Space missions like to set easier to accomplish goals. Anything after that is viewed as a bonus. US space program did the same with the recent Mars mission.
Spirit and Opportunity both had 90-day official mission lengths as well and look how long they lasted. I think this is a simple case of underpromise and overdeliver.
“Those darn Chinese! They’re also launching their projectiles at 45 degree angles! They’re obviously copying the techniques we invented when the laws of physics first came into being!”
If you design something so that it has a 99% chance of lasting 90 days, there's a pretty good chance it'll last 6 months or even a year. Especially since failures tend to follow a bathtub curve: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bathtub_curve
Extreme temperature change during night and day. You don't know the quality of the ground dust and its effect on your machines. It's extreme because of lots of unknowns.
One factor complicating landing is the thin atmosphere. Too thin to make parachutes useful but thin enough that you have to worry about the heat from high speeds.
It is harsh and famously hard to land successfully on. But if a country can operate rovers on the Moon and is able to get their rover down to the surface in without breaking it then I'd expect it to work.
If it is anything like other Chinese goods, i doubt it will even last 90 days. Lol. But I'm sure the Amazon listing for the probe would have 100k positive reviews, even though they probably only made a couple of these.
They said the same thing of US goods way back in the day, later also about Japanese goods. The "good goods" are also made in China today. It is so widespread that it can be hard to even get English or German documentation on electronic parts these days. Please don't take part in nationalism. It's not very interesting.
Now that more and more countries are getting into space exploration, I wonder how long it will be before commercial companies start developing and selling space probe platforms (just like launch platforms now).
This is already common in the satellite world. Companies design & build satellite platforms (usually called "buses" for sats) that satellite developers build on top of. Usually provides the core physical structure, plus attachments for payloads or sensors; some more advanced ones also include stuff like avionics, power distribution etc. Wikipedia has some interesting examples [0].
Photon mentioned in a sibling comment builds on that idea by providing a bus with engines to make it into a simple spacecraft. I don't know of any off-the-shelf rover platforms yet but can absolutely see the same thing happening when there's enough demand / cost of access to places worth roving around is cheaper.
It's impressive how far China has come in just 2 decades. How significant is this achievement space technology wise? I still remember the first rover on Mars and it was a really big deal in my eyes back then.
Consider that China is banned from the ISS and other kinds of space technology collaboration programs. China had to develop all space technology on their own. Some perspective on how significant.
When you look at the history of space travel. One of the first space programs (NASA) originated from Germany developments. North Korea nuclear weapons from Soviet undercover collaboration. Not familiar with specifics for your claim above, but just stealing is a miniscule part of what is really required for this type of effort
In the context of for-profit business I wholeheartedly agree with you, but in the context of space exploration, if there is research about how to go to the moon and Mars that can be "stolen," isn't the moral culpability on whatever entity is hoarding that knowledge?
Or is going to the moon and Mars the achievement of certain parts of humanity, to be kept secret from other unwanted parts of humanity?
It is not like even you are open all US research to one country in an instant, they would be able to build their own next decade.
China did a really good job figuring out the know-hows and had their domestic team geared up for the job. That is nothing to be dismissed, like tired 'China can't do shit without stealing our technology' circlejerks would like to indicate.
Not downplaying the achievements as they just achieved something the Soviet and Russian programs could not even at the height of their powers during the space race. But there are plenty of countries most notably Russia that have allowed China to purchase military/dual use technologies. Hardware such as advanced fighter jets, missile and rocket technology, and there’s also the huge numbers of tertiary education students who leave China for education in advanced fields before returning home for their careers. All of this will have contributed in some way to advancing China’s space flight program.
They didn’t achieve this in a vacuum, let’s not perpetuate the notion that China is isolated from the rest of the world.
Did the Soviets make any major attempt for Mars? I thought that after the moon, they were mostly focused on Venus during the space race. Their ~28 Venus missions were no joke, with up to 5300 kg payloads for lander + orbiter, comparable to the Zhurong lander + orbiter payload of 5000 kg. Perhaps someone more skilled at rocket science than me can comment on the relative difficulty of moving mass to Mars vs Venus. From the table in Wikipedia's delta-v article they look about the same.
That said, congratulations to China for this achievement, and the more rovers we have on mars, the more science we learn. I hope China also has a new space telescope on their to-do list.
Assuming the Zhurong Mars rover can be successfully released in the next few days, China will become the second country in the world with a working rover on Mars.
At this point, I don't care what they steal, with the exception of military related research.
(And no--I have no citation. I have just read about to many Chinese citizens being arrested on American soil for espionage, and theft of trade secrets. Remember the guy collecting genetically modified seeds in the midwest? I could care less about Monsanto though. I do care about NASA secrets.)
They steal research from "the many countries" that haven't been to Mars? That seems quite an odd accusation. You just handwave the need for evidence away as if such an accusation can be assumed to be true. Arresting people on charge of espionage doesn't mean that those people actually engaged in espionage: proper due process must be finished first before that conclusion can be drawn. Also, stealing trade secrets in certain areas has got nothing to do with stealing secrets in space technology, so it's whataboutism at best.
How exactly are they supposed to steal research when they've been banned from space collaboration programs? Assuming that even if they did manage to steal some research, how can that strategy possibly be more successful than countries that haven't been banned from collaboration? That makes absolutely no sense.
No, China developed their space technology on their own, with their own research, by their own hard work. This is the result of accusing them of stealing and banning them: they go their own way, successfully.
FYI , you know that US was caught spying on other countries, including economical espionage(on Airbus) and I remember I seen recently some video about US getting access to some Russian equipment and the hyper patriotic narrator ...
now imagine I would invent some stupid accusation that SpaceX is built on tech stolent from Russia and airbus without any proof just some unrelated links about that a guy maybe stole some seeds or some documents that you can't trust because of the political and racist environment in US.
If the tech is stolen I suggest you either do some better work on presenting this or better wait for someone less lazy, more competent and with more knowledge in this domain to do it. Some US gov employee could either show or fabricate better evidence then you.
There is quite a bit of whataboutism when Chinese espionage comes up, however the key difference is that the government has a financial interest in most companies and often shares loot from foreign competitors with local businesses.
Yes, the US, Russia, France, etc. do this too. The big difference is when the government gives Lockheed the design plans for a new Chinese fighter jet the goal is to develop countermeasures and defeats for its technology, not to clone it outright.
My issue with this comments here is, do you have any proof?
China made a rover with 6 wheels and this means it is stolen? WTF is the "round corners" issue again?
I would like to see something more real, like Patent 1234 "Mars rover with metal wheels" then show how China somwhow broke this ridiculous patent. OR show that US rover contains some super secret tech that is also present in China stuff.
As far as I know China can send his smartest people in US, EU or other countries to learn advanced stuff then bring them back in have them teach in their universities. Combine that with a large population and a hard working people that have respect for science I can easily see them getting number one in sciences and tech.
IMO, keeping things secrets is not a valid long term strategy, look at the Apple new CPU/GPU people are reverse engineering it fast. The only thing Apple can do is put tons of patents (including shit ones) and then FUD everyone with their army of lawyers.
There was a post yesterday I think about someone implementing a similar algorithm with the SpaceXs one to vertical land a virtual rocket, see is possible to implement a similar looking thing without sending a commando of guys and steal tech.
A great example is the Chengdu J-20, which was a direct clone of the F-22 using plans stolen from Lockheed Martin. The J-31 is heavily inspired by but not a complete clone of the F-35 because the latter was still under heavy development when the plans were stolen. (https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-national-who-conspire...)
The J-15 is a clone of the Russian Su-33, reverse engineered from a physical jet they obtained from Ukraine. The only real modifications are the use of lighter composite materials so that the inferior launchers on Chinese carriers could get them in the air. (https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/high-cost-china-payin...)
These examples are all military because private companies are unwilling to publicize their designs were stolen, and the government is unwilling to admit they couldn't protect private industry.
There are instances of copying. That doesn't mean all successful technologies are copied. Some technologies are harder to independently develop. Supposedly advanced jet engines are really really hard, but space technology strangely less so, because of lower safety requirements.
In other words: for the claim "their space technology is stolen", more proof is needed. Just because they copied some other area is not enough proof to say they copied this area.
The burden of proof is not on a random person on the internet to investigate their space program. I can't prove the technology is stolen, just as much as you can't prove that it isn't. We are not nation-states and don't have the access or resources.
But a reasonable person can look at a pattern of behavior and extrapolate. If China in this case was a CS academic that had plagiarized a few papers, HN wouldn't be falling over themselves to give them the benefit of the doubt on their latest work.
The significance is that that space travel is becoming a commodity. In the recent past we had several countries attempting moon landings. The Chinese landed successfully. The Israelis had a failed mission recently. The Indians crashed (on purpose) a probe on the moon. The Japanese, Iranians, and probably a few others have each launched satellites into orbit. It's getting crowded there.
The other significant thing is that there is now a bit more urgency to the matter of getting humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The Chinese are preparing to set up their own space station and are obviously interested in going to the moon and Mars and they seem to have the technical capability to get there. It's a bit like the early days of the space age when NASA and the Russians were competing for getting there first. NASA seems busy fighting domestic battles for funding rather than getting stuff done. They got a lucky break with SpaceX having a bit more focus on that front and proposing something that might actually fly. Now they need to get serious about actually making that happen. If they don't, somebody else will.
