Love Orbital Index... just realized I stopped getting emails from you guys in 2022 :( Does it auto-unsubscribe if I don't open one for a while? I was away from the Internet for a few months.
I don't think anyone is really competing for this achievement right now. If I'm running a race with no other competitors, can I claim to have finished first? Or even to be racing?
In the past year there were 6 probes (include Chang'e-6) trying to make a soft landing on the moon and only half of them succeed or partially succeed. I'm not sure how it counts as "no other competitors".
Great work, I'm curious as to how autonomous the landing was (I assume fully autonomous) - but since there's awesome video sent back from the dark side of the moon there must be some relay in orbit too.
I'd give the Chinese space program more than a healthy 50/50 chance of landing humans on the moon again within the next ten years.
I consider this unlikely - it is at least an order of magnitude harder to land people there and get them back even if you already have the heavy rockets and experience required. The US remains the only country capable of repeating this feat within the next 10 years, in spite of the current timelines being ridiculously unrealistic, simply because it doesn’t have to guess quite as much and either already has or in the advanced stages of building the necessary technological base.
> not convinced even the US is actually capable of that
Then you haven’t been paying attention to American aerospace over the past decade and a half. It is far more capable today than it was in the 60s, particularly in robotics.
Where we lag is in human space flight, in part due to bureaucracy and complacence among the majors, in part because we have ridiculously-high safety standards.
Incapability due to regulatory and bureaucratic burden is real incapability.
and frankly, while we have made some technical advances, we have also suffered severe logistical, political, and capital losses, especially in context of the aforementioned bureaucratic and regulatory burden. We have also suffered, IMO, loss of capability in our elite engineering echelon.
The F-35 is a perfect example of what I’m describing. Technically brilliant in some ways, sure. Pretty lame and terrible in others. Debatably an advance over previous generations of aircraft, at the very least.
Today’s NASA is a completely different animal than the NASA which put a man on the Moon.
I don’t see SpaceX doing it either. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Let’s wait and see.
Corruption merely makes things much more expensive. That is not really a concern to a country that can issue $3T in debt every year. Nor is “decadence”: within a decade SpaceX could do it on its own, without NASA.
And then you remember the Wolf Amendment that was enacted to hold back Chinese space efforts and you laugh .
According to this American law ,NASA is not supposed to be in contact with the Chinese government or Chinese government affiliated organizations.
It was just to delay missile development as Chinese affaires were caught gathering information for non-scientific endeavors, anyone with half of a brain knows that China was going to do this eventually.
You can't really tell the scale of the craters because each time you get closer, more craters appear. I can imagine that even with stereoscopic eyes, a human could easily misjudge distance and scale too. We're not used to operating in such a barren environment.
camera footage taken in space is something weird indeed. I remember when i first saw how an eclipse affects shadows in real life. It immediately clicked in my brain why that early moon landing footage looked how it did. And also how easily so many people thought it was fake
It looks exactly like on the first Apollo photographs. Guess they must’ve hired Kubrick's students. Jokes aside, there’s just one light source on the moon, and no atmosphere to provide diffuse light. The dynamic range (contrast) of the moon is something we don’t see often on Earth.
And the lighting makes it really hard for the camera to see any stars, so the sky always looks deep black and fake which also adds to all those frustrating conspiracy theories.
I love the spirit of the Chinese people, but much of the engineering and science China has was stolen from the "hostile nation". China also restricts who can enter its markets and censors its citizens from outside influences.
This all while a single hostile nation wants to dictate what China is allowed or not allowed to buy on the free market.
Xi has abandoned the wise policies of Deng and is setting China back. Due to the idiocy of Xi it's not a single hostile nation as you put it. It's Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, India, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand.
China's only definitive enemies are the US (at risk of their throne being usurped) and India (they've been waging border skirmishes for decades, long before Xi came to power).
As for the rest:
* The EU plays a two-faced game, antagonizing China to please the US while cooperating with China for benefits.
* Japan and South Korea must respect the fact China is their regional dominant power, not the US nor themselves. Both historically and again in modern times as China (re)gains power.
* Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Phillipines, et al.) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) antagonize or cooperate with China depending on the political winds of a given year.
Interesting word usage: other countries antagonize China but no mention of China antagonizing anyone.
China is helping Russia fund their war in Ukraine. The EU cares a lot about that.
China has no regional dominance by the very fact Taiwan is still not part of China. What’s holding them back? The US. If China had regional dominance, the US would not be an issue.
It’s important to not ignore what China is doing in the South China Sea. It’s not a “political wind” when China is attempting to redefine another country’s maritime borders and the Philippine president mentioning acts of war being committed by China.
That's because the claim was "who are China's enemies".
Anyone can decide to be China's enemy (or not) for any reason, including regardless of whether China antagonizes them.
The EU component of NATO is a great example, the US antagonizes them very often and yet they remain friends with the US. Another example is Russia; Russia hates dealing with China, including for reasons such as stealing of technology, but remains friendly for practical reasons.
China antagonizes other countries a great deal, particularly its neighbours, but that is tangent to who are its enemies.
>China has no regional dominance by the very fact Taiwan is still not part of China. What’s holding them back? The US. If China had regional dominance, the US would not be an issue.
And that situation might change this century if current trends continue, the US is losing power (in all senses, military and otherwise) and China gaining.
