That's a pretty sad state of affairs. For what, prestige?
Don't forget that China is still catching up. In the 80s, when it started developing, China was poorer than any African country.
The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science.
Times changes here in the WeSt where safety is first. It will also be in China one day, too.
It would be correct to suggest equivalence of attitudes while we were nuking Navy sailors and Nevada hundreds of times, to say nothing of willfully infecting citizens with syphilis, etc, etc, etc.
https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964...
The US is not known for their safety culture, they screw up just as readily as everyone else. They are very well known for minimising its own flaws an throwing a spotlight on its opponents mis-steps. The US inherited the fine British tradition of effective propaganda and do a very good job deploying it (comes with the territory for democracies, really).
Seriously, "they didn't do X..." for a country the size of the US over the length of years we're discussing is meaningless. Proving a negative like that is not practical even in casual conversation.
SUBSAFE?
Someone can convert that to 9's based on fleet deployment time, but that seems like an exemplary 60 year safety record.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...
1. We don't know how the outcomes compare to the Chinese standards or if the difference is significant.
2. The US has a third of a billion people and the largest military budget. China has a billion people and the world's largest military if I recall correctly. There will be pockets of excellence in both. One example isn't anywhere near enough.
3. Before SUBSAFE they had a terrible record of unsafe subs, that is why they bought in the program. That is part of learning and it'll go the same way for the Chinese with their rocket programs - losing these things is expensive and everyone figures that out fairly quickly.
the difference being that the cold war fueled novel R&D and science that the world had never seen; the Long March is a tool that was created as a means to chase after the capabilities of similar Heavy-Lift style rockets. The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; the Long March is supposed to be used for generally all space construction for the foreseeable future.
Given that this class of tool exists in the world already, all we can be asked to do is judge it against its' peers. They all have had accidents, but if the Long March is going to be known for spraying debris across the planet then this is a problem that everyone must pay attention to, regardless of where China has progressed to with regards to their safety culture.
We're not talking about Chinese safety when we're referring to space debris; this encapsulates the entire world.
This seems a bit generous to the US & USSR - remember when we nuked the bikini atoll many times? (oops sorry about your homeland)
John Wayne is possibly one of the victims of this (inconclusive; besides getting nuked he also smoked like a chimney.)
It takes serious internal problems for the third or fourth person following to repeat those mistakes.
China is banned from international space cooperation. They have to master space technology themselves because they can't rely on others. In order to do that, risks must be taken and sacrifices are necessary.
On a broader level, the Chinese think they made a mistake in not investing in science and technology for so long (read: the past couple hundred years). They see lack of science and technology as one of the main reasons why the were so miserable the past 150 years (minus the past 40 years or so). So they're not going to make that mistake again.
It's perhaps the "sacrifices are necessary" point that western commentators most disagree with. After all it goes against the idea of individual freedom. But China is very much a country that prioritizes collective interests over individual interests. This isn't even a weird thing on the world stage: most Asian countries have a similar mindset.
And why isn't there a similar amount of outrage against Starlink? Genuine question.
Do all other countries' rocket stages burn up completely?
The same is true for other countries’ rockets, which is why those countries nudge them into the atmosphere over the ocean. China’s refusal to do this standard, low-tech mitigation is the reason for the outrage.
It’s almost 100x the mass, hence 100x the danger (or more, since satellite-sized objects rarely have any debris) and 100x the outrage.
> China is banned from international space cooperation.
Firstly, China is not banned from international space cooperation. They have worked with several other agencies including ESA and Roscosmos. The only ban that exists is the US restricting China from working with it because of a history of their seizing and stealing of US civil space technology for military purposes.
> In order to do that, risks must be taken and sacrifices are necessary.
You can take risks and sacrifices without endangering the general public of your own country and especially without endangering the public of the world. China has the technology to de-orbit vehicles, they just refuse to implement it on some vehicles.
