8 ms·

Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space

298 points by Teever 1y ago

animitronix 1y ago
Can America please start doing cool shit again like this instead of eating ourselves alive?
monster_truck 1y ago
This is from January, have there been any updates in the past 7 months? There is exceptionally little material info in this article and so very much speculation
- nashashmi 1y ago
  Apparently it has been in production since 2015. Why is this the first we are hearing about it?
  - grues-dinner 1y ago
    Chinese scientific progress relatively rarely gets reported on because nearly all science reporting is a push-based system of institutions throwing press releases at publications. The publications don't have the chops to analyse or verify that information, or to go and find interesting research happening on their own, so they mostly stick with uncritically repackaging output from the places they trust.
  - nosignono 1y ago
    Because English language news sources aren't particularly interested in developing the relationships necessary to report on Chinese scientific breakthroughs. It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater. Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally, so news doesn't really report on it much.
    - hopelite 1y ago
      Especially considering the ruling class does not like when people are reminded that China has its own space station and has never allowed a single non-Chinese person on it, while we failed in several ways over months to return the astronauts from the ISS, and President Trump just decreed that he’s going to give 600,000 (more?) Chinese students visas to study at American universities and invariably displacing their indigenous. I personally have nothing against the Chinese and respect them being oddly far more interested in the wellbeing of their own people than remotely anything in any western country, but it sure is odd behavior by people who consider China a threat. “China’s an enemy” … “let’s bring in 600,000 Chinese every single year to learn from us and take the knowledge back to China and the ones that remain will be embedded spies like the people of other foreign nations who have burrowed into America and its power structure”.
      - VoidWhisperer 1y ago
        I'm not sure that a government that goes out of its way to try to silence political dissent and enforce social order through fear should be considered interested in the wellbeing of its people. [0][1][2] [0]: https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-transnational-repression-dissent-around-world/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-tran... [1]: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/3587653/chinas-authoritarian-grip-how-china-reinforces-social-control-cultivates-a-clim/ https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/358765... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-how-beijing-silences-critics https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-ho...
        hopelite 1y ago
        How is that any different than anything happening in the West? It’s not! At least the Chinese government does not seem to be importing tens of millions of foreigners to displace, disown, dispossess, plunder, dismember, and commit crimes and terrorize its own people. Say what you want, but a government that is swapping out and replacing its own people (as von der Leyden basically admitted two days ago), all while claiming to be “democratic” (while not allowing anyone to vote on their own replacement) is exponentially more diabolical and evil than what you are highlighting. The western governments don’t “silence political dissent”? “Enforce social order through fear”? Are you just lying to yourself of how can you not be aware of what is going on outside of what is likely an ideological bubble? What was the Palestine protests situation on college campuses in the U.S., if not “silencing political dissent” and “enforcing social order through fear”?? Now the Zionists are demanding America basically cancel the first amendment. Can you raise public objections about tens of millions of Africans and Asians flooding into your communities that used to be safe in Europe, or will you be terrorized with judicial persecution and be downvoted online and censored simply because you have reasonable objections to being abused and harmed? An American was just stabbed in the face by an “asylum seeker” in Germany, because he was trying to intervene in him attempting sexual assault on a woman. Did you hear about that? Do you know that rape in Europe had sky rocketed everywhere because of all the “asylum seekers”? Do you feel pangs of anxiety at hearing that and urges to make excuses for it or the fact that people who do excise it are accessories to those violent crimes that are being perpetrated all across Europe? And that’s without even all the many other examples one could list to day’s end. You seem to be fooling yourself for some reason. This is not a sportsball game where “my team good, their team bad”. Let’s be principled here, regardless of team. I don’t actually blame China for what you accuse them of, because there are long standing hostile, strategic plans that go well beyond what most people have any kind of understanding for, whose objective is basically destroying/taking over China just as they want to take over Russia in order to achieve total world domination. And no, you don’t have to believe me, you can read any of the many “think tank” and niche journal articles where they not only lay out their objectives, but also their strategic and tactical plans they’ve been executing for decades. I have even worked with them and discussed these types of plans with them. They’re insane and a certain kind of stupid, a kind of fools stupidity. Frankly, what the Chinese themselves also probably do not understand is that those 600,000 Chinese students Trump wants to let in, are part of a strategy to prevent a two-front war with China and Russia and to separate and dominate them both, regardless of how successful that will be. (It won’t)
- aaron695 1y ago
  [dead]
habibur 1y ago
This won't enable perpetual space travel in case anyone thought so. Rockets need to eject particles to generate force. And to eject 1 kg of fuel, its photo synthesis system has to lose 1 km of mass in one way or another. The solution is to find a way to generate thrust without rocket fuel ejection.
- Buttons840 1y ago
  Can we "swim" through space? Collect particles from space, add energy, expell them backwards to generate a net thrust.
  - o11c 1y ago
    There's a huge density difference if you aren't close to a planet or star. Solar sails are probably more practical.
  - aspbee555 1y ago
    no particles needed, we already have ion drive, just need electricity
    - Taniwha 1y ago
      Ions are atoms ..... tiny particles
      - lmm 1y ago
        Ions are small enough that you can bring enough for a whole trip pretty easily. Yes they're still consumable, but you need a tiny fraction of the reaction mass you need with a conventional rocket.
      - grues-dinner 1y ago
        Quite big tiny particles in this application: Xenon is a fairly hefty atomic number of 54 - exactly double iron. And you need quite a bit of it: even fairly small spacecraft like probes can have nearly a tonne of the stuff. Which, considering there's only 30-40ish tonnes extracted per year at a cost of about 1.5ish dollars per gram is quite a bit!
kevinmershon 1y ago
> This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel. This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel
- sharpshadow 1y ago
  In my opinion there is still a lot to discover around the manipulation of the environment of plants. Generally speaking its the milieu which has the primary effect on life. Genetic manipulation and environment settings should be applied together to find very specific appliances. Very intriguing is the Primeval Code[0] in which plants and other life exposed to electrostatic fields changed significantly down to the genome. Would be very interesting which other artificial settings and compositions affect life in which ways. 0. https://rexresearch.com/ebner2/BurginDerUrzeitCode.pdf https://rexresearch.com/ebner2/BurginDerUrzeitCode.pdf
- andrewflnr 1y ago
  Why aren't we engineering plants to produce automotive fuel? We ought to at least be able to do diesel.
  - asdff 1y ago
    We do this for some plants. Hybrid palms are used for palm oil production due to the favorable yields and properties compared to parental species. One might ask why there are no cars powered off palm oil seeing as we can readily grow it across the world?
    - sandworm101 1y ago
      There are. Millions of them. Most any diesel can run just fine on veg oils, even used cooking oil. (Some very modern cars might need the electronic control systems tweaked.) There have been times/places where grocery stores put limits on oil once it became cheaper than diesel. Mythbusters: https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI TopGear: https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps
freeopinion 1y ago
Ah, all the great memories of making oxygen in the chem lab. Back when we used to rip the protons, neutrons, and electrons out of Flourine atoms and smash them into Nitrogen atoms until the N turned into O. Back when we made things the old-fashioned way.
throwxipig 1y ago
[dead]

