Hacker News Reader

Also, there's that other country, which cannot be named, which can do this rocket shit reasonably well.

I tend to generally ignore Russia in the context of development nowadays in spaceflight because I don't see them having the spare resources or talent to do any meaningful new development. They're good at reusing and iterating what they inherited from the USSR, but they've promised so much new stuff over the years and have delivered on basically nothing. The countries I mentioned have all at least managed to bring online modern "from scratch" designs in reasonable timeframes.

China?

I did mention China as an example of humanity increasingly reaching for the stars :)

I don't like them politically, but they are clearly a very capable spacefaring nation, with the capability to develop new space-related technologies.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com