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China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission

197 points by bing_dai 10y ago

melling 10y ago
It's great that China is excited about space. Hopefully, they get soon excited about Nobel Prizes, and basic research. They could easily double the world's output of research.
- bbctol 10y ago
  They've been excited for a while: the growth of basic research in China has been skyrocketing for years. (http://www.nature.com/news/science-in-china-1.20120 http://www.nature.com/news/science-in-china-1.20120) The upcoming five-year plan includes a huge focus on research, and getting high-profile prizes is definitely a target.
- nebula 10y ago
  I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to flourish? The way you mentioned the "China being excited" translates to "Chinese authorities deciding to push basic research". That will no doubt get human and other resources allocated for it, but is it sufficient? China, and USSR may not be a fair comparison, but I feel China is much closer to how the USSR functioned, of course with the added opening up of the economy, and probably economic freedom within the country (The two missing pieces that led to bankruptcy of USSR). Now, let me explain the reason why I brought this comparison here. USSR in its day probably matched the west in defence, and to some extent space tech, but did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Basic research is not amenable to top-down push and needs an environment where ideas and expressions of those ideas have freedom. Anyway those are passing thoughts I had when I read your comment.
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th... And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.
  - neves 10y ago
    You are believing too much in American propaganda of the association of free markets and creativity.
    - johnzim 10y ago
      One does not beget the other but it certainly makes it easier to propagate.
      - neves 10y ago
        Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.
    - product50 10y ago
      The level of brainwashedness here is unbelievable! The OP didn't even bother to research or put data behind his claim/theory.
  - T-A 10y ago
    The USSR had world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A partial list of household names among the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau
    - gnipgnip 10y ago
      Not to mention many results in optimization/computer-science came out of Russia.
    - nebula 10y ago
      Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this? Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes. Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!
      - T-A 10y ago
        I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics. The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
  - resfirestar 10y ago
    IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities. In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.
  - geofft 10y ago
    > did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find: - Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently) - Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962 - Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression - Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
    - vkou 10y ago
      All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience". There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- resfirestar 10y ago
  China's volume of research output is respectable in many fields. But the humanities work is often dismissed as political by Western and Chinese academics alike, and science has a quality/quantity problem[0] made worse by the rapid proliferation of ranking systems for universities and a "publish or perish" culture[1] that makes elite US institutions look good. There are some groups in my field (phys chem) that we know are doing good work, but most research out of China is automatically dismissed because it's so often not reproducible. [0] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475267a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475267a.html [1] https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/how-fares-chinese-academia-questioning-the-university-spirit-%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6%E7%B2%BE%E7%A5%9E/ https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/how-fares-chinese-...
Animats 10y ago
Right now, the US has one person in space. China has two. The US has no manned launch capability.
- tdb7893 10y ago
  To be fair the US also has private companies looking at space so I don't know whether we are ahead or behind.
  - baq 10y ago
    don't expect those companies to launch people into space in the next year, though. china will be ahead for a while.
    - johnzim 10y ago
      I know Hacker news likes "Technically Correct - the Best kind of Correct" but in what sense is China 'ahead' here? It may be obvious but there are plenty more Americans who are back and walking around on planet earth than there are Chinese astronauts who have been put into orbit.
      - baq 10y ago
