5 ms·

Science and prestige probably. Don't forget that China is still catching up. In the 80s, when it started developing, China was poorer than any African country.

Science and prestige probably. Don't forget that China is still catching up. In the 80s, when it started developing, China was poorer than any African country. The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science. Times changes here in the WeSt where safety is first. It will also be in China one day, too.

tjpnz 4y ago
The US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management.
- noSyncCloud 4y ago
  > The US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management. It would be correct to suggest equivalence of attitudes while we were nuking Navy sailors and Nevada hundreds of times, to say nothing of willfully infecting citizens with syphilis, etc, etc, etc.
  - mlindner 4y ago
    Events of over half a century ago bear little relevance to events happening today, right now. You can't use the past to justify the present and the future.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      Half a century is a bat of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
      - lttlrck 4y ago
        So how far back _are_ we allowed to go hunting for justifications?
  - tjpnz 4y ago
    I'm talking about NASA, not the US Navy.
  - WillPostForFood 4y ago
    Kinda not correct to compare the space program which isn’t the nuclear weapons program. If you compare the US space program to the Chinese Program, there no equivalence. If you compare the US nuclear weapons program to the Chinese weapons program, you might something more comparable, but China had some pretty wild and reckless testing. Probably won’t surprise many that many test occurs in Xinjiang and affected the Uyghur population. https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964-first-chinese-nuclear-test https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964...
  - _Algernon_ 4y ago
    What's your argument? That we shouldn't strive to be better today, because horrible things happened in the past? I guess it is also OK for china to genocide the Uyghurs, since the Holocaust happened.
    - andrepd 4y ago
      No, because the Nazis are universally reviled. A more apt comparison would be the countless foreign invasions and "regime changes" done by the US, which resulted in millions of direct deaths and god knows how much indirect damage, since that is something that is not universally reviled at all.
      - steve76 4y ago
        [dead]
  - steve76 4y ago
    [dead]
- roenxi 4y ago
  Was that because they didn't do it or because reporting wasn't very effective in those days? Developing rockets isn't easy, things explode in unexpected ways and as the article points out it can be quite hard to control where a thing lands. The US is not known for their safety culture, they screw up just as readily as everyone else. They are very well known for minimising its own flaws an throwing a spotlight on its opponents mis-steps. The US inherited the fine British tradition of effective propaganda and do a very good job deploying it (comes with the territory for democracies, really). Seriously, "they didn't do X..." for a country the size of the US over the length of years we're discussing is meaningless. Proving a negative like that is not practical even in casual conversation.
  - ethbr0 4y ago
    > The US is not known for their safety culture SUBSAFE?
    - basementcat 4y ago
      This was instituted after the loss of the entire crew of the USS Thresher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
      - ethbr0 4y ago
        Yes, in 1963. And along with the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in 1968 are the only two US Navy nuclear submarine sinkings. Someone can convert that to 9's based on fleet deployment time, but that seems like an exemplary 60 year safety record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...
    - roenxi 4y ago
      Oh, silly me, I forgot that we frequently characterise the US by their 1960s era submarine program safety standards. My mistake. </sarcasm> I don't really know what response you expected, but one Wikipedia link to one program doesn't say a thing. It certainly doesn't sum up the US, who are famous for their huge fireballs and endless disasters - sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional. 1. We don't know how the outcomes compare to the Chinese standards or if the difference is significant. 2. The US has a third of a billion people and the largest military budget. China has a billion people and the world's largest military if I recall correctly. There will be pockets of excellence in both. One example isn't anywhere near enough. 3. Before SUBSAFE they had a terrible record of unsafe subs, that is why they bought in the program. That is part of learning and it'll go the same way for the Chinese with their rocket programs - losing these things is expensive and everyone figures that out fairly quickly.
serf 4y ago
>The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science. the difference being that the cold war fueled novel R&D and science that the world had never seen; the Long March is a tool that was created as a means to chase after the capabilities of similar Heavy-Lift style rockets. The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; the Long March is supposed to be used for generally all space construction for the foreseeable future. Given that this class of tool exists in the world already, all we can be asked to do is judge it against its' peers. They all have had accidents, but if the Long March is going to be known for spraying debris across the planet then this is a problem that everyone must pay attention to, regardless of where China has progressed to with regards to their safety culture. We're not talking about Chinese safety when we're referring to space debris; this encapsulates the entire world.
- hospadar 4y ago
  > The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; This seems a bit generous to the US & USSR - remember when we nuked the bikini atoll many times? (oops sorry about your homeland)
  - MichaelCollins 4y ago
    Not just Bikini Atoll; America nuked itself hundreds of times too, injuring and killing perhaps tens of thousands, maybe more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders John Wayne is possibly one of the victims of this (inconclusive; besides getting nuked he also smoked like a chimney.)
  - foobiekr 4y ago
    The first person down a path, unfortunately, tramples a lot. It takes serious internal problems for the third or fourth person following to repeat those mistakes.
    - waffleiron 4y ago

tjpnz 4y ago

The US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management.

