China lands Chang'e 6 sample-return probe on far side of the moon
space.com
space.com
And after this I try to find news on lcoal media and where I normally get news from, but it's obviously not on any front page or things like that.
It is fun.
(But, full disclosure, I actually read it at Slashdot first).
Unicode is still broken, which is a nice touch.
I did find out that cctv published two news through there wechat channel, but they just get flooded in the feeds.
And no-one to give the drill a bit of a wiggle if it's stuck.
I'd kill for a fully detailed machined metal scale model (but I know I couldn't afford it: edit: actually, 500 yuan ish from Taobao, perhaps not fully detailed, but I'm tempted).
I've already head national "security" experts talk of "hostile Chinese action on the moon" (without specifying further) and "Chinese efforts to control cislunar space" (again without clarifying what that would involve).
Further, citing the need to counter China the US has announced plans to send military satellites to "patrol" the Earth-Moon L2 point (a surveillance satellite as well as an ASAT capable satellite).
In other words, the US is well on its way to bring war to the Moon.
Maybe not "coordinated" but they do have some collaboration with Italian, French, Swedish and Pakistani teams on this one.
Chang'e 7 has Egyptian/Bahraini, Italian, Swiss, Thai, Russian and an international lunar group's payloads.
The Wolf Amendment makes it impossible for NASA to cooperate with China at all, so a competitive stance is really the best we can hope for (the worse alternative bring an outright adversarial one), unless the ESA can wiggle a stabilising middle path between the two sides.
> Without clarifying what that would involve
I imagine ASAT weapons around L2 would fit that bill!
Sure, but so far it is only American weapons going there, which doesn't really explain what Chinese actions the weapons are supposed to "defend" against.
Like, once someone else has sent a weapon to L2 it is easy to motivate sending your own, but the US is currently bootstrapping itself into sending the first one basically by pretending someone else already beat them to it.
Their own justification almost entirely is based on "what if" someone is doing exactly what they are trying to do. It's not even particularly subtle, even if you dress it up as debris removal. Which makes no sense in itself.
Apollo 17 was three metres deep, but they had a meatbag-in-a-bag to feed in drill segments and keep things under control. Which has its own tricky technicalities to keep the meat fresh and moving, to be sure. But it does simplify the other mechanisms.
China. Dark side of the moon. Seems ripe, shall we get one going?
The scale and rate at which China is innovating in space, science, and technology is pretty compelling for the majority of the world.
Why would it? The US returned rocks from the moon over half a century ago.
Which is to say, I'm not holding my breath for a handover just yet.
When China has that much projected power across the globe, we’ll talk. For the moment, they’d still end up in a Ukraine-sized boondoggle if they invaded Taiwan.
China has rather deftly avoided the dumb "global" conflicts the US has needlessly boondoggled itself in over the past 3 decades. I think they've mostly sidestepped this question. For now.
China hasn’t really avoided these, they have rather gotten involved in completely different ones. The good news is that their last border skirmish with Russia was around 25 years ago.
When US took over Afghanistan, it tried to set up local government modeled on western democracies. That totally failed.
I don't know what China would have done. But I'm pretty sure they wouldn't try to build anything of the sort.
Their most recent conflict is a nice counter point. Spratly Islands in South Chinese sea. It's an obvious land grab in an area that is vital for commercial shipping, important for food production and very good starting point if you needed to pressure Vietnam, Philippines or Taiwan. The only justification is some old map. International arbitration has ruled against them, and they don't really care.
In the meantime they are ramming foreign fishing boats, building military facilities (airports, depots, etc.) and generally acting like they own the area.
In summary, their approach is pragmatic, with obvious material benefit and no pretense of lofty goals. Also very low on casualties, at least for now. It is, in many ways, call back to days of gunboat diplomacy.
It's a mistake to compare the US and China's decisions like-for-like, because they're two countries with very different strategic situations and thus opportunities (i.e. China benefits from the US's middle east involvement via a number of means, namely though that stable oil prices are of a huge benefit because oil is a fungible commodity - there's no such thing as "having your own supply" unless you're literally at war and under a command economy - and at that point you're paying for that in a large number of other ways).
China is making a huge push into EVs because they don't want to be subject to the whims of Middle Eastern instability (and do not produce any significant amount of oil on their own). America, in contrast, has much more interest in oil since they produce a lot of it on their own, and their EV uptake is slower, with lots of resistance from conservatives (who want to see oil persevere as a strategic commodity due to financial self interest).
China could really be in a much better place a decade or two from now given their constraints. We still have a lot of advantages, but they are quickly eroding due to pigheaded politics.
Afghanistan and Iraq were stupid quagmires that the USA shouldn’t have involved themselves in, but 9-11 happened and somehow this was the way to deal with it? China’s national security problems are really 100% internal, so they need to garrison the PLA all throughout the country ready to act on say Beijing rather than Kabul. They have an impressive body count, just not of foreigners.
But sure, military-industrial complex gets very happy, you can't sell many weapons if nobody is fighting and people settle their differences by talking, can you.
- building infrastructure in developing economies
- overfishing contested waters
- building artificial islands to claim contested waters as near their land
- buying the debt of other countries
- Yuan shenanigans to make importing from China more desirable
you mean from the founding of the country, but especially in the last ~80 years globally.
Russia isn't the USSR anymore for a long time, where it's GDP was the same as the US.
Only their richness in natural resources kept them above, although it became typical undeveloped country resource curse over time with dictators taking all power and terrorizing population, a tradition well preserved to this day.
Do you know how many were russians were lost in taking Avdiivka? All for Putin to have something to celebrate on the run up to his sham election.
They've made these advances of a few square km, at the expense of tens of thousands of lives. This is the meatwave tactic and is not sustainable. At that rate they'd need the entire polulation of Russia to make any advance on Kyiv.
To call Russian tactics "meatwave," large numbers of soldiers or militia would have to charge at enemy positions in waves, often with minimal support from armored or mechanized units. This is simply not what is happening.
Ye the potential resurgence of open genicidial colonial policies is a concern.
The good thing about the usual suspects pretending to bomb people for their own good is that there is like a limit on how many weddings they can blow up before they are forced to pull out by other political forces.
China still seems to be mostly in a catching up and copying phase.
Not to say their accomplishments are anything but impressive. But look at the space station they’re building. Impressive achievement, but a fairly conservative design. Meanwhile the US has worked on inflatable space station modules, and it seems like that USA will make commercial space stations well before China.
For what I’ve seen USA has far more innovate designs in the works for rocket engines, rockets, spacecraft, space planes, space stations, satellites, etc.
There are impressive innovations from China too, in the space of quad copters, solar power, robot vacuums, EVs, etc. But all-in-all it feels to me that their advanced innovations from all of China isn’t much beyond what we see from much smaller countries like Korea, Japan, Taiwan, etc. Not that amazing considering their population size.
Their population is now shrinking, the economy is getting worse, they have an insane level of debt (especially when including shadow banking), they don’t do real immigration, they’re getting more hostile to expats, they have some brain drain, ... I suspect we’re seeing peak China.
Unless you're a politician running for office, you don't win by arguing your opponent is shit and debilitated and losing and then proceed to do nothing.
We need more financial incentives, more trade restrictions, harder and heavier diplomacy, and indeed even exercising our military might where necessary if we want to stay the preeminent superpower and continue Pax Americana.
China is a very motivated and ambitious country, they have every reason to kick the US and by extension the west off the pedestal. We are at the point we can't just sit and go "Made In China means Crap" anymore, we need to take them seriously and act like it or we will lose our era.
[1]: https://slashdot.org/story/24/05/27/1327206/china-sets-up-th...