298 points by Teever 1y ago

Can America please start doing cool shit again like this instead of eating ourselves alive?

This is from January, have there been any updates in the past 7 months? There is exceptionally little material info in this article and so very much speculation

nashashmi 1y ago
Apparently it has been in production since 2015. Why is this the first we are hearing about it?
- grues-dinner 1y ago
  Chinese scientific progress relatively rarely gets reported on because nearly all science reporting is a push-based system of institutions throwing press releases at publications. The publications don't have the chops to analyse or verify that information, or to go and find interesting research happening on their own, so they mostly stick with uncritically repackaging output from the places they trust.
- nosignono 1y ago
  Because English language news sources aren't particularly interested in developing the relationships necessary to report on Chinese scientific breakthroughs. It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater. Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally, so news doesn't really report on it much.
  - hopelite 1y ago
    Especially considering the ruling class does not like when people are reminded that China has its own space station and has never allowed a single non-Chinese person on it, while we failed in several ways over months to return the astronauts from the ISS, and President Trump just decreed that he’s going to give 600,000 (more?) Chinese students visas to study at American universities and invariably displacing their indigenous. I personally have nothing against the Chinese and respect them being oddly far more interested in the wellbeing of their own people than remotely anything in any western country, but it sure is odd behavior by people who consider China a threat. “China’s an enemy” … “let’s bring in 600,000 Chinese every single year to learn from us and take the knowledge back to China and the ones that remain will be embedded spies like the people of other foreign nations who have burrowed into America and its power structure”.
    - VoidWhisperer 1y ago
      I'm not sure that a government that goes out of its way to try to silence political dissent and enforce social order through fear should be considered interested in the wellbeing of its people. [0][1][2] [0]: https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-transnational-repression-dissent-around-world/ https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-tran... [1]: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/3587653/chinas-authoritarian-grip-how-china-reinforces-social-control-cultivates-a-clim/ https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/358765... [2]: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-how-beijing-silences-critics https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-ho...
      - hopelite 1y ago
        How is that any different than anything happening in the West? It’s not! At least the Chinese government does not seem to be importing tens of millions of foreigners to displace, disown, dispossess, plunder, dismember, and commit crimes and terrorize its own people. Say what you want, but a government that is swapping out and replacing its own people (as von der Leyden basically admitted two days ago), all while claiming to be “democratic” (while not allowing anyone to vote on their own replacement) is exponentially more diabolical and evil than what you are highlighting. The western governments don’t “silence political dissent”? “Enforce social order through fear”? Are you just lying to yourself of how can you not be aware of what is going on outside of what is likely an ideological bubble? What was the Palestine protests situation on college campuses in the U.S., if not “silencing political dissent” and “enforcing social order through fear”?? Now the Zionists are demanding America basically cancel the first amendment. Can you raise public objections about tens of millions of Africans and Asians flooding into your communities that used to be safe in Europe, or will you be terrorized with judicial persecution and be downvoted online and censored simply because you have reasonable objections to being abused and harmed? An American was just stabbed in the face by an “asylum seeker” in Germany, because he was trying to intervene in him attempting sexual assault on a woman. Did you hear about that? Do you know that rape in Europe had sky rocketed everywhere because of all the “asylum seekers”? Do you feel pangs of anxiety at hearing that and urges to make excuses for it or the fact that people who do excise it are accessories to those violent crimes that are being perpetrated all across Europe? And that’s without even all the many other examples one could list to day’s end. You seem to be fooling yourself for some reason. This is not a sportsball game where “my team good, their team bad”. Let’s be principled here, regardless of team. I don’t actually blame China for what you accuse them of, because there are long standing hostile, strategic plans that go well beyond what most people have any kind of understanding for, whose objective is basically destroying/taking over China just as they want to take over Russia in order to achieve total world domination. And no, you don’t have to believe me, you can read any of the many “think tank” and niche journal articles where they not only lay out their objectives, but also their strategic and tactical plans they’ve been executing for decades. I have even worked with them and discussed these types of plans with them. They’re insane and a certain kind of stupid, a kind of fools stupidity. Frankly, what the Chinese themselves also probably do not understand is that those 600,000 Chinese students Trump wants to let in, are part of a strategy to prevent a two-front war with China and Russia and to separate and dominate them both, regardless of how successful that will be. (It won’t)
aaron695 1y ago
[dead]