        please do not confuse current capability with the sum of achievements. USA has put multiple men on the surface of the Moon. what of it if it doesn't have a man-rated launcher now? SLS is a jobs program that's years from launching. Atlas V? not rated. Delta IV? being phased out and also not rated. Falcon 9? not rated. Antares? not rated. New Glenn? announced last month, hardware doesn't exist. ITS? you know the drill. tell me in what way the current US capacity of launching men into space is ahead of China's?
        jacquesm 10y ago
        What does being 'rated' mean in this context, do the Chinese and American entities building spacecraft use uniform criteria for these ratings? Or is it simply what gets built and stamped that way by local varieties?
Symmetry 10y ago
The US should really be looking at cooperating more with China in space. Not wanting to help them with rocket technologies is understandable but there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor.
- devy 10y ago
  I totally agree. It's extremely stupid to ban a country from space exploration and scientific experiments solely based on geopolitical reasons.
- finid 10y ago
  ...there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor. Just so you know, the Chinese are not on their knees begging for access to the ISS. There're doing fine on their own, and are likely happier with it that way.
- blisterpeanuts 10y ago
  There have been security concerns about sharing space technology with China, versus with Japan and Europe. Russia is also not highly trusted, but on the other hand their space technology is regarded as equal to ours, so there's not much security risk to cooperation. Probably moving forward, China will move into the top tier of space powers alongside Russia, the U.S., Japan, and western Europe, and ahead of India (which has its own program albeit with a lower budget). At that point, cooperation between China and the West would be mutually beneficial. One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget.
  - varjag 10y ago
    > One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget. This is incorrect. SpaceX Falcon 9 has lower launch costs than Chinese Long March, and it's as American rocket as they get.
- idra 10y ago
gnipgnip 10y ago
Awesome work China!
devy 10y ago
According to the plan as stated in the article, China is planning to have its own space station in 2020. By the time ISS is scheduled to retire in 2024 [1], China could very well be the ONLY country who will have space station. [1] http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-extension-2024.html http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-exten...
- drzaiusapelord 10y ago
  Who cares? I'd rather have more rover and deep space missions and non-LEO manned missions than the propagandist wins of a floating bucket in LEO. Space stations aren't progress, they're just money wasters with a roadmap that leads literally to nowhere - being burned up in the atmosphere. I never understood this mentality that when the US is between launchers everyone suddenly has a renewed appreciation for last-gen achievements. We did the LEO psce bucket with the ISS. It leads to nowhere and had questionable space science utility. Its not a stepping stone to anywhere[1]. We're building the SLS and investing in SpaceX, Blue Origin, ATK, Sierra, and ULA to get out of LEO and to have a variety of spacecraft on tap. Nations still stuck in LEO with 60+ old launch systems are going to be left behind and they shouldn't be applauded for it. A few years of downtime will be forgotten the same way we've forgotten the time between Apollo and the STS. Meanwhile, anti-US biased people will dance during this peroid and project questionable attitudes like the US not being interested in space (No one comes close NASA's achievements, missions, and budget) or how the US is declining because a pig like Soyuz can still fly to LEO. [1] by the time the ISS was built we had enough know-how to do things like permanent moon bases and other achievements that were within our technical grasp but not within our political one. Its very easy to vote for splitting the bill on a space station with a bunch of other countries. Its a whole other thing to propose risky things like moonbases and to have them funded by Congress. Thankfully with the SLS and SpaceX we're back to doing risky things.
  - kl4m 10y ago
    How are the effects of long duration spaceflight on humans to be studied without some sort of space presence?
  - 10y ago
hanoz 10y ago
Massively off topic but I hate the BBC's recent penchant for using the main event as backdrop for a piece to camera. Do other countries have to put up with this ridiculous trend?
- botskonet 10y ago
  That really bugged me, especially with an event like this. Would I rather listen to some dude yelling or a rocket launch? Hmm...
yohann305 10y ago
Am I the only one that feels that China is helping in motivating the world to put efforts into Space Exploration? Good job on China for pulling this off and helping Mankind.
- EdSharkey 10y ago
  Yeah, and as soon as a U.S. Senator makes a floor speech lamenting that "the Chinese are beating us at our own game!", I expect that the pork will start to roll and U.S. Aerospace industry will be thanking the Chinese as well.
  - hawkice 10y ago
