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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

It gets a ton of press in the United States. Mars mission, manned launches, and other achievements have been featured prominently by the national broadcasters, the New York Times, and Internet outlets. A few years back there was a movie in which a Chinese space station was featured (based on a Russian template, which figured into the story).

What these reports don't have are details. And that's not surprising, because the Chinese government doesn't share many details about its space program, or give any access to media outside of China.

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That used to be the case, but is not so much anymore: for example, Reuters filmed the launch today live. Wenchang spaceport, on China's Hawaii-equivalent island of Hainan, which you can even visit visa-free in pre-COVID times, has become a major Cape Canaveral-style space tourism destination with rocket watchers gathering for launch picnics, streaming live, etc. Today's launch was from the other major spaceport at Jiuquan though, which is the middle of nowhere deep in the Gobi Desert.

That said, the Chinese space program has deep military roots and every Chinese astronaut to date is an air force pilot, so we're not going to see NASA-style transparency anytime soon.

I think being an air force pilot is a suitable background for becoming an astronaut. Possibly even a better background than being a billionaire in a mid-life crisis.

>That said, the Chinese space program has deep military roots and every Chinese astronaut to date is an air force pilot

Is your implication that the American space programme somehow does not have deep military roots?

No. Rather, the US is farther out from our military-only space roots than China.

NASA was split off in 1958 and made a civilian agency, while the Chinese space programme has not, and probably never will.

> every Chinese astronaut to date is an air force pilot

IIRC most early American astronauts were also military aviators - either air force or navy.

> so we're not going to see NASA-style transparency anytime soon.

To what I ask "tell me ALL about your X-37 space plane."

Oh yes, the Plane that is operated by DARPA and not NASA.

The X-37 began as a NASA project in 1999, before being transferred to the United States Department of Defense in 2004.

Sigh.

I can't find a single picture of the exterior or the interior of the space station. Not a single, actual, picture.

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