Chinese villagers capture video of falling Long March rocket booster [video] | Hacker News Reader

Chinese villagers capture video of falling Long March rocket booster [video]

youtube.com

A better link: https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-r...

That sus red smoke is nitrogen tetroxide [0], and the other fuel would be one of the hydrazine derivatives (I believe UDMH [1] here, given that the Twitter thread says this was a Long March 3B). It's exactly as poisonous as it looks.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dinitrogen_tetroxide

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unsymmetrical_dimethylhydrazin...

edit: Oh yeah, those of you who are concerned about the toxic fumes from gas stoves (popular HN topic), this is exactly* that thing—except the stoves' are measured in micrograms and what you're watching in rocket disaster videos is multiple tonnes. One of these lands on your house, and you will not need to worry about long-term cancer risks ever again.

*(To be accurate, NO2 ⇌ N2O4 interconvert in dynamic equilibrium)

> *(To be accurate, NO2 ⇌ N2O4 interconvert in dynamic equilibrium)

... and isn't N02 red while N204 is clear? So, to be pedantic, the red they're seeing is N02?

Exactly!

Nicely uphill from the rice paddy this video was taken in, too. I'm sure that rice will be extra delicious as the rains wash the residues into the field.

WP about N-Nitrosodimethylamine, which apparently dimethylhydrazine is a precursor to "Contamination of drinking water with NDMA is of particular concern due to the minute concentrations at which it is harmful, the difficulty in detecting it at these concentrations, and to the difficulty in removing it from drinking water. It does not readily biodegrade, adsorb, or volatilize. As such, it cannot be removed by activated carbon and travels easily through soils. "

That's a real nightmare. Trace amounts of perchlorates (speaking of rocket chemicals) in water are attributed to some bad health effects, and the compounds you're talking about are so much worse.

> what you're watching in rocket disaster videos is multiple tonnes

But this one hardly had multiple tonnes,hadn't it? It was a spent side booster, so the most of the stuff had been burned before the separation, I think.

When you send a rocket to space, you want a margin for error. Usually this is couple percent for the first stage.

Given that the total weight of fuel at launch in this thing is couple hundred tonnes then yes, the margin for error can be multiple tonnes, but we will not know because the exact value will depend on the particulars of this launch.

if its hypergolic fuel you can be almost certain it was less than a few hundred pounds. "tonnes" of hypergolic fuel would be enough to level the hillside and send the iphone through your cranium.

most people cannot appreciate just how powerful hypergolic fuels really are. theres just no comparison, even when you see them IRL.

An example is the 2013 failure of a Proton-M at Baikonur, nearly full of propellant shortly after launch, carrying several hundred tons of hypergolics:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rfuXUr-_Rns ("Proton M Rocket Explosion 02/07/2013")

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ycRVAcZC5R4 ("More Videos Of The Russian Proton M Launch Failure And Explosion With Three GLONASS Satellites")

(There's lots of different camera angles on YouTube; not sure which one to post).

Uh for the long march 3b boosters udmh / n2o2 is the primary propellant. That entire booster was full of it, so yes, it's liable to be a tonne or so left over (full propellant mass in the stage is double digit tonnes)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B

You don't need tonnes of it to be extremely toxic. The stench of it even from a properly burning engine is extremely nasty and sickening. I'm talking about the trace residue that you get from non-stoichiometric burning in the engine. Add to that all the excess added as guidance margin and whatever is trapped in the plumbings.

About 2% residuals is common in rocketry. This was probably 2-3 tonnes of propellant left int the tank when it impacted.

If you're interested in this sort of stuff, I cannot recommend the book Ignition enough. It's got the information density of a textbook, but it's filled with hilarious commentary and fascinating anecdotes.

https://library.sciencemadness.org/library/books/ignition.pd...

Ignition! is back in print, happily.

Not only that, it's half price! With free shipping!

Holiday promo at Rutgers University Press (I'm not affiliated with them, other than being a recent customer :)

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/holiday-sale/

https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/ignition/978081359583...

