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Comment by rippercushions | Hacker News Reader

I'm kind of surprised a random SpaceX launch is #1 on HN, when on the same day, China just completed their modular space station: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33422779

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That post had a couple software penalties on it. I've removed them, and the post is on the front page now.

This is a launch of falcon heavy, there's only been a handful (unlike single falcon 9, which are more common and might be the "random SpaceX launch" you had in mind). It's also a live stream instead of a news article. But other space news events are interesting too of course

It’s entertaining and completely in line with what you would expect out of media and propaganda. There were a bunch of interesting Soviet missions that are basically unknown and obscure in the West. And this Chinese station seems quite notable, but again I basically never hear about it. But then that’s expected, NASA has a massive PR arm that makes sure the tax payers are well informed of its accomplishments. The CCP knows that even if it put massive resources into western media outreach, western news sources would be talking about human rights abuses in the next breath. And it’s extremely rare for a paper to do actual investigative journalism, so even if a western journalist found this station particularly newsworthy, they would have to do all the heavy lifting to get the story published. And probably be getting some explicit or implicit political pressure not to focus so much on a non-ally’s success.

This is the first Falcon Heavy flight in over 3 years: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Falcon_Heavy#Launches_and_payl...

I would agree with you if this was a normal falcon launch.

Space Stations have been done before. Most of what SpaceX is doing has not.

Well the video does say that this is the 150th and 151st landing of a re-usable rocket. :-)

It is basically a rivalry now so not surprised. Same thing happened with China's mars rover.

In some ways, I am down with this type of rivalry than wars. I want an intense space race between China and US.

I mean its not a rivalry at this point. China is just playing catch up.

Modular space stations are significantly easier to achieve than landing two rocket boosters at the same time. Humanity has been doing modular space stations since the 80s (Mir).

> a random SpaceX launch

This isn't a random launch.

https://archive.ph/2bXGR

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