"If the mission is successful, China will become the first nation to land, collect, and deliver samples back to Earth from the far side of the Moon."

We are absolutely competing for e.g. real estate on Shackleton’s rim.

This mission required a communication satellite that loiters on the far side of the Moon as well to relay communications back to earth. https://orbitalindex.com/archive/2024-03-13-Issue-260/#queqi...

They have the newest space station as well.

They appear to have made faster progress on production of more advanced computer chips as well but that requires some further investigation / proof.

This all while a single hostile nation wants to dictate what China is allowed or not allowed to buy on the free market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr....

Xi has abandoned the wise policies of Deng and is setting China back. Due to the idiocy of Xi it's not a single hostile nation as you put it. It's Vietnam, South Korea, Japan, the Philippines, India, the EU, Australia, and New Zealand.

This is a step forward for mankind.

Jeez, this is why we can't have nice things.

China's only definitive enemies are the US (at risk of their throne being usurped) and India (they've been waging border skirmishes for decades, long before Xi came to power).

As for the rest:

* The EU plays a two-faced game, antagonizing China to please the US while cooperating with China for benefits.

* Japan and South Korea must respect the fact China is their regional dominant power, not the US nor themselves. Both historically and again in modern times as China (re)gains power.

* Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Phillipines, et al.) and Oceania (Australia, New Zealand) antagonize or cooperate with China depending on the political winds of a given year.

America is China’s largest net importer [1], tied with the EU as a whole for total exports. Everyone besides Xi is trying to play for long-term gains.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_largest_trading_...

China is helping Russia fund their war in Ukraine. The EU cares a lot about that.

China has no regional dominance by the very fact Taiwan is still not part of China. What’s holding them back? The US. If China had regional dominance, the US would not be an issue.

It’s important to not ignore what China is doing in the South China Sea. It’s not a “political wind” when China is attempting to redefine another country’s maritime borders and the Philippine president mentioning acts of war being committed by China.

That's because the claim was "who are China's enemies".

Anyone can decide to be China's enemy (or not) for any reason, including regardless of whether China antagonizes them.

The EU component of NATO is a great example, the US antagonizes them very often and yet they remain friends with the US. Another example is Russia; Russia hates dealing with China, including for reasons such as stealing of technology, but remains friendly for practical reasons.

China antagonizes other countries a great deal, particularly its neighbours, but that is tangent to who are its enemies.

>China has no regional dominance by the very fact Taiwan is still not part of China. What’s holding them back? The US. If China had regional dominance, the US would not be an issue.

And that situation might change this century if current trends continue, the US is losing power (in all senses, military and otherwise) and China gaining.

Even today Japan and South Korea aren't just flipping China off, holding talks and building up their militaries, because they understand the US can't protect them perfectly from the dominant power of the region.

>It’s important to not ignore what China is doing in the South China Sea. It’s not a “political wind” when China is attempting to redefine another country’s maritime borders and the Philippine president mentioning acts of war being committed by China.

The previous Phillipine government was friendly to China, in no small part also to the US at the time pushing the Phillipines away. The situation there will change according to the way the political winds blow.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2012/07/09/nsa-chief-cybercrime-co...

https://www.infosecinstitute.com/resources/general-security/...

https://www.usitc.gov/publications/332/pub4199.pdf

https://securitypolicylaw.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/06...

America's petro dollar funds research by arming countries that pull oil from the ground, research that is then acquired, emulated, and iterated upon. Who's the crook in that story? The people robbing the earth of a natural resource? The people holding the world hostage forcing them to use their financial system? The people taking scientific knowledge they didn't "pay for."

While a significant portion of the techy American population in their younger years was against America's strengthen of intellectual property rights, while they were focused on art being locked down, were ignoring how much of America's strength in the world is propped up by claiming America owns ideas, information, and knowledge, that others have to buy from them.

Of course corporations wouldn't make nearly as much money, but is the goal of civilization for humans to live good lives, or for corporations to make maximum profit?

When US has agenda of X and China had an agenda of Y, etc, we’ll be pulling at the common center of humanity.

The feeling is pervasive in the enterprise as well. Each one protecting and petting their own agendas…fucking humans.

Adequate reward in corporate world means of ten hundreds of millions or billions, since risk of failure and losing it all are often massive and they do happen regularly, risk gets bigger the more revolutionary stuff you do.