Ignition! is the book that reconciled me with chemistry.

You might also enjoy Alchemy of Air.

Ordered, thank you!

I think we all would like to hear your story.

I bet it ends with a bang.

Well there’s an hour I’ll never get back. Had to close the tab or I’d be stuck for a few more hours!

SpaceX's Dragon capsule also carries hypergolics and they know not to mess around with the stuff, even trace residues are a concern when egressing astronauts and salvaging the capsule. There are similar stories from the Apollo era. Quite jarring that the Chinese program would knowingly and repeatedly douse civilian populations in them.

NASA has a vintage 1966 video "Toxic Propellant Hazards in Rocketry" that provides an interesting discussion of the dangers of nitrogen tetroxide and hydrazine propellants. It includes people mixing them together in the desert, along with a dramatization of how to deal with a nitrogen tetroxide leak.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ND2TeNfcmKA

These have fallen out of the sky before killing people on the ground:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_3B

They launched it in Sichuan in a fairly populated region. Supposedly, only 6 people died, but there are rumors that many more were killed.

> Supposedly, only 6 people died, but there are rumors that many more were killed.

Deaths and injuries are always underreported in Chinese media and government figures, because there cannot be any information that is damaging to the public image of the CCP; and if the CCP control everything, then there can't be damaging information about anything.

> only 6 people died

Only?!

The last starships have all exploded in some sort of spectacular fashion, but I don’t think anyone has ever had to worry about a booster exploding on their head.

I mean, tens of billions of dollar (equivalent) have been spent on the Long March rocket program, as with any major rocket. If you spent that much on normal construction, you'd see a lot more than 6 deaths, and indeed I'm sure more rocketry workers were killed than random outsiders.

For reference, there's of order 1 death per billion dollars spent in construction in the US per year. The statistical value of life in the US is roughly $10M, so it's only 1% of cost. I presume in China the statistical value is lower by a factor of 3-10, so it wouldn't be surprising that many dozens or even hundred of workers had been killed since the program started.

Considering now around 700 people die every day in Chinese traffic accidents, it isn't that huge of a price (well, back in 1996 I'm sure that number was much lower).

Yes, "only" in the sense that 6 isn't the real figure, not that it is an acceptable number of deaths.

Here is a better story about the launch and the conditions afterward s.

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/air-space-magazine/disaster-a...

One thing that wiki omits is that the foreign observers were not allowed to leave the launch site for several hours and it appears that during this time the entire area was swept by SAR or recovery teams.

Also not noted in Wiki is that the launch took place at 3am, so if everyone was evacuate for safety per the official claim they would have had to have overnight accommodation.

Edit add: Here is another and perhaps better link https://www.thespacereview.com/article/2323/1

I looked up the region and its like 1000km inland! It's so strange that they do this.

Nearly everyone else (US, Japan, ESA, India) launches it from sea-coasts. I guess Russia does the same thing (Baikanour), but I haven't heard of such incidents from their side.

Edit: Apparently Roscosmos' stuff usually falls on unpopulated regions in Siberia. Surprised China didn't build a launch center on the coast (probably still an issue because of the numerous islands looking out from their coast).

They have since built a launch center of the coast. But they still use this inland one sometimes.

The Russian far east is very sparsely populated. Sichuan is heavily populated in the regions where they launched this (it also has unpopulated Tibetan regions, but too many mountains).

> These have fallen out of the sky before killing people on the ground

It would be very strange if the rockets fell out of the sky after killing people on the ground.

Another angle. Looks like it landed on someone's property https://x.com/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20

https://nitter.net/AJ_FI/status/1739686569676566911?s=20

That looks like a different booster, given that the OP isn't venting as it comes down and explodes.

Maybe this is common?

It is common AFAIK. The most used launch sites (there's one on Hainan where rockets only go over the ocean, but it's the least used) are pretty far inland and they don't seem to mind if boosters land on the people there or if the villages get toxic fuel sprayed on them.

