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A comment on Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test. Parent comment

Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by adventured on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @07:27PM (#25367720)
> Even if another company decides to try to replicate what SpaceX is doing, they're now at least a decade behind.

There is one entity that can and will rapidly close that gap. In fact, they're the only one that can: China. Everyone else will continue on their slow path, more or less adopting everything SpaceX figures out a decade after the fact. The other competition operates permanently by hand-me-downs. China will invest huge sums of money and labor into doing the same thing and the difference between them and eg the Europeans, is the Chinese will and can move with ridiculous speed by comparison. The other competition won't adjust their speed, so they'll generally continue to lag SpaceX perpetually, whereas China can move at a far greater pace (aerospace, as with a few other big segments like semiconductors, is of course a core logical focus point for China, which means they will catch up no matter the cost; they'll borrow from SpaceX better than anyone else and faster than anyone else, right up to the point of copying everything). And to be clear, I don't fault China at all for that approach, it will work very well; they can leapfrog everyone not named SpaceX that way.

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by nickik on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @07:34PM (#25367807)
Easy to claim. So far China human space program has been very slow. And they have not gone full power into even a Falcon 9 clone. China is in the same space as everybody else outside of the US, with a slow moving bureaucracy leading it, wanting to switch into more commercial companies.

China has not yet itself produced an engine anywhere close to a Raptor and they have been trying for quite a while.

China can not spend gigantic amounts of money on everything at once, and even if they do, it by far doesn't work all of the time.

When you are copying SpaceX you are always cooping something that is already outdated and SpaceX will not stop innovating.

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by babesh on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @09:04PM (#25368665)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2020_in_spaceflight

In 2020, China has launched more rockets to space than any other nation.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang%27e_5

It has a mission to bring lunar rock back to earth for the first time since the 70s.

So I would say that China has put quite a bit of energy in this area and is moving faster than other nations but not as fast as SpaceX.

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by valuearb on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @11:39PM (#25369787)
China launches a bunch of obsolete rockets with relatively small capacities. Long march 3 has half the capacity of a Falcon 9, Long March 2 is about one seventh the payload capacity.

They should be justly proud of their robotic lunar missions though.

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by nickik on Thursday December 10, 2020 @01:03PM (#25376448)
Go look at how much payload by weight was launched by China. Or how many different payloads.

> It has a mission to bring lunar rock back to earth for the first time since the 70s.

Yes its a fine mission, but its a mission that is not outside of the capability of others. There are simply many space missions that could be done.

Yes, China is doing things and the are moving fast, but your prediction and text were still over the top.

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by babesh on Saturday December 12, 2020 @01:42AM (#25396194)
That wasn’t my prediction. It was from another poster.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by babesh on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @09:33PM (#25368913)
Opps. US passed China with the last few flights. Counting SpaceX and Electron in the US stats.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by oska on Thursday December 10, 2020 @12:17AM (#25370044)
And SpaceX has another 3 launches planned for December (SXM-7, NROL-108 & Turksat 5A). Although the last one is on Dec 31, so could easily slip into next year.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by NikolaeVarius on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @09:09PM (#25368718)
Why do the US numbers include electron?
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by skissane on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @09:20PM (#25368796)
Because the statistics are based on the nationality of company/agency that designs and builds the launch vehicle, not the launch site. So even though Soyuz launches from Kazakhstan and French Guiana, it is counted as a Russian launch since a Russian company (Energia) designed and built the rocket. Similarly, even though a lot of Electron launches are from New Zealand, the company that builds Electron is ultimately US-headquartered/US-controlled. (Rocket Lab was originally founded in New Zealand, but they moved their HQ and parent company to the US so are now considered a US company rather than a New Zealand one.)
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by aardvarkr on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @10:11PM (#25369177)
It’s pretty damn hard to copy something that you never get to see. China can clone tech because they force companies that build products in China to essentially give away their IP. Can’t do that if the rocket is built exclusively in Hawthorne, CA and Boca China, TX with no outside contractors. They’re decades behind even the Europeans and Japanese. Chang’e5 is cool and all but Europe and Japan landed their spacecraft this year and last year on ASTEROIDS which is actually pushing the boundaries of space accomplishments and science. Hyabusa2 flew literally billions of miles (5.4bn to be exact)[0] during its mission to collect and return asteroid samples. The Chinese mission was a repeat of the 50’s just to say that they did it too. They’re not leapfrogging ANYONE, at least not until they do something novel.

http://www.hayabusa2.jaxa.jp/en/enjoy/material/factsheet/Fac...

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by someperson on Thursday December 10, 2020 @09:03AM (#25373768)
I tend to agree with you that China's space technology is not that developed -- their manned rocket and capsule is a scaled up Russian Soyuz design -- and I have doubts about their ability to catchup without major technology transfer (whether through acquisition or theft). But we should still recognize that their previous moon mission (Chang'e-4) did do something no other nation has yet done: land on the far side of the moon. That is pushing the boundaries and just repeating the accomplishments of decades ago.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by aardvarkr on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:11PM (#25381089)
Is that really so impressive? The technical challenges remain the same as a near side landing except you’re in a communication blackout so signals have to bounce off a satellite in orbit. Even then that’s not novel because the Americans and Russians did the same thing, using their orbiting spacecraft to relay messages back to earth.

The Chinese literally haven’t done anything novel in their space program. Even the words they said upon landing on that mission were a copy of the Americans. ‘"It's a small step for the rover, but one giant leap for the Chinese nation," Wu Weiren, the chief designer of the Lunar Exploration Project, told state broadcaster CCTV.’ The Chinese literally can’t do anything but copy and it’s embarrassing.

https://phys.org/news/2019-01-chinese-rover-exploring-dark-s...

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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by someperson on Friday December 11, 2020 @01:26AM (#25382945)
Well I think landing a rover on the far side of the moon is impressive. It's definitely a first for humanity and the scientists and engineers behind that mission deserve praise for that, even if in the achievement isn't pushing forward space technology at all.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by Invictus0 on Thursday December 10, 2020 @08:58AM (#25373722)
All it takes is one cyber attack.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by valuearb on Wednesday December 09, 2020 @11:35PM (#25369761)
Chinas launchers improvements have been moving at a slow pace. Lots of obsolete solid rockets and dangerous propellant.
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Re:Starship – SN8 – High-Altitude Flight Test by ansible on Thursday December 10, 2020 @02:44AM (#25370971)
It would be nice for the environment and the Chinese people if they pursued reuse more. Landing the 1st stage is a lot better than dropping it on top of a village and exploding... as part of a normal and successful launch.

No, I'm not kidding.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2019/11/china-keeps-dropping...

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