> They see lack of science and technology as one of the main reasons why the were so miserable the past 150 years (minus the past 40 years or so).
This is the myth of "chinese national humiliation" that is a common talking point of Chinese nationalists and is used to foment nationalist sentiment. Repeating it doesn't make it real.
> But China is very much a country that prioritizes collective interests over individual interests.
You can do that (with criticism) and endanger the population of your own country but you can't at all do that internationally. That's a ridiculous claim.
> This isn't even a weird thing on the world stage: most Asian countries have a similar mindset.
This is again completely false. Japan values the life of an individual at even higher levels than we do in the US. It's not an Asian sentiment. It's a Chinese Communist Party sentiment. (BTW this technique of expanding their own values to all of Asia is something that Imperial Japan did heavily in the decades lead up to WW2. Let's hope China doesn't head along a similiar route. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_East_Asia_Co-Prosperit...)
The idea has existed way before the CCP was formed. See the May 4th movement. Just because you don't want to acknowledge it doesn't mean it's fake.
Calling someone a "nationalist" just because you don't like the point, neither automatically makes that person a nationalist, nor does it invalidate the point.
It's also interesting how people say "never forget" w.r.t. WW2 atrocities, but when it comes to atrocities done against China it quickly becomes "get over it".
> you can't at all do that internationally.
Not disagreeing with you. But please tell me why Starlink has uncontrolled reentry, and why there's not a similar amount of outrage against that. https://twitter.com/planet4589/status/1551434933285052416
> Japan values the life of an individual at even higher levels than we do in the US.
You mean Japanese aren't known to do things that they don't like at an individual level, but still do because they feel compelled to for the benefit of the group? What do you think the phenomenon of not being able to turn down a boss invitation to group drinking exactly is? Why do you think Japanese has fewer problems with masks?
> BTW this technique of expanding their own values to all of Asia
Woah, now where does this accusation come from? Do you have any sources backing up your claim that this is what they're doing?
I don't say that personally, but you're completely misinterpreting the meaning of that. It's about making sure that any one (any country) doesn't repeat the atrocities done by specific countries in WW2. China's version of never forget is about a twisted sense of revenge about what was done to it, not about messaging to its own people to never repeat the things that were done to it. (In fact many in China seems to take the opinion that if something was done to China then it's okay for China to do it to others, which is completely opposite of the messaging you're comparing it to.)
> But please tell me why Starlink has uncontrolled reentry, and why there's not a similar amount of outrage against that.
Because Starlink is explicitly designed to be 100% demisable (burn up) in the atmosphere so it cannot harm anyone on the ground. Indeed despite there has been about 100 re-entries of Starlink satellites, and no debris have been found. That's why people don't complain about it to the same level. (Plenty of people still complain or invent reasons to complain, like that it's creating too much aluminum in the atmosphere, so it's not without it's complaints.) SpaceX has indeed had debris de-orbit and hit the ground, other than Starlink, and people have complained about that. They were also MUCH smaller than the Chinese stages however. You have to remember that these are some of the biggest single objects re-entering in human history. There have been only 3 objects that have been heavier to re-enter in an uncontrolled fashion. The bigger and heavier they are, the more debris are likely to survive to hit people or objects on the ground.
> You mean Japanese aren't known to do things that they don't like at an individual level, but still do because they feel compelled to for the benefit of the group? What do you think the phenomenon of not being able to turn down a boss invitation to group drinking exactly is? Why do you think Japanese has fewer problems with masks?
I explicitly was talking about the value that Japan places on an individual's life versus other countries. For example, to what extant a culture is willing to sacrifice an individual's life for the benefit of the greater good.
> Woah, now where does this accusation come from? Do you have any sources backing up your claim that this is what they're doing?
You were just doing it. You were extrapolating CCP values to all of Asia. That's why I mentioned it in ( ) as a side comment.
Look at the dates on them, other than the Chinese stages.