China has four major launch sites. Wenchang, the one on Hainan, is used for human spaceflight. Larger cargo rockets use Jiuquan in the middle of the Gobi Desert. It's the other two, Taiyuan and Xichang (this one), that are relatively close to rural villages, although both are still very remote by Chinese standards.

Don't you mean the PRC's property?

Do "someone"s HAVE property in China?

Isn't the point of the booster to use up the entirety of its fuel to propel the main rocket? Is it normal for there to be enough fuel left in it to cause such an explosion?

There is often some margin, and it doesn’t take much. Many early failed falcon 9 landings were very explodey

Yes, there's always residual fuel and oxidizer in the piping, it's always accounted for. For the first stage of a rocket of this size, it should be around a couple dozen kg, give or take. And hypergolic components ignite on contact.

You can't pump a fuel tank entirely empty. (You could try to displace it with an inert filler gas—compressed helium, for example—but then you're replacing fuel mass with filler-gas mass, and that brings its own set of tradeoffs).

(I understand it's a particularly deep and difficult engineering problem to solve this in space: in zero-gravity, liquid fuels turn into bubbles floating around in nearly-empty fuel tanks—all sorts of phenomena going on).

By no means am I an engineer, but the first thing that comes to mind to me is those little toothpaste keys, and I wonder if you could perhaps just reduce the size of the canister as it empties. I sort of imagine a board with a spring on the top end of the canister that is held compressed under pressure but pushes towards the other end as the fuel is used up. Perhaps the pressure is so great when full that this is very difficult?

If that were possible with the fuels rockets use (liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen, liquid methane, etc.) it is still probably way cheaper on every axis to just make the tank 3% bigger and ignore the waste.

Common axes they care about in rocket design are weight, cost in money, reliability/complexity, and lately reusability.

These are not cryogenic so something is probably possible but this would add extra weight/mass.

You do not want extra weight on your rocket. Every bit of non-fuel weight you add means you have to add extra fuel, and the extra fuel to carry the extra fuel along with any extra tank needed for the extra fuel. It gets bad fast.

It just isn't worth it when you can just add that weight as fuel that normally doesn't get used. Ideally would dump in the ocean (which you cleared) so it didn't matter (much).

They do that for smaller engines. Absolutely. They call it a bladder tank. Here is an article about it: https://www.space-propulsion.com/spacecraft-propulsion/hydra...

> I sort of imagine a board with a spring on the top end of the canister

You are better off doing it with gas pressure instead of a spring, but yeah absolutely. Very good thinking.

> in zero-gravity, liquid fuels turn into bubbles floating around in nearly-empty fuel tanks

Perihelions says it absolutely right. (Fitting nick name :))

There is a beautifull footage of the phenomenon from spacex: https://youtu.be/mVAGoWJuDKk?si=AkjH5hAm-dHC0V87

From 34s onwards it shows an internal view of the liquid oxygen tank. Just to better understand the picture the camera is inside the cylindrical tank. The viewpoint is facing backwards, so the camera is at the bulkhead closer to the tip of the rocket and it is looking “down” towards the engines. The blue “magical portal” is the surface of the liquid oxygen draining away rapidly by the rocket engines. And then suddenly there is main engine cutoff and the rocket is no longer pushed forward by the engines. That is when you see that the “magical portal” sloshes to the side and then breaks up into many floating bubbles. They float because the whole rocket, including the liquid oxygen is in free fall.

Why is this a hard problem? It is absolutely not a problem… unless you want to re-ignite the engine. (Which you might want to do to conduct further maneuvers) If you do that and don’t do anything special to shepherd the fuel to the pumps of the rocket engine they might not suck in a propellant bubble. If they don’t your engine fails to reignite. If the engine ignited, but then the pumps suck in a gas bubble they will break apart. So you absolutely have to coax the fuel to the intake before you try to reignite.

