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> “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.” That's a bit of a stretch. Landing on the moon is incredible and a huge congra

• colordrops 8y ago
  The Russians landed on Venus. And got photographs back. There isn't a much harder landing than that.
  • nowarninglabel 8y ago
    That is so cool, can't believe had never heard of it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
    • NaOH 8y ago
      The 8-part BBC series The Planets includes a good segment on the Venera project, specifically the episode Terra Firma. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283775 https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283775 Edit: Jump to the 16:50 mark here: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsyzwn https://www.dailymotion.com/video/xsyzwn
    • JBiserkov 8y ago
      Replace "Chinese" with "Russian" in the following comment from this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813112 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18813112
  • TheBolivianNavy 8y ago
    They returned amazing photos but had some crazy issues. The lens cap didn't pop off on at least one of the cameras for Venera 9-12 (yep, all four). The Venera 14 lens cap popped off but landed under the surface tester arm meaning they could test the lens cap just fine but Venus, not so much. Imagine sending a probe to another planet, land successfully, and survive the hostile environment (for a little while anyway), only to have the issues with the lens cap. Again, and again, and again, and again.
    • rjf72 8y ago
      Space is like programming in that mistakes don't tend to be glorious, but just simple and mundane. The most famous example of this is almost certainly the Mars Climate Orbiter. [2] This probe was successfully launched and made it all the way to Mars. It was supposed to be an orbiter but ended up getting too close and most likely burnt up in Mars atmosphere. The culprit? Ostensibly some of the most qualified scientists with extensive oversight, regulations, and all that. And they were brought down by one operational system using imperial units, the other using metric. A more recent failure has been on Curiosity. While it's been hailed a great success, it's had some major issues fulfilling with what was one if it's primary objectives - drilling into surface level targets and starting to measure things from the inside. It became inoperable after a few superficial utilizations. The most likely culprit? A piece of debris got caught in a drill feed mechanism. It could've been fixed by a man on the ground in a matter of minutes, but there is no man on the ground of course. NASA did manage to get a 2 inch drill without the stabilizers in the mid part of last year [1], thought there have been no updates since. In many ways this is why I think people tend to rather overestimate the value of probes and remote robotics in general. Robotics, even to do relatively simple things, is incredibly hard. Trying to do not so simple things on planets tens to hundreds of millions of miles away in conditions unlike anything you can perfectly replicate on Earth? Well, you better send a few copies and just hope that what goes wrong on one probe/lander/etc (because something will go wrong) works out on one of the others! [1] - https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/06/05/scientists-resume-use-of-curiosity-rovers-drill-and-internal-lab-instruments/ https://spaceflightnow.com/2018/06/05/scientists-resume-use-... [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Climate_Orbiter
    • tanilama 8y ago
      That is in 70s. And even in this century, space programs fail all the time, think of ESA's attempt to land on Mars, one of the roller never makes to send anything back. The Soviets did an admirable job in even succeeded sending one of those photos back.
    • tdsamardzhiev 8y ago
      Also, when they finally didn't have the lens cap issue, they couldn't measure the soil compressibility, because an ejected lens cap landed right where the probe was to do the measurement. But to be fair to the Russians, the cameras weren't an important part of the mission (except for showing off), and getting rid of the caps at 700K temperature, 92bar pressure and sulfuric acid rain, while still preserving the cameras in working condition, is probably very difficult.
