&W following behind) - there are a few other smaller companies and CFM International which is GE and one of the smaller companies, Safran (used to be Snecma).

That is just one area - in the long term who knows but in the mid-term China will do well to achieve equivalency in a number of areas (and in fairness they know this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025)

I’d be more inclined to quote and think in terms of Brooks than Stalin since the latter was speaking to tanks iirc, and the former to something more akin to scientists: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”

The US probably also suffers from a surfeit of “scientists” as the Thiel theory would have it, just not as bad of a problem as China.

https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel/

Indeed that is probably a better analogy.

You also have to consider culture as well, some cultures tend towards innovation more than others - which I guess fundamentally is how 'free' people are to try things and whether it's top down control or not.

Innovation has many fathers.

And of course USA had considerable influx of German manpower and know-how some of it very directly went into their space program.

Buran made an orbital flight. I think the reason of the project's failure was lack of funding, not technology in that case.

Also I think the Soviets realized the shuttle was a badly designed and expensive frankenvehicle that did not fit any mission profile particularly well.

Perhaps. The Energia booster was quite good. The real reason they stopped flying it is that the Soviet Union went broke, which is also why there is no Soviet Union anymore.

I think the political narrative of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a bit more complex than that. The root cause was a political dissatisfaction in the "member" states and as Kremlin under Gorbachev tried to create a more financially dynamic political system, they accidentally also gave enough leash to the vassal states to create an unstoppable tidal wave of reforms. They could have rolled the tanks in as during earlier decades (e.g invasion of Checkoslovakia during the Prague spring incident -68) but didn't - for which I think the world is ever grateful for Mr. Gorbachev.

So it was not only about money. Although the financial problems were certainly one of the biggest root causes.

Then soviet system had faced several humiliating defeats a few years earlier, robbing it's system of it's facade of invincibility - the invasion of Afganistan and Chernobyl disaster among them.

I haven't lived there so I appreciate the perspective. There certainly is no single cause. What I see as the proximal cause, or the straw that broke the camel's back was that starting in the seventies, the USSR had become a petrostate. The USSR wasn't producing enough food for the population, but this wasn't a problem through the seventies and early eighties due to the high oil prices. The USSR simply sold oil to pay for food imports.

In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased.

Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.

It did fly, my point is, as a project it didn’t go anywhere. It’s not like it was some major leap in the Russian space programme.

In its own right I find it a fairly major technical achievement that the first and only orbital flight of buran was unmanned, landing on a runway with no human at the controls. That's one thing the US never did with the shuttle.

That's because Russians can copy things even when US even doesn't make them in the first place ;)

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