How do you do that? There are multiple strategies. At smaller scales you can try to have a flexible bladder. But at large rockets your best bet is to accelerate the rocket forward so all the propellant sloshes to the back and then you can ignite. Once the engine(s) are ignited you don’t have to worry about it anymore (that much) because the acceleration will keep the propellants bunched up at the aft bulkhead.

But if you need the engines to be ignited to accelerate, and you need to accelerate to ignite them then you have a circular dependency. How do you in theory solve this? You have some other mean of temporary propulsion. Either a cold gas truster, or a monopropellant rocket with a flexible blader, or a solid propellant engine. It doesn’t have to be powerfull, and it doesn’t have to push you for long. Just enough to collect the propellant while the main engines are reignited. These auxilary motors are frequently called ullage rockets.[1]

Now of course how long is long enough, and how much push you need is the black magic with the whole thing.

(And of course this has nothing to do with the pictured rockets. I don’t think those are reignitable.)

1: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ullage_motor

A theoretical alternative to ullage motors is to impart a spin on the vehicle. Then the fuel would pool at either end, or along the tank walls, depending on the type of spin.

There's some diagrams and discussion here: https://exrocketman.blogspot.com/2021/08/propellant-ullage-p...

Silly question, maybe, but what is filling the "empty" volume of that cylinder as the oxygen bubbles float around? Clearly it can't be oxygen or nitrogen gas, so is it just vacuum? In a total vacuum, wouldn't the liquid oxygen atomize? (And wouldn't pulling a vacuum in the tank on the way up make it a lot harder to pump the liquid out of it in the atmosphere?)

I also don't know, but wouldn't it be gaseous oxygen?

Edit: The tank isn't at vacuum. It started full of liquid oxygen. I assume (without researching) that the oxygen would change phase and fill the void with gas as the liquid is pumped out.

That would just cool the LOX and ultimately cause it to freeze. Such a system would require a heater, and even then there could be problems from sloshing causing the pressurizing gas to condense.

Overall, it's less of a problem in pump fed rockets, since the gas only has to pressurize the propellant up to the inlet pressure of the pumps, not above the pressure of the rocket thrust chamber as it would in tank pressure fed rockets.

What happens if the liquid oxygen is boiling as it's fed to the pump....?

Pumps require a certain inlet pressure or they will experience cavitation. I think a liquid close to boiling would make this worse.

Ah, I hadn't considered that it might be pressurized with an inert gas. Thanks!

Also, Falcon 9 now uses subcooled LOX (at 66K) to increase its density.

Not silly question at all. To my knowledge the Falcon uses helium to pressurise the tanks. So the gas you can see is helium. It has several benefits: does not burn, and does not freeze at the temperature of the liquid oxygen. It is also a relatively simple system. They “just”[1] have liquid helium in a composite overwrapped pressure vessel inside the tank and most likely they have a regulator on it to release gas as the oxygen/fuel is used up.

1: this is not easy at all, they lost a rocket due to the helium bottle breaking free once: https://sma.nasa.gov/SignificantIncidents/assets/spacex-falc...

> wouldn't pulling a vacuum in the tank on the way up make it a lot harder to pump the liquid

It would make it impossible to pump. But that is not the only reason you need a pressurant. The tank wall is relatively thin. It would implode in the lower atmosphere if you would have vacuum in it.

You also don't want the booster to run out of gas while still attached, as anything in a rocket could easily end in a fireball

Trying to burn your tank dry is asking for an explosion when the pumps suck gas instead of liquid. And if the fuel feed starts to fail while there still is oxygen the engine itself will burn.

I hope whoever posted this video isn’t in too much trouble ?

Probably not, they're more concerned blocking Winnie the Pooh memes. Rocket stage with toxic propellant landing on some poor peasants' rice paddy? Not a concern. Happens all the time. It's the price of progress: BeiDou and satellite TV used to disseminate CCP worldview.

Amazing how villagers these days have cell phones that can take high quality video. My villagers are walking around with wicker baskets and wooden hammers.

Where would that be?

In a game. Wake up matey!

This being China they probably also have pretty good 5G connectivity...