I think it’s very significant. Interplanetary navigation and retro propulsive soft landings are tricky to get right. Several recent lunar missions have failed and historically about half of missions to Mars crapped out. China is rapidly racking up a very solid track record with their lunar and now Mars landings. Also rovers are a significant step up in complexity and capability from static landers.
The Long March 8 architecture looks like it’s suitable for adaptation for first stage recovery, and they have expressed the intention to attempt it, so China are lining up to overtake Russia as the strongest competitor to the US in space technology.
When the entire world moved their factories there and then started to import everything, what else would you expect? It's funny how communists beat capitalists using greed to their advantage.
Now it's a matter of time that communism will be seeping through every country fabric and it will be the end of the free world as we know it.
More seriously, there's probably only so many valid 6-wheeled rocker bogey suspension type rover designs that are possible, but the resemblance is uncanny. NASA also likely spent a lot of time studying photos of the Soviet Lunokhod rovers.
From 1947 to 1957 US media was filled with the idea that all progress in the Soviet Union was from stealing US innovations. Particularly the 1949 A-bomb, but other things as well.
Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Then they put a dog in space. Then they put a man in space. And the narrative changed.
One of the best books about soviet rocketry is "Rockets and People" ([1]). My blood boiled at how badly German engineers were treated on the Soviet side and how inefficient the use of their skills was. They literally landed Germans on an island and gave an important, but a standalone task (multi-channel telemetry). Over time, it became redundant and 7 years later all surviving german engineers were let to go home.
It's one sin to steal; it a bigger sin to not use what you have efficiently.
To be more precise, without using German scientists to the full capacity.
This multi-channel telemetry was enabler; Soviets followed the same approach as SpaceX is doing: lot of launches, lots of explosions and learning something every time.
It was telemetry from the German team that allowed this approach to happen.
In a sense, printf-style debugging was used before it became prevalent in computers.
Every successful country at some point stole / conquered / forcefully took from others to achieve prosperity. Look at UK for example. They've raped half of the world. Then they were crying a river when the US stole from them. Now they are telling other countries not to do what they have done. Those other countries might listen when they will have "stolen" enough to be well on their own.
Also Germany, the "made in..." Label was invented in the UK to distinguish their products from the cheap German knock-offs. Later "made in Germany" became a sign of quality.
Please don't lead with flamebait. You couldn't do anything more destructive to a thread like this. You're far from the only one doing it, but it's dismaying to see from such an established account. Please don't.
It wasn't intended to flame anything, the first part was supposed to be humorous, the ending part clearly says there's historical good and rational reasons to use a proven design.
This is good, there should always be friendly competition between Nations to drive Space Exploration. I hope this lights a bigger fire under the ass of the current US Administration and NASA to push ahead harder, faster and farther. The US doesn't know how lucky they are to have SpaceX and Musk.
SpaceX is no doubt cool. Nonetheless we're discussing China landing its first rover on a planet NASA's been flying a helicopter around for the last month. I mean, both are great accomplishments, but if you have to treat it as a competition and pick a winner...
Not to pour water on your statement, I'd say that the rate of change counts more. Nailing your first landing attempt on a powered descent (rocket-crate equivalent) is no mean feat. I'm actually pleasantly surprised given the high failure rate of Mars missions.
I went from earning $10K/yr as a student to a $120K income full time over the course of a month, why aren't you worshipping me and writing news articles about my accomplishment? Is it because rate of change doesn't count as much as you think it does?
Four governmental organizations have landed on Mars. Can’t forget the Russians and Europeans did it first. But that’s besides the point because I provided a hyperbole where my rate of change was significant but not newsworthy. We aren’t celebrating them because they went from there the fastest but because they went there at all. How fast isn’t noteworthy because they’re standing on the shoulders of giants. They literally copied the design of our rover from 20 years ago and I wouldn’t be surprised if they had stolen a lot of those tech specs from nasa long ago
I'd agree rate of change counts more if both parties were at comparable technology levels. When you're still playing catchup there's a lot of opportunities to take certain engineering shortcuts.
Absolutely. He wasn't given $100B, he took a grant from the government to build something that they wanted and was able to parlay that into two incredible companies that are changing the world as we know it. You can attack the man for who he is, what he says, and whatever else you want, but saying that we didn't get something of value for the investment that the US made is ridiculous. He got filthy rich but we all got something in return.
No thanks. Not looking forward to a friendly competition to develop auxiliary technology for wmds with an authoritarian regime. I like such regimes technologically obtuse. Maybe we can also give Iran and NK an award for pushing the boundaries of human knowledge on nuclear science. Your assessment of risk to humanity vs reward for human scientific progress is out of whack.
China, Iran, and NK may be authoritarian regimes, but the US is still the only nation in the world to have used nuclear weapons in an act of war, a move which killed probably 100,000 civilians.
The remote authoritarian regime you fear the most have the covid-19 pandemic well under control for its people. And you still have to deal with the virus at your doorstep in your non-authoritarian paradise. How good is that?
> China had to develop all space technology on their own.
It’s hard not to laugh at that statement. China runs the largest IP theft program in the world. To the point U.S. companies factor it in when doing business there.
That's funny. The thousand talents program is about attracting talents globally. Now who are you to say that those talents are 'yours' not 'theirs'? How about those talents the US attracted before because 'everyone likes the freedom here'? Are those not stolen simply because the US did it under a different political banner?
Was technology given or was it stolen? Just because companies are aware the theft is going to happen doesn’t mean it’s morally or ethically something that you can defend. Theft is theft.
Put your statement in some minimal check. The IP theft you are referring are just random business patent whose sole purpose is to prevent market competition...
If you think a Mars Rover can be copied, well, you better copy one yourself...
Absolutely they did, but that's like saying your neighbor offended your great great great great great grandfather 143 years ago so you're justified in sleeping with his wife.
No, it's about your neighbor slept with the wife of your great great great great great grandfather 143 years ago, and he's offspring is biting his teeth, alleging you slept with his wife, coz he probably learnt that someone can sleep with others' wife from his ancestor.
Except that it’s nothing like that at all. Nations are very different entities than individuals.
For one thing, they have a longer lifespan. The comparison of a young US stealing IP from an industrialized Britain to a young PRC stealing IP from an industrialized US makes much more sense. The argument being that “stealing IP” is what nations do to industrialize all the time.
The original claim was "China had to develop all space technology on their own", which is not correct. No one claimed that there wasn't German V-2 technology used in the U.S. space program. Likewise, von Braun acknowledged that their work built on that of Robert Goddard in the U.S.
I hope that one day we look back on Imaginary Property and the silly notion that pure information is a scarce resource that can be owned, and realize what a terrible anti-humanist idea it is. It was a concept dreamt up by lawyers primarily for lawyers.
Funnily enough, Elon Musk agrees, at least with regard to Tesla imaginary property: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you I'd hope he has the same approach with SpaceX things, but I admit I haven't looked into it as of this comment.
Everyone stands in the shoulders of those who came before, and that is a good thing.
The US didn't invent physics, didn't invent gunpowder, oil, math, textiles, ROCKETS, etc. But they did "acquire" them all, somehow.
> China runs the largest IP theft program in the world.
Most IP has been given to them by "businessmen" trying to gain and edge and betting wrong. That is not theft, if anything, is stupidity. To the degree China has stolen trade secrets, do you really think no other country has a corporate spy program? Do you not know who the biggest ip "thief" in the world is?
Ah yes, so the chinese were "given" the designs to other military aircrafts which is why their fighter jets look identical to those from the USA and Russia?
...those don't look identical. It lists the J-20 as a knock off of the F-22, and you can even tell from the picture they use that they're radically different airframes.
Please explain the differences that you see because the philosophy looks pretty damn identical. Aside from the obvious addition of forward canards on the J-20, the two aircraft look nearly identical thanks to China’s access to classified F-22 development data. They were caught stealing from Lockheed Martin data on the F-22 program with a successful conviction in 2016
Ah yes, all of the design similarities are just cosmetic, right? They certainly haven’t had their spies convicted of stealing American aviation technology ever?
If you ever read the slightest about aerodynamics you wouldn't make such blatantly wrong, ignorant, arrogant claims that the J-20 and F-22 are 'identical'. They are of the most fundamentally different layouts in designing a jet. Do everyone a favor and shut up.
Edit: since your account has been using HN exclusively for this, I've banned it. That's not an allowed use of HN, regardless of what you're for or against.
You mean compared to the US to use the largest spy organisation in the world to spy on contracts, technology, business secrets, and personal information of business leaders of other nations to get an edge.
It always buffles me how Americans can complain about things that China does (in the business world) while being perfectly fine about what their own government does in the same space. Many actually actively promote it.
While I totally agree, the US in turn enables people like Musk to do… well, whatever it is Elon does…. more readily than other countries. Entrepreneurship is hard and especially so if your system of governance isn’t onboard with it.
That's exactly the narrative that plays into the Chinese government's hands.
That being said the Zhurong rover is funded by the China National Space Administration so it is actually the Chinese government. No one claims NASA employees act as private citizens.
SpaceX is a civilian contractor to NASA, just like companies like Boeing, Grumman, and Raytheon were during the Apollo program. They aren't operating their own scientific missions just for the hell of it. (At least, not yet.)
Please don't take HN threads into tedious nationalistic flamewar. We're trying to avoid that here, along with other predictable+nasty discussion genres.
