7 ms·

China Launches a 'Reusable Experimental Spacecraft'

81 points by bclemens 6y ago

echelon 6y ago
China seems intent to start a new space race. It's no coincidence that our Space Force was just created. I wonder how "friendly" this competition is going to be. Musk was a genius to start SpaceX, or he really timed it right. He's going to get so many federal dollars. It'll probably be worth more than Tesla.
- justicezyx 6y ago
  Come on: > China seems intent to start a new space race. It's no coincidence that our Space Force was just created. President Regan started "start war" in 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative China always copy and is reacting to the leading power, dont pretend that China is provoking anyone here...
  - garmaine 6y ago
    American space policy is not like other American foreign policy. It is the USA that is pushing a model of international cooperation and governing treaties. It is China that is taking an approach of unilateral actions and national appropriation.
    - simion314 6y ago
      Isn't China not allowed to "Cooperate" by the Americans ? Honestly with current american leadership I expect as soon as China will have a decent space station they will also demand that S will have an even bigger and cooler US only one.
      - garmaine 6y ago
        China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. The purposefully shun international cooperation, then turn around and complain in People’s Daily that the international space community has rejected them. When I was at NASA we tried very hard to build a scientific relationship with China’s planetary science researchers, to no avail. We were able to get Saudi Arabia and Israel to come together and sit at the same table together, but not China. On the US side working with China is not banned specifically, but the fact that the Chinese space program is military not civilian and because of a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, it requires special permission and extra care.
        echelon 6y ago
        This is exactly the comment I wanted to read. What's your perspective on China's desire to do things unilaterally? Are they "catching up"? Do they pose a threat to peaceful space endeavors? Are they good or bad stewards with respect to space junk? Does your perspective here give you insight as to other ways China conducts its affairs? How do you see One Belt One Road panning out? Will China own Africa and the developing world? Will they leap frog the West?
        garmaine 6y ago
        I should mention that my opinion of China's government is colored as much by the fact that I married a Taiwanese girl, my kids have Taiwanese passports and I'm personally connected to the struggle of both Taiwan and Hong Kong. But nevertheless not only is being unbiased in government work A Very Big Deal, but I've also worked more recently on contract proposals related to Belt and Road and you gotta keep personal biases at bay to be successful in business too. I'll try to give you the informed, yet detached answer you're looking for. First, the Chinese communist party is a kleptocratic, oligarchic organization. All government programs exist to profit and empower those in charge, whom for the most part inherited their privileged position. Second, the CCP maintains their control over their population through stoking nationalist fears and anti-west sentiments. Same as Iran and other autocratic states. These two facts have a particular bearing on their space policy. The space program is a source of national prestige--when they launched a man into space they accomplished something only two other nations had done (never mind that it was a near exact clone of the Russian Soyuz capsule...). Unlike the Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, India, UAE, and Israel, China doesn't have to rely on anybody to launch their astronauts to space. Each new milestone they reach--landing a rover on the moon, launching a space station--magnifies this point. Once they send human beings to the Moon they will use that as a claim of technical superiority over the west. We saw a glimpse of this when they landed a rover on the Moon, a feat the USA never did on the Moon specifically. To partner with any other nation would be to diminish or perhaps even eliminate entirely the propaganda value to the party. But the value of the Chinese space program isn't just propaganda. It's also being used as a play for potential power and profit. Jokes aside, military space power really is the dominant domain of the 21st century for conflict between superpowers, whether actual or merely planned for, like air power was in the 20th. I'm not going to adequately summarize military space policy in a HN comment, but basically the analogy to air dominance is very accurate: without satellites most of our modern war fighting capability is neutralized or made ineffective. Anti-satellite weaponry in its various forms is the new ICBM or stealth strike bomber. This isn't common knowledge outside of the military-industrial complex, but that's because our adversaries since the collapse of the USSR have had asymmetric capabilities with anti-satellite weapons consisting of camouflage tents and caves. The one thing uniquely positive I have to say about about the Chinese space program leads to the final point to be made: profit. Whereas every other human space program is science and/or prestige based, China's is run by a country looking for an exploitative edge over major world powers, and bureaucrats within the party looking for ways to get internal leverage themselves. It turns out that the Moon and near-Earth asteroids are an abundant source of minerals and metals rare on Earth and can be mined for far less than you might naïvely think. So there are young turks within the party who are advocating for a cislunar economic exclusion zone. They are talking about violating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967's prohibition against claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies. The official plan is to construct a lunar base and perform resource exploration, WITHOUT international cooperation. Indeed, while NASA is working to get the Artimis Accords in place to reaffirm the existing cooperative model and try to build a collaborative effort to return to the Moon and go beyond, while opening up cislunar space to private resource exploration, China is laying the ground work for a land-grab. There are serious talks about a Chinese cislunar economic exclusion zone explicitly compared to the South China Sea, and estimated to be worth $10 trillion dollars by 2050 (crazy optimistic numbers, but that is the claim). Regarding Belt and Road, I'm not sure what unique opinions I can offer. It's what most commentators have described it as recently: a debt trap to capture the best ports and enter into lucrative markets with the same sort of unequal treaties the europeans used against China in the 19th century. Tit-for-tat. At least some good infrastructure is being built though, particularly the roads through Central Asia which can't be monopolized in the same way that the deep-water ports they're building are. Whether they leap frog the West depends more on whether we take proactive actions ourselves. SpaceX gives me reason to be optimistic, be we can't count our chickens before they've hatched.