China already has almost 100% cell phone penetration so that is it.

Hypergolics in your backyard is no joke.

A little UDMH never hurt anyone. Well, not for very long at least.

"Orange smoke. Don't breathe this."

(The color is characteristic of nitrogen dioxide, which is a breakdown product of many hypergolic propellants.)

As wise words now as the days they were spoken. Never forget the eternal question: will it blend?

Reminds me of when a crewed SpaceX capsule landed in the Gulf of Mexico near Pensacola and a bunch of idiots in boats went to check it out.

https://www.space.com/boaters-crash-spacex-crew-dragon-splas...

So they simply launch rockets and then it rains down on their population with pollutants, I wonder what will happen after all that space junk will expire and it is time to decommission.

Is it just me, or does the booster disappear shortly before hitting the ground, followed by the explosion happening before the now invisible booster should've hit the spot of the explosion?

It's just end is pointing towards camera in the last moments

That would explain half of it, although I looked for that and couldn't see it. Wouldn't explain the other half though.

No, I see it fall right to the ground and explode at the moment it hits the ground.

I’ve had people look at me like I’m crazy when I say that the A.I. that will be a threat to humanity will be of Chinese origin. It’s this exact “succeed, at any cost” mentality that cements my belief.

strange comment for this particular video. not really sure what a rapid disassembly of a rocket has to do with AI.

i don't disagree though, maybe for differing reasons

The boosters should have their own flight termination system which should have exploded if they were going to fall anywhere near populated land. Everyone in the US has to have them even if they're launching from Florida over the ocean and each independent flight component (like rocket boosters) has to have its own.

Allowing a rocket to fall on land like that shows extreme contempt for public safety.

I think what OP might be saying is that the attitude that it's OK to just yeet a rocket booster at a populated area, might also not yield much safety when it's applied to Artificial General Intelligence.

SpaceX's flight termination system malfunctioned last year as well, though it was out to sea at that point.

That's the entire reason why they launch from the coast, so that if something goes wrong the debris or booster will fall into the ocean.

What if the termination system was needed because it turned out of control early on?

You probably still have a >50% chance that it's going to be over water since that's the direction it was initially moving. Yes, if flight termination fails and by chance it vectors backwards towards land somehow without just spinning like out of control rockets normally do then it may fly far enough to wind up on someone else's property but that's why launch sites are located at a reasonable distance from inhabited areas. The point is that it's very different to take all of those precautions vs. just flying your rockets over inhabited areas as a matter of course and not giving a fuck if they land on someone.

Flight termination system isn’t relevant when you’re deliberately launching over land. The FTS doesn’t disintegrate the thing

In general I agree with the point you are making, but if you will indulge my "well actually..."

From to the Range Commanders Council Range Safety Group, 2010, summary of FTS requirements:

2. produce a small number of pieces, all of which are unstable and impact within a small footprint;

And also another requirement relevant to this particular video where the spent booster clearly had uncombusted carcinogenic hypergolic fuel when it hit the ground:

3. control disposition of hazardous materials (burning propellant, toxic materials, radioactive materials, ordnance, etc.);

Exactly. The Chinese wont be worried about 'alignment' to prevent bias against minorities. That will be a feature.

Success is all that matters.

> It’s this exact “succeed, at any cost” mentality that cements my belief.

I think that's a ideology thing that goes across borders, as it's a problem on both sides of the pacific.

In the context of this video, you're just wrong.

Other countries seem to be very careful with their reentry plans.

The analogy falls apart with AI, though.

- American AI “safety” practices have little or nothing in common with best practices in other fields of engineering, to the extent they can be said to exist at all (most AI safety work focuses on making sure the AI doesn’t say anything that might offend someone).

- When a rocket blows up, people die but we learn from the mistake. When an AI seriously “threatens humanity”, humanity dies and we very possibly don’t get a second chance.

A rocket booster falling on your head is a real threat.

AI taking over the world is, as yet, an imagined threat.