I love that China is doing so well in space. I love that China has pulled millions out of poverty with an incredible economic uprising. However I'm terrified of the CCP. I'm terrified of the monitoring and suppression of dissenting views. I don't trust that they won't try to impose their influence on the rest of the world, and I'm not super happy about how they treat their own people. So news like this stirs very mixed emotions.
I'm not American so I don't really have a horse in that race. But you are comparing how civilians treat each other to how the government treats civilians. To me this is apples and oranges.
Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've posted flamewar comments repeatedly as well. Would you please not? We're trying for a different quality of conversation here, as you'll see if you read the link I just mentioned.
Well I indeed know people who are through the reeducation camp, they are certainly changed, for a better mental and economical status. They were practicing some weirdass Sharia laws to their families and friends.
As for the Xinjiang reeducation news, they were originated from Adrian Zenz and a small group of reporters from Australia, who both have never put feet on Xinjiang. How much the whole Xinjiang incident is propaganda, and how much reality, I don't know.
Chinas reeducation camps are the greatest blessing on earth. Unfortunately, it seems several professors and celebrities remain intransigent inspite of years of reeducation. They fail to properly absorb Xi Jinping thought, like so many CEOs have done. They must not be allowed to graduate from the camp unless they are properly reeducated.
>How much the whole Xinjiang incident is propaganda, and how much reality, I don't know.
Because right now the US politicians feel challenged, and they are panicking to paint their competitor as a threat for everyone. This kind of political trick happens all the time.
Why does every post about China ends up about them abusing human rights, stealing etc. etc.
"Whataboutism" balances a hypocrisy when one POS is trying to tell the other POS how to behave and when confronted with facts ends up telling that we are not as bad POS as the other POS.
The problem is that some of those impressions you got about China are manufactured as part of the politics. Things can't be so torn, can they? Now it's your job to figure out which ones are manufactured and which ones are not.
I truly believe that the majority of Chinese civilians are well treated under their current government.
I also think the treatment of the Uyghurs is scary. That the control of media flowing into China is so controlled that the people are not free. The lack of democracy means there are not enough checks and balances to keep the people free. The way the one child policy has been enforced is not humane. The oppression of religion means people are not free.
I am not staying any country is perfect only that I would not like to live under that control. I also fear in my part of the world we could end up under their control in my lifetime.
If you're in the Americas, Europe, or Australia that will never happen in your lifetime. Think about how plausible the US annexing China and controlling it would be. Now flip that around and double the difficulty.
If you're in southeast asia the calculus changes. But the cost benefit analysis really leans against annexing hostile locals these days unless it's some nationalist mythology like China and Taiwan. And if you're in southeast asia I'd say future heat waves and climate disasters means you'll be more likely heading north into China than them heading south.
If it's a soft ideological takeover you're envisioning then that's really the responsibility of the democratic society you live in. Democracy falls when people no longer believe in its ideas or that it is an effective way of governance.
I'm in New Zealand and have family in Vietnam. It's a soft ideological take over I'm worried about with both. Vietnam being far more likely than New Zealand but we get a lot of economic benefit from China and they are buying up agriculture in New Zealand.
Vietnam I wouldn't be worried about. China's burned it's hand in those jungles before, I doubt they're keen to do it again. As for those island disputes all I can say is good luck and at least they're not heavily populated. Unfortunately Asia still has a lot of uncleaned messes left over from the 1940s what with the constant tug of war between China and the US ever since China went communist. Vietnam isn't exactly democratic though, but I guess that's why you're in New Zealand.
As for new Zealand, remember that you always have massive leverage over China in the form of nationalizing their purchases. Don't let wealth from China be a crutch. Enjoy it but know how to live life without it if the price of wealth is too great.
Look all the copy comments aside, the future of the human race is getting off this rock we live on. Congratulations on the success of this mission. It moves all of humanity forward.
The fuel cost means that almost all of us are destined to spend our lives here on earth. Only a handful will have the privilege of going up in a rocket.
Yes, but rockets aren’t the only way up. Musk’s million Martian metropolis is roughly where it starts to be worth thinking about developing Launch Loops and Orbital Rings.
I can definitely believe China might give that a go.
I renember reading some Asimov writing where he mentioned that the earth is a very bad place to setup a launching base. He hypothesized that humans would create a launch base on the moon. And that with that gravity, something like magnetic launchpads could be used.
Also some fuels could be made away from the earth, making their transport easier as there would be less gravity and atmosphere to fight against (∆v would still be a thing of course).
If the human race wants to have a future, we need to take care of the planet we live on, not assume we can slash-and-burn our way through new environments whenever we trash our home too badly.
Um.. why isn't this being talked about more? I remember the discussions were very lively everywhere from Youtube to HN and Reddit when India was attempting to land its probe on the moon.
A rover on Mars is a huge thing! Why are discussions relatively tame now?
It's the western media... They spent several hours talking about another rocket launched by SpaceX as if it was a big scientific advancement. But a major advancement by China is gonna be a little notice, or maybe they will say how this is a danger for everyone.
India and NASA went through concerted PR efforts in the lead up to the orbital insertion and landing respectively.
In this case it was known that the rover would be on Mars sometime in "mid-May" -- and now suddenly it's here. No globally oriented, in-the-moment PR. You can't fault anyone for it not being as immediately recognized and discussed as the other two.
I believe even though western media are more free in principle there are only a handful of corporations which have the loudest voice.
So the comparison is between western corporate media vs. Chinese state media. That said, internet discussion forums like this are a good counter balance to corporate media
* Russia built a rocket that almost put its enormous core stage in orbit -- Energia -- but were careful that it didn't. 2 launches total.
* The Space Shuttle was careful to not put its enormous external tank into orbit. 100+ launches.
It's one thing to lose control of a space station before it re-enters, numerous countries have had that happen. It's another to design a launch system that's intended to have a large thing re-enter uncontrolled. Russia? Never. US? Never.
All: if you can't post anything but cheap nationalistic comments, or other obvious reactions, please refrain from posting. The goal here is to have interesting conversation, which is the opposite of reflexive generic stuff [1, 2].
If you're not sure whether you're facilitating interesting conversation, here's the key: what's interesting are the diffs [3]: the specific, interesting details that haven't been repeated before or elsewhere. Ask yourself whether your comment could appear in any thread on some generally related theme (e.g. space, China). If yes, it's probably not interesting in the sense we're shooting for here. The goal is to consider things we haven't before.
Please note: this isn't about being 'positive' vs. 'negative' - it's about not being repetitive/predictable. That's different.
I read that ground penetrating radar only really works well if it is really close to the ground. It also only gets a thin slice of the ground so you need a rover that can move in order to image a volume.
It had some coverage here, it was one of the three probes headed for Mars this year, other two being the US and UAE probes.
The rover itself is not as larges as the Perseverance or Curiosity, but their orbiter seems a quite heavy probe. Hope we will get some detailed high-resolution images of the surface from the orbiter, so that we can have even better surface maps of Mars.
Also the CNSA programs don't get as much coverage in the West. Their Chang'e 5 lunar sample return probe was quite a good achievement, with they being able to do an autonomous docking in lunar orbit.
Not that I know of, Venus is kinda crazy. 90 ATM pressure, -1 pH acid rain, about 700 K temperatures at night, it's pretty absurd. Unless you want to make a probe out of solid Tungsten, you're probably out of luck. And good luck getting that out of low earth orbit, that would be stupidly heavy.
I believe an airship would have higher chances of survival. If the surface has been that hot for thousands/millions of years, why would the underground be different? Unless you go really deep (hundreds of KM?), which is impossible.
IIRC some designs have an airship with probe on a long cable. The airship stays in the relatively cool upper layers of the atmosphere and periodically lowers the probe to study the surface for a short while.
That way you can cool the probe down every time you reel it in instead of making it withstand the hellish temperatures for extended amounts of time.
What if you designed a probe like a medicine capsule, with an outer shell that's designed to melt, but a smaller rover inside that can survive the heat/acid/pressure?
Apart from Venus which is quite interesting, indeed, but very challenging goal, I hope there will be better exploration of Mercury, since it's rich in iron and closest to the Sun. It is a perfect fit for systematic monitoring of Sun's activity. Moreover, such proximity would make the energy density a big advantage in terms of the mission lifetime.
Russians landed 10 probes successfully and took pictures and did the science.
Venera 13 lander survived for 127 minutes.
You can shield the probes from sulfuric acid and pressure, but it's hard to keep electronics cool for longer than few hours. Mean surface temperature is 464 °C. (867 °F). Doing science experiments is even harder.
You could use active cooling but the energy requirements would be immense, as you would need to make the heat sink even hotter than the 464+ C atmosphere.
You would basically have to use a crazy high temperature reactor like those envisioned for project Pluto, but setup to somehow produce useful work instead of propulsion, to get the necessary power needed to reach sane cold side temperatures on your heat pump.
How did they copy it? Which parts did they copy? Given it arrived at Mars at around the same time as perseverance... (it left in the same transfer window right?)
I wouldn't bother trying to tease anything rational out, it comes across as trolling, the grandparent commenter also says they are from an Islamic country. I guess we all stand on the shoulders of giants sometimes.
The reason is that Perseverance is the size and weight of a small SUV (around 1,000 kg) whereas the Chinese lander seems to be only 240 kg, so 1/4 of the weight. That is likely the reason why they were able to land it directly, the way comparably heavy US rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, also landed.