noSyncCloud 4y ago
> The US program wasn't known for dropping boosters onto villages and dousing residents with hypergolic propellants in the process. While the US program did take a lot of risks early on it would be incorrect to suggest any equivalence in attitudes towards risk management. It would be correct to suggest equivalence of attitudes while we were nuking Navy sailors and Nevada hundreds of times, to say nothing of willfully infecting citizens with syphilis, etc, etc, etc.
- mlindner 4y ago
  Events of over half a century ago bear little relevance to events happening today, right now. You can't use the past to justify the present and the future.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    Half a century is a bat of an eye in the grand scheme of things.
    - lttlrck 4y ago
      So how far back _are_ we allowed to go hunting for justifications?
- tjpnz 4y ago
  I'm talking about NASA, not the US Navy.
- WillPostForFood 4y ago
  Kinda not correct to compare the space program which isn’t the nuclear weapons program. If you compare the US space program to the Chinese Program, there no equivalence. If you compare the US nuclear weapons program to the Chinese weapons program, you might something more comparable, but China had some pretty wild and reckless testing. Probably won’t surprise many that many test occurs in Xinjiang and affected the Uyghur population. https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964-first-chinese-nuclear-test https://www.ctbto.org/specials/testing-times/16-october-1964...
- _Algernon_ 4y ago
  What's your argument? That we shouldn't strive to be better today, because horrible things happened in the past? I guess it is also OK for china to genocide the Uyghurs, since the Holocaust happened.
  - andrepd 4y ago
    No, because the Nazis are universally reviled. A more apt comparison would be the countless foreign invasions and "regime changes" done by the US, which resulted in millions of direct deaths and god knows how much indirect damage, since that is something that is not universally reviled at all.
    - steve76 4y ago
      [dead]
- steve76 4y ago
  [dead]
roenxi 4y ago
Was that because they didn't do it or because reporting wasn't very effective in those days? Developing rockets isn't easy, things explode in unexpected ways and as the article points out it can be quite hard to control where a thing lands. The US is not known for their safety culture, they screw up just as readily as everyone else. They are very well known for minimising its own flaws an throwing a spotlight on its opponents mis-steps. The US inherited the fine British tradition of effective propaganda and do a very good job deploying it (comes with the territory for democracies, really). Seriously, "they didn't do X..." for a country the size of the US over the length of years we're discussing is meaningless. Proving a negative like that is not practical even in casual conversation.
- ethbr0 4y ago
  > The US is not known for their safety culture SUBSAFE?
  - basementcat 4y ago
    This was instituted after the loss of the entire crew of the USS Thresher. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Thresher_(SSN-593)
    - ethbr0 4y ago
      Yes, in 1963. And along with the USS Scorpion (SSN-589) in 1968 are the only two US Navy nuclear submarine sinkings. Someone can convert that to 9's based on fleet deployment time, but that seems like an exemplary 60 year safety record. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_submarines https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sunken_nuclear_subma...
  - roenxi 4y ago
    Oh, silly me, I forgot that we frequently characterise the US by their 1960s era submarine program safety standards. My mistake. </sarcasm> I don't really know what response you expected, but one Wikipedia link to one program doesn't say a thing. It certainly doesn't sum up the US, who are famous for their huge fireballs and endless disasters - sometimes intentional, sometimes unintentional. 1. We don't know how the outcomes compare to the Chinese standards or if the difference is significant. 2. The US has a third of a billion people and the largest military budget. China has a billion people and the world's largest military if I recall correctly. There will be pockets of excellence in both. One example isn't anywhere near enough. 3. Before SUBSAFE they had a terrible record of unsafe subs, that is why they bought in the program. That is part of learning and it'll go the same way for the Chinese with their rocket programs - losing these things is expensive and everyone figures that out fairly quickly.

serf 4y ago

>The Soviets and Americans also did a lot of borderline and dangerous stuff when doing prestige and science. the difference being that the cold war fueled novel R&D and science that the world had never seen; the Long March is a tool that was created as a means to chase after the capabilities of similar Heavy-Lift style rockets. The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; the Long March is supposed to be used for generally all space construction for the foreseeable future. Given that this class of tool exists in the world already, all we can be asked to do is judge it against its' peers. They all have had accidents, but if the Long March is going to be known for spraying debris across the planet then this is a problem that everyone must pay attention to, regardless of where China has progressed to with regards to their safety culture. We're not talking about Chinese safety when we're referring to space debris; this encapsulates the entire world.

hospadar 4y ago
> The experimentation of the Cold War was fairly tightly controlled and limited in quantity; This seems a bit generous to the US & USSR - remember when we nuked the bikini atoll many times? (oops sorry about your homeland)
- MichaelCollins 4y ago
  Not just Bikini Atoll; America nuked itself hundreds of times too, injuring and killing perhaps tens of thousands, maybe more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Downwinders John Wayne is possibly one of the victims of this (inconclusive; besides getting nuked he also smoked like a chimney.)
- foobiekr 4y ago
  The first person down a path, unfortunately, tramples a lot. It takes serious internal problems for the third or fourth person following to repeat those mistakes.
  - waffleiron 4y ago