When AI proves it will take over the world and China builds theirs without the "don't take over the world" code mandated by every other country, let's talk more.

> let's talk more.

Unfortunately if that happens, we won’t be able to!

I don't feel like parent was talking "in the context of this video" as they mentioned AI, so I figured we left that context behind in this comment-tree. Seemingly, I was wrong.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

"I love the smell of hydrazine in the morning."

That's normal for China, they don't care about the trajectory of their boosters and deorbited satellites.

This kind of event is highly irresponsible, and let's be clear their space program decided for it to fall in or around where the video was taken. Utterly reckless.

In this case that recklessness paid off... Nobody was killed or injured, and they probably gain far more from being able to inspect the used booster than the cost of cleanup/replanting a tree or two.

It looks like it exploded when it landed. How inspectable will it be?

The fact that nobody was injured does not make it any less reckless...

Does spreading incredibly carcinogenic compounds in a populated area count as injury?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergolic_propellant#Disadvan...

This line of reasoning is often heard on a crowded lake after a close call with a boat.

It's the reasoning of Idiocracy / Darwin Award candidates.

If its stupid and it works, its still stupid and you're lucky.

Maxim 43

https://schlockmercenary.fandom.com/wiki/The_Seventy_Maxims_...

- "Nobody was killed or injured"

We have no possible way of knowing that, given this is Communist China with a press-freedom index of approximately -∞, and a *documented history* [0] of concealing and covering up politically-inconvenient mass casualty events, including, very specifically, government rocket boosters landing on civilians.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelsat_708

- "The nature and extent of the damage remain a subject of dispute. The Chinese government, through its official Xinhua news agency, reported that six people were killed and 57 injured. Western media speculated that between a few dozen and 500 people might have been killed in the crash; "dozens, if not hundreds", of people were seen to gather outside the centre's main gate near the crash site the night before launch.[4] When reporters were being taken away from the site, they found that most buildings had sustained serious damage or had been flattened completely.[4] Some eyewitnesses were noted as having seen dozens of ambulances and many flatbed trucks, loaded with what could have been human remains, being taken to the local hospital.[4]"

That's quite the Kerbal approach to space program safety you've got there.

Moloch is winning

There are only, like, two dozen launch-capable space agencies in the world (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=List_of_governmen...). This isn't a Moloch problem.

I agree. I also posted the same information below.

I guess I was more responding to the general sentiment in the thread about AI and human rights.

You are correct, as I posted below on launch sites, in agreement.

Guess I was reacting to the rest of the thread that was discussing AI and Human Rights.

Is this video real? That booster seems to be falling very slowly.

It’s an illusion, the larger an object is the slower it seems to be moving. It’s pretty strong if you see a wide body jet or old bomber fly by at low altitude.

As a kid I saw an airliner landing nearby, and I was absolutely certain it had come to a near-stop mid-air. I assumed all of these years that was due to my youth and the fact that I was in a moving car; I didn’t realize this was a known illusion.

When I see a wide body jet fly over my home approaching a landing about 15km away it just looks like it’s impossible how it just hangs there apparently little faster than an airship. Of course it’s actually going 300km/h!

For a commercial airliner on final, probably slower than that, ~240--280 kph (130--150 knots). Given cruise speed is closer to 1,000 kph, that's comparatively quite slow.

Is there a higher quality video where we could estimate its velocity? It seems very slow.

Edit: There is more video here. https://spacenews.com/china-launches-new-beidou-satellites-r...

Max terminal velocity of a skydiver is only 200 km/h.. if this booster is empty this is even maybe slower. Plus real slowness there is also the optical illusion of a very large object in some distance.

So just curious, how fast would you think it should be, and how fast do you think it is in the video?

It makes more sense when you see the wreckage. The entire booster looks like it is made of very thin metal. It is falling on its side just before impact so it has maximum drag at that stage. I would guess it is going 100km/h or less.

This illusion is particularly strong when looking from the moving car. Large low flying planes seem to be standstill in this case.

