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Shenzhou-15 manned mission ready for launch after final rehearsal
- joak 4y ago
- Kukumber 4y ago> All in the middle of Chinese pro democracy demonstrations like in the good ol'days of 1989 pro-democracy? the west likes to exaggerate everything that's happening in foreign countries it's just about the zero-covid policy do you call the anti mask mandate protests in the US "pro-democracy demonstrations"? Also what's up with that website, every articles are broken, there is no text, just a picture, some noise in the network?
- tianqi 4y agoIt is definitely not only about the zero-covid policy. There are certain slogans in there that people rarely say because that takes a serious danger. So not much, but that means more.
- ailun 4y agoI understand media skepticism, but your comment is just as reductive and misinformed as saying that all the protests are pro-democracy. There are both types of protest right now in China. Many are anti-local government, asking for the central government to help rein in the provincial and city-level officials who are the ones actually responsible for enforcing zero-Covid. But there are also many pro-democracy/human rights type people coming out as well, especially in Shanghai and on university campuses. There are tons of videos of them calling for democracy, for Xi Jinping to step down, that kind of thing. You can find them on Twitter, but you’ll have to sort through all of the spam that the Chinese government is flooding relevant hashtags with.
- samcheng 4y agoI don't think the "white paper" statement in these protests is about zero-covid policy exactly - it's clearly about censorship and freedom of expression. The zero-covid policy precipitated the unrest - guess where covid policy and freedom of expression intersect? That's right, self-determination / democracy. Most of these protests are not directly about democracy yet, but they are definitely hinting toward it.
- kccqzy 4y agoDo a search for "Beijing Sitong Bridge" in your favorite search engine. The protest was about Xi's third term as president. That's enough to be a pro-democracy protest for me.
- coliveira 4y agoFor Western media everything in China is about political protest. If a person cry on the street it must be a "democracy fighter" trying to "destroy that government that we don't like"...
- tw1984 4y ago> the west likes to exaggerate everything that's happening in foreign countries Chinese living in China here. I don't see any western involvement. There were protests in almost every tier-1 and tier-2 cities in China during the last few days. This is totally unheard of since the Tiananmen Square incident back in 1989. Police were ordered to randomly stop people to search their phones, they want to see whether you are part of wechat groups discussing the ongoing protests. Here in Shanghai, they even had the street nameplate removed because it contains the word Urumqi, which is the name of the city where 10 people who were locked up at home for zero-covid crap were burned to death due to a fire accident. 3 full years after the outbreak of the COVID, enough is enough, you just can't treat people like crap forever just because there are COVID.
- vachina 4y agoI’d like to remind you that western media were the first to fling blame on China during the beginning of Covid, for not restricting China nationals from traveling and spreading Covid. Damned if they lockdown, damned if they don’t lockdown.
- tw1984 4y agoI'd like to remind you that the current situation is vastly different from the beginning of 2020. According to official figures, 240k cases confirmed in China in the last 7 days, there are now a total of 106 people in serious condition across the country. Locking down a big percentage of the country home to 1.4 billion people for illness like this is beyond imagination.
- bergenty 4y agoI wouldn’t underestimate the Chinese. They have a much larger tolerance for loss of human life so they may progress faster.
- duxup 4y agoI suspect political pressure would be to at least match competing programs current safety record. I don’t think they can hide failures / would want anyone to see that happen.
- bagels 4y agoUnfortunately the facts don't back up this speculation. https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/another-chinese-rocket-falls-near-a-school-creating-toxic-orange-cloud/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2020/09/another-chinese-rock... https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/19/health-fears-chinese-rocket-debris https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2010/jan/19/health-f...
- Grimburger 4y ago[dead]
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> have a much larger tolerance for loss of human life so they may progress faster Launch systems work virtually autonomously. Tolerance to loss of life isn't as meaningful as it was in the Apollo era.
- GuB-42 4y ago> Also, this is reminiscent to the cold war's race to the moon, a useless nationalist showoff... Maybe the best nationalist showoff in history. If there is anything good about the cold war, that's it. Do it again please.
- Vt71fcAqt7 4y agoI agree. Better a war stay cold than go hot; if winning some space race does that, that's great, even if it's largely meaningless (imo).
- remarkEon 4y agoWhen was the last time there were two separately crewed space stations in orbit? At some point during the US-Soviet space race? Pretty cool to think about. Space is hard, so no matter what I’m always going to applaud efforts to get there.
- ecpottinger 4y agoYes, a good point.