    I would take even odds against you on that bet. While the US would like to be seen as gearing up to take on China, most policy is driven in the direction of symbolism and a desire to have China step up so the US can step down in international affairs (a much more likely scenario is a renewed emphasis on North Korea as China's most potent regional security threat). The American space program has been doomed for so long that it's hard to imagine a single speech would turn anyone around. More generally, this outlook is part of why the TTP is staggeringly unpopular -- developing a soft power base in Asia, independent of China, simply isn't worth sacrificing _anything_, no matter how small, in the eyes of both the American public and it's current major party nominees.
- optforfon 10y ago
  Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering. It won't bring people together and that ultimately a lot more sad.
  - twblalock 10y ago
    > Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering. So did the first space race, and it went pretty well, and cooperation between the US and Russia still took place eventually.
anders098 10y ago
Missing the old days that US and USSR competing on space and innovating tons of new technologies for mankind. Now what do we got, Snapchat, Instagram, Uber, Airbnb and we call that innovations?
paradite 10y ago
One interesting observation about what the narrator said at the beginning section of the video: "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country." I understand that you do not like certain aspects of my country, but do you really need to squeeze in comments like that when covering a spacecraft launch? Edit: It was referring to the visit to the "secret launch base", so it is technically a fair statement. Still, the tone bothers me.
- hackuser 10y ago
  A journalist's job is not to give anyone or anything a pass. You can identify a good publication because everyone, on all sides of an issue, thinks the publication is out to get them. Both the Clinton and Trump camps think that about the NY Times, for example. In a way, a good way, it's true.
  - paradite 10y ago
    That's a fair and nice argument. I do think BBC is a fine example of covering all sides of an issue. My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting.
    - hackuser 10y ago
      Thanks for your thoughtful response. I'm afraid we still don't quite agree (not that agreement is necessary): >>> "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country." > My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting. The statement you quoted doesn't seem personal to me; it's not about the reporter's experience but about the experiences of journalists in general. And it's factual, not opinion or sentiment.
    - chillacy 10y ago
      All reporting is subject to opinion. Or as I once heard: editing is art because the editing process makes choices to bring certain facts forward and discard other facts. The best journalists are aware of that and try to present a neutral story, but it's inevitable. In this case, BBC is a media company and its in their best interests to be able to "experience" more of these types of events.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
Very impressive; congratulations to China on another successful manned launch. The article reports that their space budget is $2 billion a year, an impressively modest budget (assuming it's accurate). This should be a kick in the pants to the U.S. to get its own manned space program back in operation, after a hiatus of 5 years.
m_mueller 10y ago
Why isn't China using its southernmost locations for equator proximity, like the US does? Not enough distance to heavily populated areas? For example, are these islands owned by the PRC? https://www.google.co.jp/maps/dir//21.1143616,115.9785889/@21.1144381,115.9434835,13z/data=!3m1!4b1?hl=en https://www.google.co.jp/maps/dir//21.1143616,115.9785889/@2...
- paradite 10y ago
  According to a Chinese source [1] that I just Googled, 2 main reasons: 1. Need enough distance to populated area. This has to take into account of the situation where something goes wrong in soon after the launch, when rocket is still close enough to the ground to cause damages. The launch location that you see is in the middle of the desert, so it is suitable. 2. Need to consider the landing location. The choice of landing location is limited by the launch location. This launch location allows for suitable landing location which are safe and far from populated area. [1] http://www.weidu8.net/wx/674945 http://www.weidu8.net/wx/674945
  - m_mueller 10y ago
    (2) is a good point, I never thought of that. So, if KSP is giving the right hints here, it seems like the inclination needs to be pretty exact because they don't have any delta-v left to adjust it for the landing. Maybe South China Sea water landings are not considered because of territorial disputes?
- DerekHe 10y ago
  These islands are actually controlled by Taipei...
  - paradite 10y ago
    Yes. It is part of the Pratas Islands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratas_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratas_Islands
- Aaronn 10y ago
maverick_iceman 10y ago
I wish someone was working on nuclear propulsion technology with Isp of 1000-10000km/s. Chemical rockets are a dead end for space exploration even within the solar system.
intrasight 10y ago
It is really amazing what China has accomplished in a short period of time - especially given that the Cultural Revolution sort of threw them back to the stone age.