Can there be any news here from China where y'all don't end up on the China is bad, we are good topic? I feel like this was different before Trump? Did he make all of you come out of the closet?

Are we all on the china is bad topic because we're concerned about highly toxic rocket fuel spraying over civilians? Or what are we doing wrong here?

Replying to a Chinese troll, that's what. ;)

It's against the site guidelines to post like this, so please don't.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Being concerned is not a problem. It's the trying to make it look like China is that brutal stone age country that doesn't give a damn about the lives of their people, in total disregard of facts. Have you considered that may they try but fail to land them far away from the population.

> Have you considered that may they try but fail to land them far away from the population.

They keep using inland launch sites when this is a known significant risk, so objectively they are not trying very hard.

> keep using inland launch sites

Do you know why?

Wait, so you don't think that China is a brutal country that doesn't give a damn about the lives of their people?

Leaving out the deeply incorrect "stone age" part, that strikes me as a perfectly reasonable objective fact.

From your echo chamber, you are right

Nationalistic flamewar will get you banned here, regardless of which country you have a problem with, so please don't post like this to HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

I think you just became more sensitive to it. Sorry, we'll only post good news about China and hide awful stories like this from now on. You're right, China's image needs protecting.

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar hell. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> any news here from China where y'all don't end up on the China is bad

Just to say: this is real bad. Very hazardous to their own people both long and short term. There are historical reasons why they do it, but they could do things differently if they would want to. The underlying reason is that the system does not value the life of the people living in that area.

> we are good

The US has many systemic problems. But in this particular regard they are absolutely the good ones. The US exhibits a lot of systematic disregard toward the health of its population and select subsects of it. This particular kind of careless disregard would not be acceptable in the US.

All in all, you might be right about your point. But this is the worst example to bring it up under.

So with all the changes that China has undergone in the last 30 years, the development in all sectors. The effort they have put in to reduce pollution in their cities. Research in health fields Where do you get the idea that they don't want to do better?

It sounds like you are talking about generalities. I am talking about a very particular issue: they launch rockets and stages of the rocket by design fall back on populated areas.

These are not accidents. Sometimes in the US, or elsewere, an airplane falls on your house. This is not that case. The rocket in these videos didn’t “go wrong”. (Altough sometimes they do go wrong and then they cause even more devasation.)

Some engineer in some non-descript office did a briefing. It went something like this “We will launch the rocket at X. The first stage will land somewhere in the indicated area on the map. It will contain Y kg nitrogen tetroxide, and Z kg hydrazine. Ok?” And their bosses said: “ok”. That is the problem.

> The effort they have put in to reduce pollution in their cities.

I know nothing about that and therefore i will not comment on it. I know about rockets, that is why i commented on that. But do post when you have sources so we can all learn.

Why are you so sure they are not accidents? Accidents can happen again and again. We recently saw a lot of train derailings in the states

> Why are you so sure they are not accidents?

Because it is inherent in the technology. Lower stages of a multi stage rocket separate and fall off as they run out of fuel. Where they fall is the question of where the launch site is and in which direction the rocket is launched.

> We recently saw a lot of train derailings in the states

A derailing is not the right analogy. That is an anomaly. Something which is not supposed to happen, and people are acting to prevent it. If you want a rail analogy this is like a train crossing a bridge between station A and B. It will keep happening because it is designed to happen. It is inherent in the design.

Research in health fields

Yeah, let's not go there

FR, people only think this is bad because it's China. When NASA or SpaceX drops NO3/UDMH filled rocket boosters all over villages in Florida and Texas, you literally never hear about it.

You don't hear about it, because they don't do that.

They launch out over the ocean, you silly person.

I'm all for looking beyond political things Beijing does and looking at China the massive country and people itself, that alone breaks the minds of most of colleagues, but this was a very irresponsible to do

Are there domestic Chinese news sources reporting on this event?

Shallow nationalistic comments are indeed the opposite of what we want here, but please don't start a flamewar about it yourself—that just makes everything worse.

"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents."

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