  • rjf72 8y ago
    It gets even better than that. They also have audio. Seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ A chronology of that audio is: --------- 00:33 - Landing 00:41 - Camera lens cap being ejected off 01:00 - 02:09 - Drilling 02:14 - The drill system had a special series of tubes that used Venus' surface pressure to operate the mechanism for retrieving the soil sample, this is the seals being popped off to allow the pressure to rush in. 02:42 - Soil being injected into chamber --------- Just unbelievable to understand that you're listening to the sounds of Venus from the surface of Venus. For anybody who'd like to know the location that's at 13.25°S 310°E on a basaltic plain near Phoebe Regio. That lander lasted for 57 minutes in temperatures of 869F with a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres. The most remarkable thing to consider is that this all happened in 1981. Now 38 years ago. It's such a shame that the space race ended. There's no reason at all to think we wouldn't have been on Mars many years ago had it persisted. I think the new head of NASA is much more ambitious and seems genuinely enthusiastically interested in making space exploration work. There was a nice writeup on 'We're not going to [just] do flags and footprints again.' here [1]. The great thing is that even outside of NASA, the future of space looks brighter than ever before at least. In a way we're in our own 1962, which was when JFK gave his 'We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' to the moon speech. [1] - https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/nasa-administrator-bridenstine-were-not-going-to-do-flags-and-footprints-again/ https://www.spaceflightinsider.com/organizations/nasa/nasa-a...
    • ardy42 8y ago
      > It gets even better than that. They also have audio. Seriously: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jZDW53U8qQ Very cool. However, I kinda understand why most landers don't record audio: they seem very focused on achieving scientific objectives and those aren't really advanced by recording manmade sounds.
  • mabbo 8y ago
    Wow, how late must it have been that I forgot that one. Yeah, nevermind, Russia wins on that one alone.
• duxup 8y ago
  The Venus landings are pretty incredible considering the conditions and very short duration the were going to have there.
  • myrandomcomment 8y ago
    Venera Probes. Very impressive. https://www.universetoday.com/36684/landings-on-venus/ https://www.universetoday.com/36684/landings-on-venus/ https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_explorations_of_Venus https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Observations_and_exploration...
• smhost 8y ago
  you must be new to chinese state rhetoric
• deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
• A2017U1 8y ago
  It's most likely just a statement lost in translation and didn't come across as criticism to me.
  • colordrops 8y ago
    Probably true. The guy also didn't even work on this mission. Kind of stupid how everyone is focusing on this statement when he's not even part of the program.
• franzwong 8y ago
  Japan space probe landed on an asteroid in 2018 (launched in 2014). They just have different priority.
• datumy 8y ago
  Most likely a mistranslation purposely done by NYTimes ...
  • mips_avatar 8y ago
    That’s the problem with translating Chinese, there’s a lot of ambiguities. An interesting story from Nixon’s opening to China was that the PLA generals were openly calling the US 霸 which the Chinese translators insisted meant respected leader. But if anyone in the US delegation had read Romance Of The Three Kingdoms in mandarin they would have realized that the PLA generals meant 霸 as in calling the US a tyrannical hegemon to be overthrown. Like if that translation had gone differently I wonder if the US would have even been comfortable opening up trade relations with China.
    • wahern 8y ago
      We have an example of the opposite mistranslation in how we translate the infamous Iranian political phrase "marg bar America" to "death to America" instead of the more reasonable "down with America". http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116 http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116 TL;DR: Marg bar in Iranian political culture has been for nearly a century the equivalent of saying "damn" in English. In English saying "damn Iran" doesn't literally mean you wish Iran or Iranians to burn in eternal hellfire, although it would have once upon a time. Rick Steves has an anecdote where, amidst traffic in sweltering Tehran, his translator translated their driver's exasperated exclamation as "death to traffic", causing a lightbulb to go off in Steves' head. (https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-traffic/ https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-tr...) Although, at this point I think Iranian political leaders purposefully make use of this mistranslation to antagonize Americans without appearing antagonistic to Iranians. Likewise when the Iranian President stated that Israel needed to be wiped off the map--AFAIU he purposefully made use of a sort of double entendre which could be taken literally or figuratively, appeasing both liberal and conservative Iranian factions.
      • mips_avatar 8y ago
        This is really interesting. Thanks for sharing.
• est 8y ago
  > “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.” I don't believe it's a common thinking among Chinese people, but rather NYT carefully picked this particular quote from like a million opinions by the chinese.
  • datumy 8y ago
    it's a flamebait.