197 points by bing_dai 10y ago

It's great that China is excited about space. Hopefully, they get soon excited about Nobel Prizes, and basic research. They could easily double the world's output of research.

bbctol 10y ago
They've been excited for a while: the growth of basic research in China has been skyrocketing for years. (http://www.nature.com/news/science-in-china-1.20120 http://www.nature.com/news/science-in-china-1.20120) The upcoming five-year plan includes a huge focus on research, and getting high-profile prizes is definitely a target.
nebula 10y ago
I could be completely off the mark here, but is it wrong in my part to assume that China may not necessarily have the right environment for basic research to flourish? The way you mentioned the "China being excited" translates to "Chinese authorities deciding to push basic research". That will no doubt get human and other resources allocated for it, but is it sufficient? China, and USSR may not be a fair comparison, but I feel China is much closer to how the USSR functioned, of course with the added opening up of the economy, and probably economic freedom within the country (The two missing pieces that led to bankruptcy of USSR). Now, let me explain the reason why I brought this comparison here. USSR in its day probably matched the west in defence, and to some extent space tech, but did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Basic research is not amenable to top-down push and needs an environment where ideas and expressions of those ideas have freedom. Anyway those are passing thoughts I had when I read your comment.
- lostlogin 10y ago
  The following wiki page is interesting - the Nobel prize section in particular. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_the_Soviet_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_technology_in_th... And a counter example: The regime in 1930s-1940s Germany was more repressive and they had a lot of major research breakthroughs.
- neves 10y ago
  You are believing too much in American propaganda of the association of free markets and creativity.
  - johnzim 10y ago
    One does not beget the other but it certainly makes it easier to propagate.
    - neves 10y ago
      Maybe. What I'm saying is that there is a correlationm but we can't say there's causation, at least not how the American propaganda states. It is plain simple propaganda as the soviet Russia used to do.
  - product50 10y ago
    The level of brainwashedness here is unbelievable! The OP didn't even bother to research or put data behind his claim/theory.
- T-A 10y ago
  The USSR had world-class mathematicians and theoretical physicists. A partial list of household names among the latter: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abram_Ioffe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Landau
  - gnipgnip 10y ago
    Not to mention many results in optimization/computer-science came out of Russia.
  - nebula 10y ago
    Thanks a lot for the pointers. Many here have already pointed that I am buying too much into the "free market" propaganda; may be I was indeed brainwashed into buying that, but I am trying to open my eyes and learn. AFAICT, there seems to be strong correlation between wealth/prosperity of a nation and the openness of its economy. Are there any counter examples to this? Coming to back to the original topic, is it fair to say there is no strong correlation between development of science and freedom of thought? Well, it may be true if the state does not repress the ideas being produced under science; I can now see why that might have been the case under USSR, and even in China. Scientific thought being largely apolitical may not have to be repressed by authoritarian regimes. Any holes in this logic? Sorry for being naive!
    - T-A 10y ago
      I agree about the relation between prosperity and openness of the economy. But the relation to science, especially theoretical work requiring little more than pencil and paper, is less clear. Trivial example: lucrative opportunities in finance might have lured away some of the old USSR's math talent, to the detriment of Soviet mathematics. The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
- resfirestar 10y ago
  IMO, the problems with scientific research in China have little or nothing to do with state repression and more to do with an overcommodified educational system: too much competition at every step from primary school exams to tenure track positions, too much pressure to get high impact publications every few months, too much administrative bloat and rankings-centered priorities. In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.
- geofft 10y ago
  > did USSR produce any original major basic research breakthroughs? Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find: - Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently) - Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962 - Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression - Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
  - vkou 10y ago
    All this despite a few decades of suppression of computing science as an un-Marxist "bourgeois pseudoscience". There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
resfirestar 10y ago
China's volume of research output is respectable in many fields. But the humanities work is often dismissed as political by Western and Chinese academics alike, and science has a quality/quantity problem[0] made worse by the rapid proliferation of ranking systems for universities and a "publish or perish" culture[1] that makes elite US institutions look good. There are some groups in my field (phys chem) that we know are doing good work, but most research out of China is automatically dismissed because it's so often not reproducible. [0] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475267a.html http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475267a.html [1] https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/how-fares-chinese-academia-questioning-the-university-spirit-%E5%A4%A7%E5%AD%A6%E7%B2%BE%E7%A5%9E/ https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/how-fares-chinese-...

Animats 10y ago

Right now, the US has one person in space. China has two. The US has no manned launch capability.

tdb7893 10y ago
To be fair the US also has private companies looking at space so I don't know whether we are ahead or behind.
- baq 10y ago
  don't expect those companies to launch people into space in the next year, though. china will be ahead for a while.
  - johnzim 10y ago
    I know Hacker news likes "Technically Correct - the Best kind of Correct" but in what sense is China 'ahead' here? It may be obvious but there are plenty more Americans who are back and walking around on planet earth than there are Chinese astronauts who have been put into orbit.
    - baq 10y ago
      please do not confuse current capability with the sum of achievements. USA has put multiple men on the surface of the Moon. what of it if it doesn't have a man-rated launcher now? SLS is a jobs program that's years from launching. Atlas V? not rated. Delta IV? being phased out and also not rated. Falcon 9? not rated. Antares? not rated. New Glenn? announced last month, hardware doesn't exist. ITS? you know the drill. tell me in what way the current US capacity of launching men into space is ahead of China's?
      - jacquesm 10y ago
        What does being 'rated' mean in this context, do the Chinese and American entities building spacecraft use uniform criteria for these ratings? Or is it simply what gets built and stamped that way by local varieties?