Probably true. Even so, I found it remarkable that the very first thing the Lunar lander that China sent to the moon did was send a picture of the place where it landed. Same with the second one that had a rover. And yet the Mars one, more than 24 hours later, hasn't produced a single image?
What makes this story even weirder is if the Chinese are lying about the successful landing, why? And how would they walk that back when no further data came from the rover?
In about 4 days it looks like HiRISE will be in a good position to image the landing area where they landed and so we will get a picture, one way or another.
For me what has always been amazingly fascinating about all of these missions (even more so for the Voyager missions) is to be able to work with so much latency!
In today's world, where we are used to working with millisecond latencies across thousands of kilometers, just to be able to do something with latency of minutes to tens of hours, boggles my mind!
When the Voyager missions were launched most of the world didn't have international calling. So making a call from lets say Somalia to the US, involved finding a post office with the only international line in town and "booking" a call. Which meant you had to walk over and write down your name (and if you were lucky enough to have a local landline your 4 digit phone number) in a ledger and then walk back home to sit by the phone, for two days to a week, before the operator would call up to tell you the line was available. If the exchange wasn't sophisticated enough to forward the call, you then had to drop everything you were doing and walk back to the post office to use the line. Now think about how anything worked with that level of latency :)
Spanish colonies heard months after the event that the Spanish king(s) had abdicated. There were peoples fighting in the name of kings that didn't exist anymore...
Well, if there is a state partition in an always available application like humans then consistency cannot be guaranteed.
a Japanese holdout who did not surrender at the war's end in August 1945. After the war ended Onoda spent 29 years hiding out in the Philippines until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974.
The development cycles in space exploration are heroic. My own code takes literally one minute to run and the wait is a serious drag on my productivity.
On the code side of these rover and landers, you also have to deal with radiation/vacuum-hardened chips.
From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result.
This being HN, there may be a person on here that can speak more to program design with space rated hardware. I'd love to learn a bit more!
Well, it really depends on the nature of the radiation hardening.
Modern computing is all complementary mosfet based. You have a transistor to pull the signal up quickly, and a transistor to pull the signal down quickly.
The thing with CMOS is that, if both transistors turn on at the same time, it creates a short circuit. Depending on details of how the silicon was actually made, a short like that could either permanently cause damage, or it could just cause the circuit to transiently crap out until it reboots.
Exotic radioactive particles have a tendency to turn mosfets on when they smash into them. This can cause those sorts of short circuits. Some computers blow up, while others just stop working until power cycled.
In space, you obviously don't want to use the computers that blow up when that happens. If you use the computers that just transiently fail, then you generally need to have redundant computers able to keep the rest of the system running while they reboot the computer that failed. That does add a lot of software complexity, but at least the computers are relatively normal.
Transistors are less likely to be toggled by radiation the larger and more capacitive (slow to toggle) they are, so if you make a computer with big slow transistors, it will be unlikely to crap out even if a bunch of radiation is hitting it. That's handy because the software can actually be really simple. You just run your program and trust that it will be reliable enough to get it's job done.
Not all errant transistor flips cause a short circuit, they may just cause a miscalculation. Most of the calculations a computer does don't actually matter, and no one ever notices. It does mean the computer is slightly irrational, though, and that's bad for a computer. There's chips that have hardware support for detecting miscalculations and memory corruption. There's nothing particularly special about writing software for them. Typically you just need to implement an interrupt handler for when the hardware detects corruption, and you need to write a task that periodically reads every physical memory address so that the memory controller can proactively fix any bit flips in the memory.
It makes me concerned thinking about what kind of biological contamination this rover might have brought to Mars that may seriously hamper the search for signs of past native life.
JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.
I may have an unorthodox opinion about this, but I believe our primary goal should be to propagate life rather than to search for it. Sooner or later, we will need to expand our horizons as a species. When that time comes, we will benefit greatly from a long period of study regarding the forms of earthly life that can potentially survive elsewhere. To me, finding evidence of past life would be fascinating and groundbreaking, but not particularly actionable.
It would be an interesting experiment for sure to see if one could "terraform" Mars with some kind of life from Earth. But I don't see how it would be any more actionable than any discovery of past life. Both experiments will give greater insight into theories like abiogenesis and panspermia, but that's about it. Better to exhaust the first before trying the second, since you can't undo the second one. Also a bit more scientific rigour than just seeing what happens to piggyback on the spacecraft would probably be warranted.
China doesn't have any worse (or better) reputation than JPL in cleaning their crafts. This is pure speculation. If anything the US RU space race were much more likely to have spread bugs than modern crafts.
It's a cultural and institutional problem. All you have to do is extrapolate from their general hygienic practices. Wet markets, gutter oil, the whole Covid-19 pandemic. Germ theory isn't even fully accepted in China, I'm sure someone would have suggested rubbing down the spacecraft with ginseng to align the chi or something. Couple that with the demonstrably awful spacemanship in dropping rocket stages completely at random, for no other reason than méi bàn fǎ.
Of course there's a lot of Chinese people, especially of the younger generations, who are perfectly smart and conscientious about these things, just like the whistleblowers at the start of the pandemic. But who do you think approves the budgets for things like decontamination and controlled re-entry procedures, but the feckless, corrupt and superstitious CCP uncles who were formed by Mao's cultural revolution?
Of course any criticism of communist China is going to be met with a long string of whataboutisms, so I might as well pre-empt it. Yes, shame on the Americans for incinerating 17 of their astronauts out and endangering many others with their negligence. Shame on the Russians for everything they did wrong. I don't have a horse in the space race, they are all worthy of criticism. Criticism of one does not imply that any of the other are perfect, anyone who thinks that is clearly an idiot.
It's crazy that people downvote such comments. It seems like history repeats itself. When the West was getting reports about Nazi Germany running concentration camps this was ignored too. Why do we let China get away with this?
At least JPL can certainly update the code in its rovers (at least the main programs, probably not various firmware).
I doubt they incorporated the knowledge of another rover in their code but I believe JPL rovers are “driven” by humans and do not explore autonomously. Due to the delay, the commands are slightly higher level (short term setpoints) but the point is that a human would have to command the rover to drive into another; it wouldn’t happen automatically.
To the (flagged) comments about China stealing research: I’ll abstract from lack of evidence.
Just stealing isn’t enough. Russia, I believe, ended up admitting stealing research on the Space Shuttle, and despite that their own project never really materialised. Even. You steal, that lets you catch up, not overtake.
So even if China is helping themselves (again, I don’t know), they still have to innovate and improve. Good on them if they do. And then, their own technology is also ripe for the taking if that’s how the game works.
In its own right I find it a fairly major technical achievement that the first and only orbital flight of buran was unmanned, landing on a runway with no human at the controls. That's one thing the US never did with the shuttle.
The stone cold fact is that China has n-times engineers than USA, mostly working for the same American companies who outsourced their RnD, and engineering decades ago, and working on mostly the same things.
It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.
It's not just a numbers game (though as Stalin said - quantity does have a quality all of it's own).
Life is rarely that simple - there are also sociological/societal causes plus the required surrounding infrastructure.
China has made dramatic leaps in technological capability but they still can't make a good competitive jet engine and they've been pouring resources into that for literally decades.
Even if you have the plans (and realistically they probably do) just the metallurgy alone is an absolute nightmare.
There are a handful of countries that can do it reasonably well and only a couple of companies that can do it approaching the state of the art.
General Electric and Rolls Royce (with P&W following behind) - there are a few other smaller companies and CFM International which is GE and one of the smaller companies, Safran (used to be Snecma).
That is just one area - in the long term who knows but in the mid-term China will do well to achieve equivalency in a number of areas (and in fairness they know this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025)
I’d be more inclined to quote and think in terms of Brooks than Stalin since the latter was speaking to tanks iirc, and the former to something more akin to scientists: “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later.”
The US probably also suffers from a surfeit of “scientists” as the Thiel theory would have it, just not as bad of a problem as China.
You also have to consider culture as well, some cultures tend towards innovation more than others - which I guess fundamentally is how 'free' people are to try things and whether it's top down control or not.
Also I think the Soviets realized the shuttle was a badly designed and expensive frankenvehicle that did not fit any mission profile particularly well.
Perhaps. The Energia booster was quite good. The real reason they stopped flying it is that the Soviet Union went broke, which is also why there is no Soviet Union anymore.
I think the political narrative of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was a bit more complex than that. The root cause was a political dissatisfaction in the "member" states and as Kremlin under Gorbachev tried to create a more financially dynamic political system, they accidentally also gave enough leash to the vassal states to create an unstoppable tidal wave of reforms. They could have rolled the tanks in as during earlier decades (e.g invasion of Checkoslovakia during the Prague spring incident -68) but didn't - for which I think the world is ever grateful for Mr. Gorbachev.
So it was not only about money. Although the financial problems were certainly one of the biggest root causes.
Then soviet system had faced several humiliating defeats a few years earlier, robbing it's system of it's facade of invincibility - the invasion of Afganistan and Chernobyl disaster among them.
I haven't lived there so I appreciate the perspective. There certainly is no single cause. What I see as the proximal cause, or the straw that broke the camel's back was that starting in the seventies, the USSR had become a petrostate. The USSR wasn't producing enough food for the population, but this wasn't a problem through the seventies and early eighties due to the high oil prices. The USSR simply sold oil to pay for food imports.
In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased.
Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.
It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it.