    - socialdemocrat 6y ago
      Eh... the US deliberately kept China out of any space collaboration. So no... the US isn’t all that warm and fuzzy about cooperation
      - jackinloadup 6y ago
        It's kinda important to note why they have been barred. They broke international space laws and were caught hacking JPL. Additionally china's space program is tightly tied to their milliary unlike NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and Roscosmos.
        sudosysgen 6y ago
        Hahaha. NASA is very strongly tied into the US military. NASA projects are bid on by US military contractors, and NASA flies military airframe all the time. NASA pretty much is an arm of the US MIC, in a way that the ESA or the CSA aren't. And also, the Soviet space program was also openly tied into their military, and that wasnt an issue. The real reason is that the US wants to make everything hard and expensive for China, due to perceiving them as a competitor. It's just not interested in cooperation. As for violation of international law, neither the US nor the Soviets cared about it. It's just politics.
- simion314 6y ago
  A race to where? First base opn the Moon/Mars ? I don't follow this topic but it could just be that countries like China, India have a space program and they are using it, hopefully we get better diplomats leading this big countries to avoid any waste on useless military/propaganda missions - a competed US leadership could invite China on the ISS.
  - jeswin 6y ago
    > competed US leadership could invite China on the ISS. And then what, watch the CCP trample HongKong, run massive internment camps, and threaten Taiwan with total destruction? China's (CCP's) values are wholly different from the free world's; I can't think of a way to co-exist when they can get upset for even just news reporting. The west has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into a dictatorship and they're building a powerful military with it. And Europe mostly hasn't even woken up to this yet.
    - pjc50 6y ago
      We said all that and more about the Soviet Union, and still made gestures of international co-operation. Because it was better than nuclear war.
      - Teever 6y ago
        Do you think those situations are comparable? Is the threat of nuclear war between China and the US comparable to the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR? Perhaps a more comparable situation is between the UK or US and Nazi Germany in the mid thirties? It would have been a terrible idea to embark on shared technological and exploratory expeditions with Nazi Germany in the 30s.
        pjc50 6y ago
        The big parallel with Nazi Germany could I suppose be the coziness between the elites; all the way from little details like the Germans copying British foxhunting to King Edward VIII having a fascist spy as a girlfriend. However, Germany was explicitly trying to be a colonial expansionist. Having run out of unconquered countries in Africa, all that was left to enslave was Eastern Europe. Chinese expansionism seems much more limited.
- valuearb 6y ago
  There is no space race to anywhere. SpaceX just got the short end of the new Airforce launch contract, ULA got the big end for a rocket that’s never flown and won’t fly for another year. That’s after getting 2/3s as much as Boeing for a NASA crew launch capsule. If SpaceX ever wants large proportions of federal space launch contracts, they have to start building rocket parts across all 50 states, especially Alabama.
  - jackinloadup 6y ago
    Meh, I think SLS will fold after a flight or two. There is no way to justify spending $800M per launch, assuming they launch at least twice, every 1.5-2 years when NASA could spend $150M for a Falcon Heavy launch or less when Starship starts flying. Especially when SpaceX can provide many launches per year. Then again the US government doesn't really care if taxpayer money is well spent. NASA needs to shift gears to science and exploration. More rovers and deep space probes please and thank you.
    - baq 6y ago
      The Senate Launch System provides many many jobs and thus many many votes for politicians who support it. If rational thought was at the driver’s seat it would have been cancelled way back.
    - izend 6y ago
      The SLS is an indirect project to ensure the US ICBM solid fuel rocket manufacturing know-how and skills are not lost.
- sumedh 6y ago
  > Musk was a genius to start SpaceX, or he really timed it right. SpaceX was founded in 2002, I don't think Musk was timing anything.
Animats 6y ago
Nice. Any idea how big it is?
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  Long March 2F, the launch rocket, has a stated payload of 8,400 kg to LEO. The Air Force says the X-37 has a "launch weight" of 4,990 kg. Its first flight was on a Atlas V 501, which has a max payload of 8,123 kg to LEO.
fspeech 6y ago
"We have no clue how long the spacecraft will stay in orbit. It will be interesting to see when and where it lands." Hmm, it already returned after a two day stint.
SubiculumCode 6y ago
Is it going to look like a SpaceX clone?
justicezyx 6y ago
Can we focus on the technical and strategic value in terms of competition, and put the value system and ideology aside for a moment?... The international political competition and struggle are among the most complicated and complex human activities. Value system and ideology are just but one part of the driven force, and most of time is even the secondary or irrelevant part.

