As last module docks, China completes its space station
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
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 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.
> 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.
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.
India is 1/6 of the world's population and its media sentiment towards China has been trending sharply downwards over the past few years.
Check out figure 15 for South Asia's sentiment on China.
Edit: Some more propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o96yCGqCHFg <- Will be interesting in a few years, I guess.
China has already overbuilt its highspeed rail system. China really doesn't need another solution for a problem it doesn't have.
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.
You assume that company is giving an accurate picture of what it has achieved. That's not how it works in China...
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.
"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.
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.
Why do you think that's a reasonable assumption to make?
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.
- 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.
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.
Healthy competition for the betterment of all!
Some cooperation would be great, of course. Like the US / USSR space cooperation in 1970s, despite bitter ideological and military rivalry.
But I’m not. I was simply saying that the sanctions have nothing to do with their ability to obtain western tech.
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
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.
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-...
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/16/china-intellectual-prop...
Because this way you'll always be behind.
The Chinese would be supremely unintelligent if they didn’t use that advantage.
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.
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?
BTW competing with Lockheed-Martin and even Sukhoi seems to be harder, too.
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.
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.
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.
They have hacked nearly every F100 they needed to and steal hundreds of billions in IP annually already.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/china-state-backed-hackers-c...
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...
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.
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).
Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.
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.
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
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01...
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in_t...
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.
And those are only the ones who’ve been caught
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.
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.
However it doesn’t get much coverage in western media beyond a Cold War / environmental risk angle.
Reminds me of the coverage of the US launches I watched as a kid.
I'm guessing this is an ongoing thing, and since the clip popped up on Reddit it seems at least ‘social media’ pick up on such output.
We had every opportunity to collaborate with chinese scientists aboard the ISS before this crap. The man is a traitor to science.
Interestingly, you inadvertently (?) demonstrated OPs comment by using the opposing definition from GP.
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!
2. belt and road
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.
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.
> have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory > Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration
These are far from what was claimed by the OP
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.
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 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.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...
[2] https://irp.fas.org/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf
They are indeed IP theft in their genetics!
ftfy
I don’t claim there is no creativity in China. But to claim that everything that looks new to you is therefore original goes too far.
they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.
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
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...
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).
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.
> 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.
Its problem is that it appears to mean the opposite of what it means, not that it has two contradictory meanings.
Try "The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly impervious to fire."
I would say what are you talking about? That makes no grammatical sense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cleave#Etymology_2
> (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.
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.)
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.
Also I don't think the CanadaArm can roam to the Russian segment, but there's a new European arm that does.
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.
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.
"Quick, wind it back in, I need to change the SD card!"
[I'm generally surprised by how ill-informed western populace is about their own govts doing.]
An uncaught error where you don't catch and gracefully handle errors in your promises is not the users' fault. It's sloppy workmanship.
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.
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.
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.
Technically, we should be checking everything.
Practically, nobody does.
That's WiFi only iPads - the iPads with 3G/4G comms used to have GPS, at least the 2011 iPad2 did.
Probably still do, my current cheap Android tablet with 4G does.
Secure context: This feature is available only in secure contexts (HTTPS), in some or all supporting browsers.
So perhaps the site isn't being loaded over HTTPS? If that's the case, it sounds like a site bug.
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...
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.
That's a rather flimsy straw man. I did no such thing.
> You're not automatically entitled to request that every site support your broken configuration.
Goodness, now I'm entitled.
I did no such thing; I just said that blaming your users for your sloppy coding is a terrible strategy.
You should be able to specify a viewing location if geolocation is blocked.
> If you get this error, you intentionally broke your browser,
What I did was that I went into browser's preferences and set "geo.enabled" to false.
> Note that the site absolutely requires some form of geolocation to work at all.
Oh, please, I am perfectly capable of finding my village on the globe by hand.
The ISS, which has five times more modules, reaches magnitude -4 sometimes. Third brightest thing in sky.
The ISS will still generally be the first, second, or third brightest thing in the night sky on a good, near-overhead pass.
> 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 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 am curious as to:
- What provides the 3D earth model
- What calculates the satellite trajectory and plots its arc
- What client side & server side frameworks you used for the web app itself
https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...
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.
https://theconversation.com/space-debris-is-coming-down-more...
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.
> 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 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.
Are you mixing it up with a Cuban owned cow and a different launch almost 20 years before Skylab?
Edit: They never paid it, and it was $400
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/70708/nasas-unpaid-400-l...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Can I get a schematic for an US-based rocket turbopump?
Or the schematics of a spacecraft telemetry module?
Even if most of the stuff didn't wasn't sensitive in the national security sense, it would still constitute the IP of the companies who developed it.
"F-1 ENGINE FAMILIARIZATION TRAINING MANUAL" by Rocketdyne
https://www.pdf-archive.com/2016/10/21/rocketdyne-f1-engine-...
NASA Technical Reports Server - Telemetry (23103 documents)
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/search?q=telemetry
NASA Technical Reports Server - Turbo Pump (2800 documents)
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...
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.
Compare and contrast any content on there to what NASA is providing on e.g. Perseverances mission page: https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/
I can't even find homepages for Tianwen-1 / Zhurong. That is hardly because "media is cherry-picking negative stuff".
https://english.news.cn/20221101/9c24720a1d7e4a71ac112a69572...
I would like to see this:
https://media.istockphoto.com/photos/futuristic-architecture...
https://t3.ftcdn.net/jpg/04/77/75/80/360_F_477758033_1n2FBtz...
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.
People choose those paths on their own, not because some human industrial policy plucked them out of middle school and put them on that path.
And currently most of them go into trading, which is a zero-sum game, or into building another social network that causes depression.
Look at top-ten list of high paying jobs, and ask youself how much crucial work for society they do
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.
It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.
So it starts, the birth of space environmentalists.
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.
You're even allowed to be a pedant, as I am often accused! :)
https://theconversation.com/how-spacex-lowered-costs-and-red...
Your vision is useful for tourism and little else.
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 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.
In space, you have to make it airtight with most rubbers drying our, and constant intense thermal cycling.
That said… you can always make a really large pressure vessel and put things inside…
Also solar is far more efficient in space, without any annoying atmosphere in the way, it makes perfect sense to use it there.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/space-hotel-orbital-assem...
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.
I think we were way too optimistic about ourselves as a species. Our cooperation does not last long.
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.
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.
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.
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.
our earth shapers, builders of history, failed miserably
congrats China, that's how you recognize a great civilization
Artemis: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artemis_program vs Chang’e: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Pr...
EU about to give up Ariane to focus on SpaceX [1]
Isn't that a confession of failure, lack of confidence?
I suspect the US asked them to help them fund their missions
https://phys.org/news/2022-10-european-space-agency-missions...
Also China is unapolegitically militarizing it's space presence, and that should bother you a lot more than any US ambitions in that regard.
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.