None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iterative process for centuries, with the odd leap and bound.
Industrial espionage exists because it works, and everyone does it because it's a cheap way to come up to speed with the leading edge of human knowledge rather than unnecessarily duplicating effort.
Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
The absurdity of the "it's stealing" position is obvious when you imagine what the world would look like if everybody suddenly decided each country is doing only their own research and is not allowed to use any external idea. It would be utterly ridiculous. Copying-and-improving is the default, it's what makes us move forward as humanity. Everything else is just politics and national pride.
"They're only copying" was also an accusation famously leveled by Britain against the US (see Lowell[1] and The Pirates of Penzance[2]) and by the US against Japan around the turn of the 20th century. Copying complex technologies is hard and countries that are able to succeed at it usually go on to become innovative.
The US would then turn around and copy Japanese submarines in 1940s and 50s after the war (admittedly a smaller amount than what they copied from German designs.)
I was just telling my wife about this yesterday and how Wernher von Braun basically saved the US rocket program; or, at least, it was having major difficulties before, and major successes after he joined up.
And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard, the inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket; Werner von Braun said, about him, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." There was a large exchange of information in most areas of physics between very illustrious German and American physicists.
I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do.
That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
Not only that, but the project director of the friggin Saturn V - Arthur Rudolph - was forced to rescind his US citizenship or face charges for war crimes because he had managed a factory during the war - Mittelwerk - that killed more forced labourers by building the V-2 than died in the V-2 bombings (20,000 vs 9,000 V-2 casualties).
> I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do.
> That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
You're only saying this because America stopped Germany. You might as well be telling the French why sharing their science with 1930's Germany is a net good. What about a hypothetical where that French 30's science was the defining factor in Germany being able to conquer them?
> China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
What % of the scientific community would it take to convince their government to be open about sharing their knowledgebase? seems unrealistic with their current 'climate'.
If anyone wants to get into some of the obscure history niches, see the book Ignition!: An informal history of liquid rocket propellants (ISBN13: 9780813507255):
> And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard
Is that true? I have read that, unlike the German rocket club, Goddard was very secretive — more like closed-source.
Thanks to the open German rocket club, they solved the engineering difficulty of a high speed pump to deliver fuel to the engines. Goddard appears to have stalled there.
So the U.S. gets the German scientists, some hardware. They seem to have wanted to have both a peaceful, scientific track for rocket research and a military one.
Werner got the military track with the Army. Developing, among other things, the Redstone.
The peaceful, scientific track became NASA when Sputnik circled the Earth. Failing to get their own JPL rockets off the ground, the U.S. turns to the Army .... hey, Werner, anything you can do with your Redstone to help us out here?
That's my take anyhow. Someone with deeper historical knowledge can correct my wild generalizations.
"Wernher von Braun, a German physicist and a friend of Goddard [also a PhD physicist; emph. mine], instituted the German Rocket Society in 1927, following Goddard’s March 1926 launch." [0]
Goddard's early launches were made possible by a Smithsonian grant of $5000 by Charles Greeley Abbot from the Hodgkins fund. After being ridiculed in the NYT in 1920 he got more cautious about PR. After a Lindbergh visit, the Guggenheims helped him find another $100,000.
Germany didn't need 'help' from Goddard; they had Oberth, who did a PhD thesis on rocketry in 1922, and published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923.
"Space historians typically name three pioneers as the founding fathers of astronautics: Tsiolkovsky [a Russian teachr when Goddard was still a teen], the American Robert Goddard, and the German (although Romanian-born) Hermann Oberth." [1]
The Americans got the scientists, the Russians got the technicians. They served as catalysts for both space programs, but there was also a lot of talent from else where (America is famous for deporting a Chinese rocket scientist in the 50s or 60s, giving a good start to their program).
Germans wouldn't have started the war without loans from the US or help from companies like IBM. So it's not so much as stealing, but rather trying to claw back some of the "investment" when the war machinery started to collapse.
Yeah, this is complete nonsense. The science behind rockets were already being worked on long before WW2 or even the first expansion of territory of the Third Reich beyond the borders set at the closing of WW1.
It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.
I didn't say that only Germans had this technology. They have been doing a heavy research though and they didn't have to worry about human rights abuse and so on. It was valuable enough so that it was worth for the US to launch Operation Paperclip.
Sure but I'm not sure how their freedom from worrying about human rights abuse has anything at all to do with their rocket research. They never had any human test pilots or manned rocket vehicle tests (that are public record anyway). Perhaps, you confusing that with their medical research.
Is it really stealing when the individuals who did the work for America voluntarily left Germany due to its foray into authoritarianism? Seems more like a windfall for a country with better human rights than a theft, to me.
That's not quite how it went down - the really top guys were running the show in Nazi Germany until the very end, and only came to the US after Germany lost the war.
See siblings comments about Mittelwerk, eg. Also Chabon's (fictional) novel Moonglow covers some of this history well.
Operation Paperclip was a secret US intelligence program in which more than 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the United States for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, primarily between 1945 and 1959.
> To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
Allied bombings of Germany began in 1939, the information is even present in the Wikipedia link you provided. V-2 launches against Allies started in September 1944, well after commencement of large scale strategic bombing of German cities, and the name was given to it after successful test launches, also in 1944.
von Braun and his team specifically sought out Americans to surrender to. Characterizing a surrender as "theft" (as though people are property?!) is truly bizarre.
Precisely. Instead of crying the same people should question their Government on why the tech wasn't protected enough if it was not supposed to be copied.
Not directly relevant to this case, since I don't know anything about these Mars rovers than the superficial stuff from news outlets, but I think that what hurts isn't the copying, but boasting about it, presenting it as your own, not acknowledging the source, etc.
A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation.
To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.
Hockney derived a new theory of art and optics: around 1430, centuries before anyone suspected it, artists began secretly using cameralike devices, including the lens, the concave mirror and the camera obscura, to help them make realistic-looking paintings. ... Hockney suggests, knew the magic of photographic projection.
T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
Is there any evidence that there's copying going on? I tried searching online, but couldn't find any. A few months ago I saw people claiming that the leading choice in the contest to name the rover was "Perseverance"[1], which wasn't actually true (see the comment about how 弘毅 is translated). There seems to be a lot of misinformation out there these days.
in my opinion africa should ditch everything and focus on copyright business. since this all started there, they would be the richest continent in no time.
I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress.
I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7.
> Industrial Espionage....
> Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere.
I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
America literally did exactly what China is doing now, when it was the upstart and Britain was the industrial powerhouse of the world. Americans stole British IP and built an industrial economy with that technology. All the while implementing perhaps the largest and cruelest human trafficking operation ever conceived.
How are all the other countries, who follow US IP laws and trade regulations, pulling themselves out of poverty? Are they doing it as fast as China is?
It is always in the interest of a more developed country to set IP terms, because they own the patents and the manufacturing processes, and they can advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else. Look at how Mexico fared in NAFTA, or what the terms of the TPP were. All of this is completely beside the point of who has a more "fair" or more "just" regime. China did what they needed to do to develop their economy: steal American IP and ignore American trade laws and patents.
First, you can't compare the wealth an advantage IP represents now to what it was before the 1960s. It's a ridiculous comparison when you look at the amount of economic activity that depended on it.
Second, the list of underdeveloped countries that care about US IP laws is non-existent. The US doesn't care. It only matters when the country is wealthy and advanced enough to do something with the IP that it matters.
Third, I don't see how it being in the US's interest to protect their IP makes protecting the IP wrong.
Forth, you've rebutted none of my actual points, and ignored my last sentence.
> I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
Well, this actually reminded me the case of Apple issued Microsoft for the infringement in 1988 [1], and Apple did not win because the Mac UI was actually 'referenced' from Xerox as well.
That wasn't a case of 'they stole something too', though. That was a case of 'this thing they're saying I stole from them, we both stole from someone else'. A lil bit different.
The fact your comment is upvoted says all you need to know about the parcipatants in this thread.
China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.
What I find very exciting and something that is totally lacking from any news articles and discussions I have seen outside space-geek circles is that China is actually very much open to cooperate with other agencies. The China Russia plan of a base on the moon is open to partners whom would like to join: International Lunar Research Station.
It'd be like the US saying that Ambazonia or Palestine can participate in the ISS program. I'm sure the we'd happily let any other African nation participate for instance, but we don't recognize Ambazonia. And we consider it irrelevant that anyone else does. Needless to say, participation under a Palestinian flag would be a non starter.
I'm almost positive China would have the same sort of policy.
No, the US do not recognise ROC/Taiwan as a nation.
Only these countries recognise Taiwan as an independent country: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Holy See, Honduras, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Paraguay, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent, Grenadines, Swaziland, Tuvalu.
Taiwan is officially part of PRC unless you are one of these countries: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Holy See, Honduras, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Paraguay, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Swaziland and Tuvalu.
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[ 3.9 ms ] story [ 302 ms ] thread90 days, doesn't that seem short?
That’s you. That’s how you sound.
Also, there are dozens of ways to make the mission last longer but no ways of accomplishing that without adding more weight.
What’s actually so harsh about Mars?
Let’s imagine some alien civilization tries to send a probe to Earth, they’d be saying things like:
“Dude, that atmosphere is gonna burn our shit up before it even touches ground, if we’re not careful.”
“Holy shit, what are these huge animals with long noses and big ears? They’re gonna destroy our probe if they walk over it.”