81 points by bclemens 6y ago

China seems intent to start a new space race. It's no coincidence that our Space Force was just created. I wonder how "friendly" this competition is going to be. Musk was a genius to start SpaceX, or he really timed it right. He's going to get so many federal dollars. It'll probably be worth more than Tesla.

justicezyx 6y ago
Come on: > China seems intent to start a new space race. It's no coincidence that our Space Force was just created. President Regan started "start war" in 80s: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strategic_Defense_Initiative China always copy and is reacting to the leading power, dont pretend that China is provoking anyone here...
- garmaine 6y ago
  American space policy is not like other American foreign policy. It is the USA that is pushing a model of international cooperation and governing treaties. It is China that is taking an approach of unilateral actions and national appropriation.
  - simion314 6y ago
    Isn't China not allowed to "Cooperate" by the Americans ? Honestly with current american leadership I expect as soon as China will have a decent space station they will also demand that S will have an even bigger and cooler US only one.
    - garmaine 6y ago
      China doesn’t cooperate with other agencies largely because they have no desire to. The purposefully shun international cooperation, then turn around and complain in People’s Daily that the international space community has rejected them. When I was at NASA we tried very hard to build a scientific relationship with China’s planetary science researchers, to no avail. We were able to get Saudi Arabia and Israel to come together and sit at the same table together, but not China. On the US side working with China is not banned specifically, but the fact that the Chinese space program is military not civilian and because of a history of aggressive hacking and stealing of technology and trade secrets, it requires special permission and extra care.
      - echelon 6y ago
        This is exactly the comment I wanted to read. What's your perspective on China's desire to do things unilaterally? Are they "catching up"? Do they pose a threat to peaceful space endeavors? Are they good or bad stewards with respect to space junk? Does your perspective here give you insight as to other ways China conducts its affairs? How do you see One Belt One Road panning out? Will China own Africa and the developing world? Will they leap frog the West?
        garmaine 6y ago
        I should mention that my opinion of China's government is colored as much by the fact that I married a Taiwanese girl, my kids have Taiwanese passports and I'm personally connected to the struggle of both Taiwan and Hong Kong. But nevertheless not only is being unbiased in government work A Very Big Deal, but I've also worked more recently on contract proposals related to Belt and Road and you gotta keep personal biases at bay to be successful in business too. I'll try to give you the informed, yet detached answer you're looking for. First, the Chinese communist party is a kleptocratic, oligarchic organization. All government programs exist to profit and empower those in charge, whom for the most part inherited their privileged position. Second, the CCP maintains their control over their population through stoking nationalist fears and anti-west sentiments. Same as Iran and other autocratic states. These two facts have a particular bearing on their space policy. The space program is a source of national prestige--when they launched a man into space they accomplished something only two other nations had done (never mind that it was a near exact clone of the Russian Soyuz capsule...). Unlike the Europeans, Japanese, Canadians, India, UAE, and Israel, China doesn't have to rely on anybody to launch their astronauts to space. Each new milestone they reach--landing a rover on the moon, launching a space station--magnifies this point. Once they send human beings to the Moon they will use that as a claim of technical superiority over the west. We saw a glimpse of this when they landed a rover on the Moon, a feat the USA never did on the Moon specifically. To partner with any other nation