- steve76 4y ago
- qbasic_forever 4y agoMir and ISS were both up together and crewed for a brief time around 2000/2001 I believe.
- mandevil 4y agoMir and ISS were up at the same time, but not manned at the same time. The last mission to Mir, Soyuz TM-30, came home on June 16, 2000, and Expedition 1 to the ISS launched on November 1st, 2000. The first component of the ISS, the Zarya, was launched in November 1998, and the Mir deorbited March 23, 2001, so for that time there were two stations in space, but never manned at the same time.
- mandevil 4y agoThe first time that Soviet and American spacemen were in space at the same time was Skylab SL-4 (space station) and the Soviet Soyuz 13, which never docked with a space station. This was the final flight to Skylab, and that crew left before the follow-on Soyuz 14 docked with Salyut 3, so at no point during the US-Soviet space race were there two separately crewed space stations in orbit. But just as a pedantic note, I really object to calling this China's first space station. The Tiangong-1 and Tiangong-2 both were just as much a space station as Skylab or a Salyut[1]. The current Tiangong is indeed the first complex, ISS like space-station, of multiple components launched separately, but that's not the same thing as a space station. So I would say that the three previous Chinese flights to Tiangong-1 and -2 (Shenzhou-9, Shenzhou-10, and Shenzhou-11) all should count as the first times that there were two separately crewed space stations in orbit. Obviously, the other station in all three cases was the International Space Station program, which has had people in space continuously since November 1st, 2000 (it is my hope and dream that October 31st of the year 2000 becomes a very important day in human history- that last day that all of humanity was together on the same planet). [1]: Technically two separate programs, the military OPS and the Civilian DOS programs, but both were the same as far as assembly goes: launched in one piece from a heavy lift rocket.
- tw1984 4y agoWhat is the purpose of such adventure when your own citizens are locked up or beaten up for not willing to be locked up.
- tw1984 4y agoon the positive side - Qingming Deng who will be on board the SZ-15 mission has been on training for the past >26 years for this. best wishes for him as he deserves a safe and pleasant 6 months stay in space.
- itg 4y agoCan we really not have a thread on HN about the accomplishments of a country, in this case China, without bringing whatever protests are currently going on? US/Europe has accomplishments related to space all the time but I don't see people mentioning anti-government protests that happen all the time in the same threads?
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> accomplishments of a country, in this case China, without bringing whatever protests are currently going on? Eh, this is a mission being launched by the same Chinese state that's being protested. Apollo-era aerospace history commonly touches on the concurrent civil rights movement because they had a common political nexus. Also, to the extent there is non-technical commentary in the top comments on this thread, it's yours.
- donatj 4y agoThe same reason you don’t talk about Nazi Germany’s accomplishments without bringing up the holocaust.
- walrus01 4y agoPeople who were previously entirely unaware tend to get uncomfortable when they learn about operation paperclip, Nazi rocket scientists, the v2 program, and the early history of NACA/NASA
- JumpCrisscross 4y ago> People who were previously entirely unaware tend to get uncomfortable when they learn about operation paperclip, Nazi rocket scientists, the v2 program, and the early history of NACA/NASA This is why we talk about it.
- darig 4y ago
- tw1984 4y ago
- JumpCrisscross 4y agoThe Chinese space station (to which this mission flies) recently relocated its Mengtian module in a neat robotic procedure [1]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Module_relocation_with_rotation_arm_on_Tiangong.gif https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Module_relocation_with_ro...
- trothamel 4y agoNote that this is very similar to the way modules were relocated on Mir. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyappa_arm https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyappa_arm
- genocidicbunny 4y agoAs an aside, this: > The word “Lyappa” does not exist in Russian. It is probably a corruption of Russian: лапа, romanized: lapa, lit. 'paw' does not seem to be completely accurate to me, since 'ляпа' is a word in Russian that is pronounced more or less like "lyappa"; The only reason I'm hesitant is that ляпа means blunder or mistake, which would be a rather ominous name to give you a component of your pride-of-the-nation space station. Almost seems like the 'paw' nickname somehow got out to western media, and someone decided to play a little linguistic joke.
- yetihehe 4y agoOr someone misread and thought that л is always soft, so lyappa. Not the first chinese speaker mistake I've seen today.
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoThat's super neat!