“Let’s avoid landing in that area where those bipedals are still waging war.”
“The rain is acidic! WT bloody F?”
“Ugh, those black-and-white swimming things seem like assholes who like to play with their food, let’s steer clear of them.”
Photon mentioned in a sibling comment builds on that idea by providing a bus with engines to make it into a simple spacecraft. I don't know of any off-the-shelf rover platforms yet but can absolutely see the same thing happening when there's enough demand / cost of access to places worth roving around is cheaper.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satellite_bus
but also, for balance:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_H._Goddard
[1] https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
Or is going to the moon and Mars the achievement of certain parts of humanity, to be kept secret from other unwanted parts of humanity?
China did a really good job figuring out the know-hows and had their domestic team geared up for the job. That is nothing to be dismissed, like tired 'China can't do shit without stealing our technology' circlejerks would like to indicate.
They didn’t achieve this in a vacuum, let’s not perpetuate the notion that China is isolated from the rest of the world.
That said, congratulations to China for this achievement, and the more rovers we have on mars, the more science we learn. I hope China also has a new space telescope on their to-do list.
At this point, I don't care what they steal, with the exception of military related research.
(And no--I have no citation. I have just read about to many Chinese citizens being arrested on American soil for espionage, and theft of trade secrets. Remember the guy collecting genetically modified seeds in the midwest? I could care less about Monsanto though. I do care about NASA secrets.)
How exactly are they supposed to steal research when they've been banned from space collaboration programs? Assuming that even if they did manage to steal some research, how can that strategy possibly be more successful than countries that haven't been banned from collaboration? That makes absolutely no sense.
No, China developed their space technology on their own, with their own research, by their own hard work. This is the result of accusing them of stealing and banning them: they go their own way, successfully.
https://defense.info/re-thinking-strategy/2020/10/the-fight-...
If the tech is stolen I suggest you either do some better work on presenting this or better wait for someone less lazy, more competent and with more knowledge in this domain to do it. Some US gov employee could either show or fabricate better evidence then you.
Yes, the US, Russia, France, etc. do this too. The big difference is when the government gives Lockheed the design plans for a new Chinese fighter jet the goal is to develop countermeasures and defeats for its technology, not to clone it outright.
I would like to see something more real, like Patent 1234 "Mars rover with metal wheels" then show how China somwhow broke this ridiculous patent. OR show that US rover contains some super secret tech that is also present in China stuff.
As far as I know China can send his smartest people in US, EU or other countries to learn advanced stuff then bring them back in have them teach in their universities. Combine that with a large population and a hard working people that have respect for science I can easily see them getting number one in sciences and tech.
IMO, keeping things secrets is not a valid long term strategy, look at the Apple new CPU/GPU people are reverse engineering it fast. The only thing Apple can do is put tons of patents (including shit ones) and then FUD everyone with their army of lawyers.
There was a post yesterday I think about someone implementing a similar algorithm with the SpaceXs one to vertical land a virtual rocket, see is possible to implement a similar looking thing without sending a commando of guys and steal tech.
The J-15 is a clone of the Russian Su-33, reverse engineered from a physical jet they obtained from Ukraine. The only real modifications are the use of lighter composite materials so that the inferior launchers on Chinese carriers could get them in the air. (https://nationalinterest.org/blog/buzz/high-cost-china-payin...)
These examples are all military because private companies are unwilling to publicize their designs were stolen, and the government is unwilling to admit they couldn't protect private industry.
In other words: for the claim "their space technology is stolen", more proof is needed. Just because they copied some other area is not enough proof to say they copied this area.
But a reasonable person can look at a pattern of behavior and extrapolate. If China in this case was a CS academic that had plagiarized a few papers, HN wouldn't be falling over themselves to give them the benefit of the doubt on their latest work.
The other significant thing is that there is now a bit more urgency to the matter of getting humans back to the moon and eventually to Mars. The Chinese are preparing to set up their own space station and are obviously interested in going to the moon and Mars and they seem to have the technical capability to get there. It's a bit like the early days of the space age when NASA and the Russians were competing for getting there first. NASA seems busy fighting domestic battles for funding rather than getting stuff done. They got a lucky break with SpaceX having a bit more focus on that front and proposing something that might actually fly. Now they need to get serious about actually making that happen. If they don't, somebody else will.
Is it the Vikram lander that was destroyed while landing because of a software glitch?
The Long March 8 architecture looks like it’s suitable for adaptation for first stage recovery, and they have expressed the intention to attempt it, so China are lining up to overtake Russia as the strongest competitor to the US in space technology.
"uhhh..."
"It's okay, I'll just change it up a little bit so it doesn't look like a 1:1 copy of Spirit and Opportunity"
https://www.dw.com/en/chinas-tianwen-1-enters-mars-orbit/a-5...
More seriously, there's probably only so many valid 6-wheeled rocker bogey suspension type rover designs that are possible, but the resemblance is uncanny. NASA also likely spent a lot of time studying photos of the Soviet Lunokhod rovers.
Then the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. Then they put a dog in space. Then they put a man in space. And the narrative changed.
Our german rocket scientists are better than your german rocket scientists! Operation paperclip, and all that.
It's one sin to steal; it a bigger sin to not use what you have efficiently.
1. https://www.nasa.gov/connect/ebooks/rockets_people_vol1_deta...
This multi-channel telemetry was enabler; Soviets followed the same approach as SpaceX is doing: lot of launches, lots of explosions and learning something every time.
It was telemetry from the German team that allowed this approach to happen.
In a sense, printf-style debugging was used before it became prevalent in computers.
Every successful country at some point stole / conquered / forcefully took from others to achieve prosperity. Look at UK for example. They've raped half of the world. Then they were crying a river when the US stole from them. Now they are telling other countries not to do what they have done. Those other countries might listen when they will have "stolen" enough to be well on their own.
TL,DR: Japanese went through this cycle as well. And I would say Chinese too, by now.
If resemblance is a proof of copying, then we probably should point to all the other stuffs than advanced space technology.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
It’s hard not to laugh at that statement. China runs the largest IP theft program in the world. To the point U.S. companies factor it in when doing business there.
Just search this - https://duckduckgo.com/?q=china+steals&t=fpas&ia=web
They also had the “thousand talents program”.
That’s not to say what they did was not impressive, it was. But it’s also a lot of stolen IP.
stealing is involuntary on the part of the entity being stolen from.
Are those talents being enslaved to produce the IP for the US?
If you insist on the 'involuntary' part, well, all of you stole paper from China.
This sounds pretty voluntary.
If you think a Mars Rover can be copied, well, you better copy one yourself...
[1] https://www.pri.org/stories/2014-02-18/us-complains-other-na...
For one thing, they have a longer lifespan. The comparison of a young US stealing IP from an industrialized Britain to a young PRC stealing IP from an industrialized US makes much more sense. The argument being that “stealing IP” is what nations do to industrialize all the time.
I hope that one day we look back on Imaginary Property and the silly notion that pure information is a scarce resource that can be owned, and realize what a terrible anti-humanist idea it is. It was a concept dreamt up by lawyers primarily for lawyers.
Funnily enough, Elon Musk agrees, at least with regard to Tesla imaginary property: https://www.tesla.com/blog/all-our-patent-are-belong-you I'd hope he has the same approach with SpaceX things, but I admit I haven't looked into it as of this comment.
The US didn't invent physics, didn't invent gunpowder, oil, math, textiles, ROCKETS, etc. But they did "acquire" them all, somehow.
> China runs the largest IP theft program in the world.
Most IP has been given to them by "businessmen" trying to gain and edge and betting wrong. That is not theft, if anything, is stupidity. To the degree China has stolen trade secrets, do you really think no other country has a corporate spy program? Do you not know who the biggest ip "thief" in the world is?
[0]https://www.popularmechanics.com/military/aviation/g23303922...
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Edit: since your account has been using HN exclusively for this, I've banned it. That's not an allowed use of HN, regardless of what you're for or against.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Please read the site guidelines and take them in more deeply. There's a lot there:
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It always buffles me how Americans can complain about things that China does (in the business world) while being perfectly fine about what their own government does in the same space. Many actually actively promote it.
Can we stop for a moment to label anything from China with political statement?...
Things are built by people, not some random business man...
That being said the Zhurong rover is funded by the China National Space Administration so it is actually the Chinese government. No one claims NASA employees act as private citizens.
That makes all the difference.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27161906.
Chinese people are certainly treated better from CCP than American people are treated. Look at the hate crimes targeted at Asian...
Edit: it unfortunately looks like you've posted flamewar comments repeatedly as well. Would you please not? We're trying for a different quality of conversation here, as you'll see if you read the link I just mentioned.
As for the Xinjiang reeducation news, they were originated from Adrian Zenz and a small group of reporters from Australia, who both have never put feet on Xinjiang. How much the whole Xinjiang incident is propaganda, and how much reality, I don't know.
>How much the whole Xinjiang incident is propaganda, and how much reality, I don't know.
Such a shame.
"Whataboutism" balances a hypocrisy when one POS is trying to tell the other POS how to behave and when confronted with facts ends up telling that we are not as bad POS as the other POS.
I also think the treatment of the Uyghurs is scary. That the control of media flowing into China is so controlled that the people are not free. The lack of democracy means there are not enough checks and balances to keep the people free. The way the one child policy has been enforced is not humane. The oppression of religion means people are not free.