would be to diminish or perhaps even eliminate entirely the propaganda value to the party. But the value of the Chinese space program isn't just propaganda. It's also being used as a play for potential power and profit. Jokes aside, military space power really is the dominant domain of the 21st century for conflict between superpowers, whether actual or merely planned for, like air power was in the 20th. I'm not going to adequately summarize military space policy in a HN comment, but basically the analogy to air dominance is very accurate: without satellites most of our modern war fighting capability is neutralized or made ineffective. Anti-satellite weaponry in its various forms is the new ICBM or stealth strike bomber. This isn't common knowledge outside of the military-industrial complex, but that's because our adversaries since the collapse of the USSR have had asymmetric capabilities with anti-satellite weapons consisting of camouflage tents and caves. The one thing uniquely positive I have to say about about the Chinese space program leads to the final point to be made: profit. Whereas every other human space program is science and/or prestige based, China's is run by a country looking for an exploitative edge over major world powers, and bureaucrats within the party looking for ways to get internal leverage themselves. It turns out that the Moon and near-Earth asteroids are an abundant source of minerals and metals rare on Earth and can be mined for far less than you might naïvely think. So there are young turks within the party who are advocating for a cislunar economic exclusion zone. They are talking about violating the Outer Space Treaty of 1967's prohibition against claims of sovereignty over celestial bodies. The official plan is to construct a lunar base and perform resource exploration, WITHOUT international cooperation. Indeed, while NASA is working to get the Artimis Accords in place to reaffirm the existing cooperative model and try to build a collaborative effort to return to the Moon and go beyond, while opening up cislunar space to private resource exploration, China is laying the ground work for a land-grab. There are serious talks about a Chinese cislunar economic exclusion zone explicitly compared to the South China Sea, and estimated to be worth $10 trillion dollars by 2050 (crazy optimistic numbers, but that is the claim). Regarding Belt and Road, I'm not sure what unique opinions I can offer. It's what most commentators have described it as recently: a debt trap to capture the best ports and enter into lucrative markets with the same sort of unequal treaties the europeans used against China in the 19th century. Tit-for-tat. At least some good infrastructure is being built though, particularly the roads through Central Asia which can't be monopolized in the same way that the deep-water ports they're building are. Whether they leap frog the West depends more on whether we take proactive actions ourselves. SpaceX gives me reason to be optimistic, be we can't count our chickens before they've hatched.
  - socialdemocrat 6y ago
    Eh... the US deliberately kept China out of any space collaboration. So no... the US isn’t all that warm and fuzzy about cooperation
    - jackinloadup 6y ago
      It's kinda important to note why they have been barred. They broke international space laws and were caught hacking JPL. Additionally china's space program is tightly tied to their milliary unlike NASA, ESA, JAXA, CSA, and Roscosmos.
      - sudosysgen 6y ago
        Hahaha. NASA is very strongly tied into the US military. NASA projects are bid on by US military contractors, and NASA flies military airframe all the time. NASA pretty much is an arm of the US MIC, in a way that the ESA or the CSA aren't. And also, the Soviet space program was also openly tied into their military, and that wasnt an issue. The real reason is that the US wants to make everything hard and expensive for China, due to perceiving them as a competitor. It's just not interested in cooperation. As for violation of international law, neither the US nor the Soviets cared about it. It's just politics.
simion314 6y ago