Symmetry 10y ago

The US should really be looking at cooperating more with China in space. Not wanting to help them with rocket technologies is understandable but there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor.

devy 10y ago
I totally agree. It's extremely stupid to ban a country from space exploration and scientific experiments solely based on geopolitical reasons.
finid 10y ago
...there's no reason they shouldn't participate in the international space station or its successor. Just so you know, the Chinese are not on their knees begging for access to the ISS. There're doing fine on their own, and are likely happier with it that way.
blisterpeanuts 10y ago
There have been security concerns about sharing space technology with China, versus with Japan and Europe. Russia is also not highly trusted, but on the other hand their space technology is regarded as equal to ours, so there's not much security risk to cooperation. Probably moving forward, China will move into the top tier of space powers alongside Russia, the U.S., Japan, and western Europe, and ahead of India (which has its own program albeit with a lower budget). At that point, cooperation between China and the West would be mutually beneficial. One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget.
- varjag 10y ago
  > One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget. This is incorrect. SpaceX Falcon 9 has lower launch costs than Chinese Long March, and it's as American rocket as they get.
idra 10y ago

gnipgnip 10y ago

Awesome work China!

devy 10y ago

According to the plan as stated in the article, China is planning to have its own space station in 2020. By the time ISS is scheduled to retire in 2024 [1], China could very well be the ONLY country who will have space station. [1] http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-extension-2024.html http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-exten...

drzaiusapelord 10y ago
Who cares? I'd rather have more rover and deep space missions and non-LEO manned missions than the propagandist wins of a floating bucket in LEO. Space stations aren't progress, they're just money wasters with a roadmap that leads literally to nowhere - being burned up in the atmosphere. I never understood this mentality that when the US is between launchers everyone suddenly has a renewed appreciation for last-gen achievements. We did the LEO psce bucket with the ISS. It leads to nowhere and had questionable space science utility. Its not a stepping stone to anywhere[1]. We're building the SLS and investing in SpaceX, Blue Origin, ATK, Sierra, and ULA to get out of LEO and to have a variety of spacecraft on tap. Nations still stuck in LEO with 60+ old launch systems are going to be left behind and they shouldn't be applauded for it. A few years of downtime will be forgotten the same way we've forgotten the time between Apollo and the STS. Meanwhile, anti-US biased people will dance during this peroid and project questionable attitudes like the US not being interested in space (No one comes close NASA's achievements, missions, and budget) or how the US is declining because a pig like Soyuz can still fly to LEO. [1] by the time the ISS was built we had enough know-how to do things like permanent moon bases and other achievements that were within our technical grasp but not within our political one. Its very easy to vote for splitting the bill on a space station with a bunch of other countries. Its a whole other thing to propose risky things like moonbases and to have them funded by Congress. Thankfully with the SLS and SpaceX we're back to doing risky things.
- kl4m 10y ago
  How are the effects of long duration spaceflight on humans to be studied without some sort of space presence?
- 10y ago

hanoz 10y ago

Massively off topic but I hate the BBC's recent penchant for using the main event as backdrop for a piece to camera. Do other countries have to put up with this ridiculous trend?

botskonet 10y ago
That really bugged me, especially with an event like this. Would I rather listen to some dude yelling or a rocket launch? Hmm...

yohann305 10y ago

Am I the only one that feels that China is helping in motivating the world to put efforts into Space Exploration? Good job on China for pulling this off and helping Mankind.