I am not staying any country is perfect only that I would not like to live under that control. I also fear in my part of the world we could end up under their control in my lifetime.
If you're in southeast asia the calculus changes. But the cost benefit analysis really leans against annexing hostile locals these days unless it's some nationalist mythology like China and Taiwan. And if you're in southeast asia I'd say future heat waves and climate disasters means you'll be more likely heading north into China than them heading south.
If it's a soft ideological takeover you're envisioning then that's really the responsibility of the democratic society you live in. Democracy falls when people no longer believe in its ideas or that it is an effective way of governance.
As for new Zealand, remember that you always have massive leverage over China in the form of nationalizing their purchases. Don't let wealth from China be a crutch. Enjoy it but know how to live life without it if the price of wealth is too great.
Meanwhile latest census shows that the Northeastern China peoples are shifting to the South.
Seeing it as a global humanity achievement... this is great.
We need to invent fuels that weigh less to have any hope of getting enough stuff into space to undertake any seriously large achievements.
I can definitely believe China might give that a go.
[0] https://m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Launch_loop
[1] https://m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbital_ring
That would be fantastic!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skyhook_(structure) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_tether
Also some fuels could be made away from the earth, making their transport easier as there would be less gravity and atmosphere to fight against (∆v would still be a thing of course).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Propellant_depot https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining
Also, research on how to even survive Mars lets us help keep Earth’s ecosystem in better shape.
A rover on Mars is a huge thing! Why are discussions relatively tame now?
In this case it was known that the rover would be on Mars sometime in "mid-May" -- and now suddenly it's here. No globally oriented, in-the-moment PR. You can't fault anyone for it not being as immediately recognized and discussed as the other two.
So the comparison is between western corporate media vs. Chinese state media. That said, internet discussion forums like this are a good counter balance to corporate media
* Russia built a rocket that almost put its enormous core stage in orbit -- Energia -- but were careful that it didn't. 2 launches total.
* The Space Shuttle was careful to not put its enormous external tank into orbit. 100+ launches.
It's one thing to lose control of a space station before it re-enters, numerous countries have had that happen. It's another to design a launch system that's intended to have a large thing re-enter uncontrolled. Russia? Never. US? Never.
If you're not sure whether you're facilitating interesting conversation, here's the key: what's interesting are the diffs [3]: the specific, interesting details that haven't been repeated before or elsewhere. Ask yourself whether your comment could appear in any thread on some generally related theme (e.g. space, China). If yes, it's probably not interesting in the sense we're shooting for here. The goal is to consider things we haven't before.
Please note: this isn't about being 'positive' vs. 'negative' - it's about not being repetitive/predictable. That's different.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[3] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Is this type of survey also possible from the orbiter? Though it would not be as hi-def as from the land level, but more extensive coverage.
The rover itself is not as larges as the Perseverance or Curiosity, but their orbiter seems a quite heavy probe. Hope we will get some detailed high-resolution images of the surface from the orbiter, so that we can have even better surface maps of Mars.
Also the CNSA programs don't get as much coverage in the West. Their Chang'e 5 lunar sample return probe was quite a good achievement, with they being able to do an autonomous docking in lunar orbit.
A video of the sample transfer in lunar orbit: https://youtu.be/iABFC9V3cPc
That said, absolutely amazing to see happen! Here is hoping that it lasts long past the design date like the others tend to do.
It is hot like an oven, with 400F temperatures, and multiple ATM pressures. It is much a more challenging environment.
That way you can cool the probe down every time you reel it in instead of making it withstand the hellish temperatures for extended amounts of time.
[1] https://www.nasa.gov/feature/jpl/nasas-venus-rover-challenge...
[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/20190034042
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venera
https://solarsystem.nasa.gov/missions/bepicolombo/in-depth/
You can shield the probes from sulfuric acid and pressure, but it's hard to keep electronics cool for longer than few hours. Mean surface temperature is 464 °C. (867 °F). Doing science experiments is even harder.
You would basically have to use a crazy high temperature reactor like those envisioned for project Pluto, but setup to somehow produce useful work instead of propulsion, to get the necessary power needed to reach sane cold side temperatures on your heat pump.
[1] http://global.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202105/15/WS609f18aaa31024...
I hope that more things on Mars are a net positive anyway, regardless the nation.
Being part of the "western" agricultural industry, you keep eating our homework so we have to do it again.
What makes this story even weirder is if the Chinese are lying about the successful landing, why? And how would they walk that back when no further data came from the rover?
In about 4 days it looks like HiRISE will be in a good position to image the landing area where they landed and so we will get a picture, one way or another.
In today's world, where we are used to working with millisecond latencies across thousands of kilometers, just to be able to do something with latency of minutes to tens of hours, boggles my mind!
Amazing accomplishment of humankind!
a Japanese holdout who did not surrender at the war's end in August 1945. After the war ended Onoda spent 29 years hiding out in the Philippines until his former commander travelled from Japan to formally relieve him from duty by order of Emperor Shōwa in 1974.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroo_Onoda
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CAP_theorem
From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result.
This being HN, there may be a person on here that can speak more to program design with space rated hardware. I'd love to learn a bit more!
Modern computing is all complementary mosfet based. You have a transistor to pull the signal up quickly, and a transistor to pull the signal down quickly.
The thing with CMOS is that, if both transistors turn on at the same time, it creates a short circuit. Depending on details of how the silicon was actually made, a short like that could either permanently cause damage, or it could just cause the circuit to transiently crap out until it reboots.
Exotic radioactive particles have a tendency to turn mosfets on when they smash into them. This can cause those sorts of short circuits. Some computers blow up, while others just stop working until power cycled.
In space, you obviously don't want to use the computers that blow up when that happens. If you use the computers that just transiently fail, then you generally need to have redundant computers able to keep the rest of the system running while they reboot the computer that failed. That does add a lot of software complexity, but at least the computers are relatively normal.
Transistors are less likely to be toggled by radiation the larger and more capacitive (slow to toggle) they are, so if you make a computer with big slow transistors, it will be unlikely to crap out even if a bunch of radiation is hitting it. That's handy because the software can actually be really simple. You just run your program and trust that it will be reliable enough to get it's job done.
Not all errant transistor flips cause a short circuit, they may just cause a miscalculation. Most of the calculations a computer does don't actually matter, and no one ever notices. It does mean the computer is slightly irrational, though, and that's bad for a computer. There's chips that have hardware support for detecting miscalculations and memory corruption. There's nothing particularly special about writing software for them. Typically you just need to implement an interrupt handler for when the hardware detects corruption, and you need to write a task that periodically reads every physical memory address so that the memory controller can proactively fix any bit flips in the memory.
JPL is very forthcoming about their cleanliness procedures, China not so much. And they don’t exactly have a great track record in this respect.
About 90% died as a result. If the objective was to propagate life, they definitely failed
This is a poor comparison.
Have we found and enslaved humans on Mars?
Sending a rover to another planet is an engineering feat. Your worry is the Chinese space agency and its staff dont know how to decontaminate?
That is properly odd of not myopic.
Of course there's a lot of Chinese people, especially of the younger generations, who are perfectly smart and conscientious about these things, just like the whistleblowers at the start of the pandemic. But who do you think approves the budgets for things like decontamination and controlled re-entry procedures, but the feckless, corrupt and superstitious CCP uncles who were formed by Mao's cultural revolution?
Of course any criticism of communist China is going to be met with a long string of whataboutisms, so I might as well pre-empt it. Yes, shame on the Americans for incinerating 17 of their astronauts out and endangering many others with their negligence. Shame on the Russians for everything they did wrong. I don't have a horse in the space race, they are all worthy of criticism. Criticism of one does not imply that any of the other are perfect, anyone who thinks that is clearly an idiot.
Kind of how NASA post stuff on WeChat even though most Americans don’t use it... wasn’t it also banned under trump?
Q: Are the landing sites even remotely close to each other?
Q: Had any of sides incorporated this somehow unexpected counterpart into their master programs? Can they update the programs at all?
Edit: grammar
I doubt they incorporated the knowledge of another rover in their code but I believe JPL rovers are “driven” by humans and do not explore autonomously. Due to the delay, the commands are slightly higher level (short term setpoints) but the point is that a human would have to command the rover to drive into another; it wouldn’t happen automatically.
The two rovers are 1873 km away from each other.
calculation and sources: https://gist.github.com/krisoft/4f06624a79f4a0df1107fb29be99...
Just stealing isn’t enough. Russia, I believe, ended up admitting stealing research on the Space Shuttle, and despite that their own project never really materialised. Even. You steal, that lets you catch up, not overtake.
So even if China is helping themselves (again, I don’t know), they still have to innovate and improve. Good on them if they do. And then, their own technology is also ripe for the taking if that’s how the game works.
It’s all progress one way or the other.
It strikes me every time hearing such argument from people completely oblivious to the above fact.
Life is rarely that simple - there are also sociological/societal causes plus the required surrounding infrastructure.
China has made dramatic leaps in technological capability but they still can't make a good competitive jet engine and they've been pouring resources into that for literally decades.
Even if you have the plans (and realistically they probably do) just the metallurgy alone is an absolute nightmare.
There are a handful of countries that can do it reasonably well and only a couple of companies that can do it approaching the state of the art.
General Electric and Rolls Royce (with P&W following behind) - there are a few other smaller companies and CFM International which is GE and one of the smaller companies, Safran (used to be Snecma).