A race to where? First base opn the Moon/Mars ? I don't follow this topic but it could just be that countries like China, India have a space program and they are using it, hopefully we get better diplomats leading this big countries to avoid any waste on useless military/propaganda missions - a competed US leadership could invite China on the ISS.
- jeswin 6y ago
  > competed US leadership could invite China on the ISS. And then what, watch the CCP trample HongKong, run massive internment camps, and threaten Taiwan with total destruction? China's (CCP's) values are wholly different from the free world's; I can't think of a way to co-exist when they can get upset for even just news reporting. The west has pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into a dictatorship and they're building a powerful military with it. And Europe mostly hasn't even woken up to this yet.
  - pjc50 6y ago
    We said all that and more about the Soviet Union, and still made gestures of international co-operation. Because it was better than nuclear war.
    - Teever 6y ago
      Do you think those situations are comparable? Is the threat of nuclear war between China and the US comparable to the threat of nuclear war between the US and the USSR? Perhaps a more comparable situation is between the UK or US and Nazi Germany in the mid thirties? It would have been a terrible idea to embark on shared technological and exploratory expeditions with Nazi Germany in the 30s.
      - pjc50 6y ago
        The big parallel with Nazi Germany could I suppose be the coziness between the elites; all the way from little details like the Germans copying British foxhunting to King Edward VIII having a fascist spy as a girlfriend. However, Germany was explicitly trying to be a colonial expansionist. Having run out of unconquered countries in Africa, all that was left to enslave was Eastern Europe. Chinese expansionism seems much more limited.
valuearb 6y ago
There is no space race to anywhere. SpaceX just got the short end of the new Airforce launch contract, ULA got the big end for a rocket that’s never flown and won’t fly for another year. That’s after getting 2/3s as much as Boeing for a NASA crew launch capsule. If SpaceX ever wants large proportions of federal space launch contracts, they have to start building rocket parts across all 50 states, especially Alabama.
- jackinloadup 6y ago
  Meh, I think SLS will fold after a flight or two. There is no way to justify spending $800M per launch, assuming they launch at least twice, every 1.5-2 years when NASA could spend $150M for a Falcon Heavy launch or less when Starship starts flying. Especially when SpaceX can provide many launches per year. Then again the US government doesn't really care if taxpayer money is well spent. NASA needs to shift gears to science and exploration. More rovers and deep space probes please and thank you.
  - baq 6y ago
    The Senate Launch System provides many many jobs and thus many many votes for politicians who support it. If rational thought was at the driver’s seat it would have been cancelled way back.
  - izend 6y ago
    The SLS is an indirect project to ensure the US ICBM solid fuel rocket manufacturing know-how and skills are not lost.
sumedh 6y ago
> Musk was a genius to start SpaceX, or he really timed it right. SpaceX was founded in 2002, I don't think Musk was timing anything.

Animats 6y ago

Nice. Any idea how big it is?

sbierwagen 6y ago
Long March 2F, the launch rocket, has a stated payload of 8,400 kg to LEO. The Air Force says the X-37 has a "launch weight" of 4,990 kg. Its first flight was on a Atlas V 501, which has a max payload of 8,123 kg to LEO.

fspeech 6y ago

"We have no clue how long the spacecraft will stay in orbit. It will be interesting to see when and where it lands." Hmm, it already returned after a two day stint.

SubiculumCode 6y ago

Is it going to look like a SpaceX clone?

justicezyx 6y ago

Can we focus on the technical and strategic value in terms of competition, and put the value system and ideology aside for a moment?... The international political competition and struggle are among the most complicated and complex human activities. Value system and ideology are just but one part of the driven force, and most of time is even the secondary or irrelevant part.