- tw1984 4y agoSome regular spaceship launch should never ever be used to shadow or censor the hardship currently being experienced by hundreds of millions. Yes, it is a fun moment if you are into space tech or tech in general. Most people here on HN are the same, they love such stuff. WE love it because WE believe it can make life BETTER - that is not the case in China at the moment. Hundreds of millions are being locked up in China. We are talking about real lives, not some random figures on paper. Talking about paper, do you know the fact that you can now be arrested on the street by simply holding a piece of white paper? Sorry, but I am not going to celebrate the launch or the completion of the Chinese space station, hundreds of millions Chinese are suffering on the ground.
- brookst 4y agoI’m not following how the launch is “censoring the hardship”. Can you elaborate?
- DriftRegion 4y agoI think OP may referring to "flooding", a tried and true technique used by Chinese state media during politically sensitive times. To flood is to "prioritize the consumption of government-produced news over news produced by other groups or by citizens themselves." You can read more about it here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799749 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28799749
- brookst 4y agoFair enough. Not sure I'm ready to call all attempts to manipulate public attention "censorship" (are Friday news dumps censorship?), but I suppose it's just semantics.
- Kukumber 4y agoWhat kind of obscurantism is that? Russia is abandoning the ISS, China will replace it, we should be thankful, we can continue research and dream about space exploration again We should also be thankful for all the scientific breakthroughs that will allow humankind to step on the moon for a 2nd time Mixing up your political agenda with science reminds me of how in the Middle Age, the Church was burning people alive for claiming that Earth was not flat and it rotates around the sun
- steele 4y ago
- albertopv 4y agoChina still declares to be a WTO developing country while having a space station all alone. That's insane and that's why I won't cheer to their space success.
- missedthecue 4y agoChina's median income is lower than many other nations universally regarded as developing. Just because they excel in the sciences doesn't mean they should be punished in other areas.
- lettergram 4y ago
- dirtyid 4y agoI mean west free to start propaganda campaign to claim PRC is underreporting GDP and overreporting population (so far only focused on latter), and conclude PRC is finally reached high-income status. Afterall, PRC's already pretty close to the threshold, with incentive to juke stats to continue being developing economy for the perks. But west would have to accept that CCP did good enough to avoid middle income trap.
- qiaoliang89 4y agoFwiw, more than 600mil ppl earn less than 200 dollars per month in China while the living standard in major city like Beijing is not much different from the US or other developed countries.
- lazyeye 4y ago
- AustinDev 4y agoYeah labeling China as developing is silly when other developing nations have 3 orders of magnitude lower GDP. And all but 1 ‘developed ‘ nation have lower GDP .
- yorwba 4y agoYeah, even Iceland, a "developed" country, has almost three orders of magnitude lower GDP! But Iceland also has a tiny population, so maybe we should look at per-capita measures instead. After all, a country with 100 million subsistence farmers merging with another of the same size doesn't suddenly become twice as developed just because there are now 200 million subsistence farmers.
- lazyeye 4y agoI dont really care what the per-capita measures look like. If you are claiming concessions as a "developing economy" whilst spending money on Mars rovers, space stations, building the world's biggest nuclear arsenal etc, then you are not acting in good faith.
- justsomehnguy 4y agoMy dearest factoid about that is what China is in Group III in UPU terminal dues list.
- rippercushions 4y agoThis mission marks the completion of the Chinese space station Tiangong and the start of its permanent habitation, since all three modules are now in place and it will be the first time they do an in-orbit crew exchange. Politics aside, it's quite a remarkable achievement, as to date every single mission they've launched, crewed or uncrewed, has been successful. (Yes, really. China livestreams all their launches, and it's not like you can hide rockets going boom in these days of satellite imagery.) China has yet to announce their space station plans for 2023 and beyond, but the Xuntian space telescope that can dock and undock autonomously is under development, and they also plan to bring in astronauts from other countries.
- coffeeblack 4y agoJust a reminder that no “livestream” in China is actually live. Ever.
- tecleandor 4y agoNot even the Superbowl. Although that's not China.
- Grimburger 4y ago> the Xuntian space telescope that can dock and undock autonomously is under development Was under the impression it was on track to be launched mid next year? Will be basically Hubble tier, but with 400x field of vision and easily maintained/upgraded. A huge boon for astronomers worldwide.
- rippercushions 4y agoYes, Wikipedia says launch target is end of year 2023. It's the only confirmed remaining part of the current program.
- tempera 4y ago
- Simon_O_Rourke 4y agoThey do, but you could say that about any sufficiently large polity. Folks in greenhouses shouldn't start throwing stones.
- rdtwo 4y agoSo does musk and lots of other western capitalist elites. If musk were to run the future off space flight I bet outcomes would be equally grim.