That is just one area - in the long term who knows but in the mid-term China will do well to achieve equivalency in a number of areas (and in fairness they know this - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Made_in_China_2025)
The US probably also suffers from a surfeit of “scientists” as the Thiel theory would have it, just not as bad of a problem as China.
https://conversationswithtyler.com/episodes/peter-thiel/
You also have to consider culture as well, some cultures tend towards innovation more than others - which I guess fundamentally is how 'free' people are to try things and whether it's top down control or not.
Innovation has many fathers.
So it was not only about money. Although the financial problems were certainly one of the biggest root causes.
Then soviet system had faced several humiliating defeats a few years earlier, robbing it's system of it's facade of invincibility - the invasion of Afganistan and Chernobyl disaster among them.
In the mid eighties, the oil price crashed, and in order to feed the USSR, they had to take out increasingly large hard currency loans, which eventually got so big, that the only way to make them happen was with western government backing. The (implicit or explicit) condition was that if they rolled tanks in Poland or East Germany, the money, and hence the grain, would be cut off. Gorbachev said in an interview that in 1988 or 1989, the USSR was months away from mass starvation had the imports ceased.
Some give Reagan credit for convincing the Saudis to pump more oil and set this chain of events in motion, but I have no idea if that's true or not. Of course I'm disregarding why exactly it was that the USSR couldn't produce enough food with the massive amount of arable land available to it, or why it exactly there were these pro-democracy movements popping up in Poland and East Germany and other places in the Warsaw Pact.
None of our inventions arise from a vacuum. Cars are still as wide as Roman chariots for good reason. Power transfer uses the same base principles as were in play during the dawn of steam engines and before. Energy conversion has been an iterative process for centuries, with the odd leap and bound.
Industrial espionage exists because it works, and everyone does it because it's a cheap way to come up to speed with the leading edge of human knowledge rather than unnecessarily duplicating effort.
Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
[1]https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pirates_of_Penzance#Backgr...
It's also exactly what made nasa in the first place, with America stealing much of rocket science from the Germans in the wake of WW2.
And, in addition, the Germans in the 1930s got a lot of good information from Robert H. Goddard, the inventor who built the first liquid-fueled rocket; Werner von Braun said, about him, "His rockets ... may have been rather crude by present-day standards, but they blazed the trail and incorporated many features used in our most modern rockets and space vehicles." There was a large exchange of information in most areas of physics between very illustrious German and American physicists.
I think that having more people doing more science enriches everyone. Without American and German scientists working sharing information, it would have taken a lot longer to have the space technology that we currently do.
That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Rudolph
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelwerk
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelbau-Dora_concentration_c...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket
> That is true even when two countries have political tension, as Germany and America had in the 1930s. China may have political rivalry with America, but science should take a lead in exchanging ideas, learning from each other, and developing new ideas that will enrich all of humanity.
You're only saying this because America stopped Germany. You might as well be telling the French why sharing their science with 1930's Germany is a net good. What about a hypothetical where that French 30's science was the defining factor in Germany being able to conquer them?
What % of the scientific community would it take to convince their government to be open about sharing their knowledgebase? seems unrealistic with their current 'climate'.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/677285.Ignition_
It's not about rockets in general, but about rocket fuel specifically. It's the "#1 Best Seller in Petroleum (Engineering)" category:
* https://www.amazon.com/Ignition-Informal-History-Liquid-Prop...
Is that true? I have read that, unlike the German rocket club, Goddard was very secretive — more like closed-source.
Thanks to the open German rocket club, they solved the engineering difficulty of a high speed pump to deliver fuel to the engines. Goddard appears to have stalled there.
So the U.S. gets the German scientists, some hardware. They seem to have wanted to have both a peaceful, scientific track for rocket research and a military one.
Werner got the military track with the Army. Developing, among other things, the Redstone.
The peaceful, scientific track became NASA when Sputnik circled the Earth. Failing to get their own JPL rockets off the ground, the U.S. turns to the Army .... hey, Werner, anything you can do with your Redstone to help us out here?
That's my take anyhow. Someone with deeper historical knowledge can correct my wild generalizations.
Goddard's early launches were made possible by a Smithsonian grant of $5000 by Charles Greeley Abbot from the Hodgkins fund. After being ridiculed in the NYT in 1920 he got more cautious about PR. After a Lindbergh visit, the Guggenheims helped him find another $100,000.
Germany didn't need 'help' from Goddard; they had Oberth, who did a PhD thesis on rocketry in 1922, and published The Rocket into Planetary Space in 1923. "Space historians typically name three pioneers as the founding fathers of astronautics: Tsiolkovsky [a Russian teachr when Goddard was still a teen], the American Robert Goddard, and the German (although Romanian-born) Hermann Oberth." [1]
[0] https://www.famousscientists.org/robert-goddard/ [1] https://www.airspacemag.com/space/russias-long-love-affair-w...
It's like when people gave credit to Hitler for infrastructure projects such as the Autobahns which were already in progress before he took office.
See siblings comments about Mittelwerk, eg. Also Chabon's (fictional) novel Moonglow covers some of this history well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...
To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
Yes, that lines up with von Braun's account of his motivations.
> We knew that we had created a new means of warfare, and the question as to what nation, to what victorious nation we were willing to entrust this brainchild of ours was a moral decision more than anything else. We wanted to see the world spared another conflict such as Germany had just been through, and we felt that only by surrendering such a weapon to people who are guided not by the laws of materialism but by Christianity and humanity could such an assurance to the world be best secured.
I'm not particularly convinced by this man's praise of America and talk of Christianity, I think he was brown-nosing just a little bit... but it does seem clear he preferred America to the Soviets.
He really write that? That’s some chutzpah.
Also interesting is that the V-2 missile was called a “ vengeance weapon” [0] but Allied bombing of Germany hadn’t started when the V-2 started. [1]
On 22 December 1942, Adolf Hitler ordered the production of the A-4 as a "vengeance weapon", and the Peenemünde group developed it to target London.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_air_operations_during_...
Not at all the same as what's going on right now [0]
[0] https://www.justice.gov/usao-az/pr/former-raytheon-engineer-...
A trivial example: a nephew of mine proudly showed his drawings. They were really fantastic for his age, and everyone told him so. Turns out, he drew them by putting paper on a computer monitor (this was back when CRTs were still the fashion) and tracing. That did change the perception of merit a bit. The difference in the difficulty underlies the difference in appreciation.
To make my stance entirely clear: this is not meant to condone or condemn either side.
https://www.nytimes.com/2001/12/04/arts/paintings-too-perfec...
T. S. Eliot’s dictum: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different. The good poet welds his theft into a whole of feeling which is unique, utterly different than that from which it is torn.”
https://www.uvu.edu/arts/applause/posts/stealing.html
[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/spacex/comments/konwyz/starship_sta...
e.g. Soviet Union vs United States.
I like it, I welcome it - it begs to open the purse and spend and brings the most creative solutions to the table.
Like computers, boy what a fad!
Wasn't it an American who said "good artists copy, great artists steal"?
I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress.
I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks...
> Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere.
I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
How are all the other countries, who follow US IP laws and trade regulations, pulling themselves out of poverty? Are they doing it as fast as China is?
It is always in the interest of a more developed country to set IP terms, because they own the patents and the manufacturing processes, and they can advantage themselves at the expense of everyone else. Look at how Mexico fared in NAFTA, or what the terms of the TPP were. All of this is completely beside the point of who has a more "fair" or more "just" regime. China did what they needed to do to develop their economy: steal American IP and ignore American trade laws and patents.
Second, the list of underdeveloped countries that care about US IP laws is non-existent. The US doesn't care. It only matters when the country is wealthy and advanced enough to do something with the IP that it matters.
Third, I don't see how it being in the US's interest to protect their IP makes protecting the IP wrong.
Forth, you've rebutted none of my actual points, and ignored my last sentence.
Well, this actually reminded me the case of Apple issued Microsoft for the infringement in 1988 [1], and Apple did not win because the Mac UI was actually 'referenced' from Xerox as well.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_Computer,_Inc._v._Micros....
China merely isn't just engaged in industrial espionage because it works to not duplicate effort. They steal to undermine the effort of the people that made it possible to begin with. In many cases ruining the companies that made the original innovation. This isnt crying and whinging for no reason it's unethical and wrong. This isnt a two way street where chinese innovations are helping our world. Almost everything the Chinese steal all while burning through natural resources and at alarming pace and injecting the most harmful substances into the environment. And be honest they are simply doing this to saberrattle the US and create propoganda to legitmaze an oppressive state. So, yes it's not only unfair, it's evil. And I'm not happy for China.
https://spacenews.com/china-russia-open-moon-base-project-to...
Including Taiwan?
We do. But they don't.
It'd be like the US saying that Ambazonia or Palestine can participate in the ISS program. I'm sure the we'd happily let any other African nation participate for instance, but we don't recognize Ambazonia. And we consider it irrelevant that anyone else does. Needless to say, participation under a Palestinian flag would be a non starter.
I'm almost positive China would have the same sort of policy.
Only these countries recognise Taiwan as an independent country: Belize, Guatemala, Haiti, Holy See, Honduras, Marshall Islands, Nauru, Nicaragua, Palau, Paraguay, St Lucia, St Kitts and Nevis, St Vincent, Grenadines, Swaziland, Tuvalu.
So yes, Taiwan is part of the program.