habibur 1y ago

This won't enable perpetual space travel in case anyone thought so. Rockets need to eject particles to generate force. And to eject 1 kg of fuel, its photo synthesis system has to lose 1 km of mass in one way or another. The solution is to find a way to generate thrust without rocket fuel ejection.

Buttons840 1y ago
Can we "swim" through space? Collect particles from space, add energy, expell them backwards to generate a net thrust.
- o11c 1y ago
  There's a huge density difference if you aren't close to a planet or star. Solar sails are probably more practical.
- aspbee555 1y ago
  no particles needed, we already have ion drive, just need electricity
  - Taniwha 1y ago
    Ions are atoms ..... tiny particles
    - lmm 1y ago
      Ions are small enough that you can bring enough for a whole trip pretty easily. Yes they're still consumable, but you need a tiny fraction of the reaction mass you need with a conventional rocket.
    - grues-dinner 1y ago
      Quite big tiny particles in this application: Xenon is a fairly hefty atomic number of 54 - exactly double iron. And you need quite a bit of it: even fairly small spacecraft like probes can have nearly a tonne of the stuff. Which, considering there's only 30-40ish tonnes extracted per year at a cost of about 1.5ish dollars per gram is quite a bit!

kevinmershon 1y ago

> This is a similar reaction to photosynthesis in plants, which produces glucose instead of rocket fuel. This is silly, but also begs the sillier question why we aren't bioengineering plants to produce rocket fuel

sharpshadow 1y ago
In my opinion there is still a lot to discover around the manipulation of the environment of plants. Generally speaking its the milieu which has the primary effect on life. Genetic manipulation and environment settings should be applied together to find very specific appliances. Very intriguing is the Primeval Code[0] in which plants and other life exposed to electrostatic fields changed significantly down to the genome. Would be very interesting which other artificial settings and compositions affect life in which ways. 0. https://rexresearch.com/ebner2/BurginDerUrzeitCode.pdf https://rexresearch.com/ebner2/BurginDerUrzeitCode.pdf
andrewflnr 1y ago
Why aren't we engineering plants to produce automotive fuel? We ought to at least be able to do diesel.
- asdff 1y ago
  We do this for some plants. Hybrid palms are used for palm oil production due to the favorable yields and properties compared to parental species. One might ask why there are no cars powered off palm oil seeing as we can readily grow it across the world?
  - sandworm101 1y ago
    There are. Millions of them. Most any diesel can run just fine on veg oils, even used cooking oil. (Some very modern cars might need the electronic control systems tweaked.) There have been times/places where grocery stores put limits on oil once it became cheaper than diesel. Mythbusters: https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI https://youtu.be/QEX1YFXYTdI TopGear: https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps https://youtu.be/GOFbsaNeZps

freeopinion 1y ago

Ah, all the great memories of making oxygen in the chem lab. Back when we used to rip the protons, neutrons, and electrons out of Flourine atoms and smash them into Nitrogen atoms until the N turned into O. Back when we made things the old-fashioned way.

throwxipig 1y ago

[dead]