That's why US won cold war - individuals and private entities were massively motivated to do their best, and so they did and in few decades leaped light years ahead of eastern bloc. Anybody from former soviet bloc/eastern bloc visiting western country went through absolute shock and disbelief, and that includes Gorbachev visiting supermarket in West Germany in late 80s IIRC, he thought its some sort of propaganda trick on him. I went through milder version of it too, a powerful experience.

Communism in any form doesn't work long term, tried and tested many times already, period. It fails on people, and that's enough for a complete failure. Neutral non-greedy AGI could make this work, if not turning into some form of Skynet... but getting vastly off topic here

Also worth noting that American space exploration achievements were also kickstarted by importing the talent from post-WW2 Germany.

They are all metal pipes filled with boom powder that can be used to throw things up.

I didn't think news.ycombinator.com catered to misinformation. I'm guessing your PhD is in Aerospace Engineering?

Their only difference is to what purpose they are used. Some are used to destroy, some are used to kill, some are used to defend, some are used to throw stuff into space.

But they are all pointy metal tubes filled with boom powder.

There really is no difference to the rockets themselves, they are all varying forms of pointy metal pipes filled with boom powder. The only difference is the payload they carry; whether they are humans or spaceborne vessels like satellites, or explosives of various descriptions with which to destroy and kill.

If you disagree, and you've certainly made it clear you do, you can put forth counterarguments instead of claiming quackery.

One quick question though, what was the "powder" used on, say, the Apollo missions?

I've always heard the Saturn V launch had a J-2 liquid propellant rocket engine that used used liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen.

The Saturn V used RP-1 and liquid oxygen for the first stage, and liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for the second and third stages. The Apollo CSM used dinitrogen tetroxide and "Aerozine 50", a 50:50 mix of hydrazine and UDMH hypergolic fuels that was originally used for the Titan II ICBM.

Further reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_command_and_service_mod...

Relatively slow controlled energy release for thrust isn't particularly evoked by the word BOOM!!

Otherwise simplifying rockets and missiles as they are today to tubes of slow release thrust (with some additional wrinkles such as side thrust | directional thrust to 'balance' load over thrust, multi stages, etc) seems innocent enough.

China can’t really play this card given what it’s currently doing in Xinjiang/East Turkestan [1]. (And while America was capturing the likes of von Braun and chemical bombing Vietnam, Mao was conducting his own crimes against humanity [2].)

The proximate history of every country’s aerospace programme is unfortunately troubled. What matters is what can be done today and by whom. In that, China and America are worthy adversaries. Let’s hope the competition can be kept civil versus militarised.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persecution_of_Uyghurs_in_Ch...

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Leap_Forward

Currently the headline on HN reads “Footage of Chang'e-6's land on far side of the moon”

NHK reports[1] that China announced Chang'e-6 "landed" (着陸, chakuriku) successfully on the far side of the Moon.

[1]: https://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/html/20240602/k10014468871000.ht...

Also, is that how the moon looks, or is this some kind of night vision?

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-175/

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-176/

https://jatan.space/moon-monday-issue-177/

And the probe will hover above the landing area and use a laser to detect the surface to choose the landing point. It can be seen in the video.

I saw some comments that due to the limited bandwidth of the relay satellite, these images were taken every second. So it is actually not a "video".

I'd give the Chinese space program more than a healthy 50/50 chance of landing humans on the moon again within the next ten years.

Then you haven’t been paying attention to American aerospace over the past decade and a half. It is far more capable today than it was in the 60s, particularly in robotics.

Where we lag is in human space flight, in part due to bureaucracy and complacence among the majors, in part because we have ridiculously-high safety standards.

and frankly, while we have made some technical advances, we have also suffered severe logistical, political, and capital losses, especially in context of the aforementioned bureaucratic and regulatory burden. We have also suffered, IMO, loss of capability in our elite engineering echelon.

The F-35 is a perfect example of what I’m describing. Technically brilliant in some ways, sure. Pretty lame and terrible in others. Debatably an advance over previous generations of aircraft, at the very least.

Today’s NASA is a completely different animal than the NASA which put a man on the Moon.

I don’t see SpaceX doing it either. Not today. Maybe tomorrow. Let’s wait and see.