Even today Japan and South Korea aren't just flipping China off, holding talks and building up their militaries, because they understand the US can't protect them perfectly from the dominant power of the region.
>It’s important to not ignore what China is doing in the South China Sea. It’s not a “political wind” when China is attempting to redefine another country’s maritime borders and the Philippine president mentioning acts of war being committed by China.
The previous Phillipine government was friendly to China, in no small part also to the US at the time pushing the Phillipines away. The situation there will change according to the way the political winds blow.
America's petro dollar funds research by arming countries that pull oil from the ground, research that is then acquired, emulated, and iterated upon. Who's the crook in that story? The people robbing the earth of a natural resource? The people holding the world hostage forcing them to use their financial system? The people taking scientific knowledge they didn't "pay for."
While a significant portion of the techy American population in their younger years was against America's strengthen of intellectual property rights, while they were focused on art being locked down, were ignoring how much of America's strength in the world is propped up by claiming America owns ideas, information, and knowledge, that others have to buy from them.
Humans would be a lot better off if everyone just copied everyone so we could advance as quickly as possible - imagine if the entire would could just manufacture whatever cutting edge medicine some corporation is holding hostage - and that's just the medicine example. Let your mind wander to every aspect of life - clean energy, transport, tech.
Of course corporations wouldn't make nearly as much money, but is the goal of civilization for humans to live good lives, or for corporations to make maximum profit?
Yes its works for 1 generation, but nobody ain't going to break their back again to develop next generation cutting edge machine, if the adequate reward won't be there. And some cheers are not cutting it for capable and ambitious folks.
Adequate reward in corporate world means of ten hundreds of millions or billions, since risk of failure and losing it all are often massive and they do happen regularly, risk gets bigger the more revolutionary stuff you do.
That's why US won cold war - individuals and private entities were massively motivated to do their best, and so they did and in few decades leaped light years ahead of eastern bloc. Anybody from former soviet bloc/eastern bloc visiting western country went through absolute shock and disbelief, and that includes Gorbachev visiting supermarket in West Germany in late 80s IIRC, he thought its some sort of propaganda trick on him. I went through milder version of it too, a powerful experience.
Communism in any form doesn't work long term, tried and tested many times already, period. It fails on people, and that's enough for a complete failure. Neutral non-greedy AGI could make this work, if not turning into some form of Skynet... but getting vastly off topic here
As-if all countries are on the brink of launching their own space program, if only they copied a few PDFs from somewhere. Its a US intelligence talking point.
Be that as it may, these things are won by whoever crosses the finish line first and China appears to be ahead of the west at this point and especially if current trends continue.
Also worth noting that American space exploration achievements were also kickstarted by importing the talent from post-WW2 Germany.
> worth noting that American space exploration achievements were also kickstarted by importing the talent from post-WW2 Germany
China can’t really play this card given what it’s currently doing in Xinjiang/East Turkestan [1]. (And while America was capturing the likes of von Braun and chemical bombing Vietnam, Mao was conducting his own crimes against humanity [2].)
The proximate history of every country’s aerospace programme is unfortunately troubled. What matters is what can be done today and by whom. In that, China and America are worthy adversaries. Let’s hope the competition can be kept civil versus militarised.
They are all pointy metal tubes with wings and (an) engine(s), filled with fuel that go boom to make them fly, carrying some sort of payload.
Their only difference is to what purpose they are used. Some are used to destroy, some are used to kill, some are used to defend, some are used to throw stuff into space.
But they are all pointy metal tubes filled with boom powder.
Nearly all modern forms of rocketry trace their roots to German technologies like the V-2, and rockets used for space exploration in particular are direct or spiritual descendents of intercontinental ballistic missiles repurposed for civilian use.
There really is no difference to the rockets themselves, they are all varying forms of pointy metal pipes filled with boom powder. The only difference is the payload they carry; whether they are humans or spaceborne vessels like satellites, or explosives of various descriptions with which to destroy and kill.
If you disagree, and you've certainly made it clear you do, you can put forth counterarguments instead of claiming quackery.
Obviously I'm saying "boom powder" as a generic and funny term for the various fuels used in rocketry. They can be liquids (RP-1, liquid hydrogen, liquid methane, various hypergolics like UDMH, etc.) or solids (eg: solid rocket boosters, most military missiles and rockets).
The Saturn V used RP-1 and liquid oxygen for the first stage, and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the second and third stages. The Apollo CSM used dinitrogen tetroxide and "Aerozine 50", a 50:50 mix of hydrazine and UDMH hypergolic fuels that was originally used for the Titan II ICBM.
Sure .. from my PoV I can live with "powder" it's the "boom" that rankles.
Relatively slow controlled energy release for thrust isn't particularly evoked by the word BOOM!!
Otherwise simplifying rockets and missiles as they are today to tubes of slow release thrust (with some additional wrinkles such as side thrust | directional thrust to 'balance' load over thrust, multi stages, etc) seems innocent enough.
It’s a disgrace indeed. This fragile, completely open and transparant, utterly harmless human rights paradise wants to just grow a tiny bit while this single, isolated, hostile, aggressive and jealous close-minded nation wants to control them.
This mission required a communication satellite that loiters on the far side of the Moon as well to relay communications back to earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#queqi...