EdSharkey 10y ago
Yeah, and as soon as a U.S. Senator makes a floor speech lamenting that "the Chinese are beating us at our own game!", I expect that the pork will start to roll and U.S. Aerospace industry will be thanking the Chinese as well.
- hawkice 10y ago
  I would take even odds against you on that bet. While the US would like to be seen as gearing up to take on China, most policy is driven in the direction of symbolism and a desire to have China step up so the US can step down in international affairs (a much more likely scenario is a renewed emphasis on North Korea as China's most potent regional security threat). The American space program has been doomed for so long that it's hard to imagine a single speech would turn anyone around. More generally, this outlook is part of why the TTP is staggeringly unpopular -- developing a soft power base in Asia, independent of China, simply isn't worth sacrificing _anything_, no matter how small, in the eyes of both the American public and it's current major party nominees.
optforfon 10y ago
Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering. It won't bring people together and that ultimately a lot more sad.
- twblalock 10y ago
  > Except it's going to go hand in hand with nationalism and fear-mongering. So did the first space race, and it went pretty well, and cooperation between the US and Russia still took place eventually.

anders098 10y ago

Missing the old days that US and USSR competing on space and innovating tons of new technologies for mankind. Now what do we got, Snapchat, Instagram, Uber, Airbnb and we call that innovations?

paradite 10y ago

One interesting observation about what the narrator said at the beginning section of the video: "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country." I understand that you do not like certain aspects of my country, but do you really need to squeeze in comments like that when covering a spacecraft launch? Edit: It was referring to the visit to the "secret launch base", so it is technically a fair statement. Still, the tone bothers me.

hackuser 10y ago
A journalist's job is not to give anyone or anything a pass. You can identify a good publication because everyone, on all sides of an issue, thinks the publication is out to get them. Both the Clinton and Trump camps think that about the NY Times, for example. In a way, a good way, it's true.
- paradite 10y ago
  That's a fair and nice argument. I do think BBC is a fine example of covering all sides of an issue. My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting.
  - hackuser 10y ago
    Thanks for your thoughtful response. I'm afraid we still don't quite agree (not that agreement is necessary): >>> "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country." > My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting. The statement you quoted doesn't seem personal to me; it's not about the reporter's experience but about the experiences of journalists in general. And it's factual, not opinion or sentiment.
  - chillacy 10y ago
    All reporting is subject to opinion. Or as I once heard: editing is art because the editing process makes choices to bring certain facts forward and discard other facts. The best journalists are aware of that and try to present a neutral story, but it's inevitable. In this case, BBC is a media company and its in their best interests to be able to "experience" more of these types of events.

blisterpeanuts 10y ago

Very impressive; congratulations to China on another successful manned launch. The article reports that their space budget is $2 billion a year, an impressively modest budget (assuming it's accurate). This should be a kick in the pants to the U.S. to get its own manned space program back in operation, after a hiatus of 5 years.

m_mueller 10y ago

Why isn't China using its southernmost locations for equator proximity, like the US does? Not enough distance to heavily populated areas? For example, are these islands owned by the PRC? https://www.google.co.jp/maps/dir//21.1143616,115.9785889/@21.1144381,115.9434835,13z/data=!3m1!4b1?hl=en https://www.google.co.jp/maps/dir//21.1143616,115.9785889/@2...

paradite 10y ago
According to a Chinese source [1] that I just Googled, 2 main reasons: 1. Need enough distance to populated area. This has to take into account of the situation where something goes wrong in soon after the launch, when rocket is still close enough to the ground to cause damages. The launch location that you see is in the middle of the desert, so it is suitable. 2. Need to consider the landing location. The choice of landing location is limited by the launch location. This launch location allows for suitable landing location which are safe and far from populated area. [1] http://www.weidu8.net/wx/674945 http://www.weidu8.net/wx/674945
- m_mueller 10y ago
  (2) is a good point, I never thought of that. So, if KSP is giving the right hints here, it seems like the inclination needs to be pretty exact because they don't have any delta-v left to adjust it for the landing. Maybe South China Sea water landings are not considered because of territorial disputes?
DerekHe 10y ago
These islands are actually controlled by Taipei...
- paradite 10y ago
  Yes. It is part of the Pratas Islands. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratas_Islands https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pratas_Islands
Aaronn 10y ago

maverick_iceman 10y ago

I wish someone was working on nuclear propulsion technology with Isp of 1000-10000km/s. Chemical rockets are a dead end for space exploration even within the solar system.

intrasight 10y ago

It is really amazing what China has accomplished in a short period of time - especially given that the Cultural Revolution sort of threw them back to the stone age.