I am genuinely confused by the sentiment of my fellow commenters saying that this press release sounds like “satire”, “butt-hurt”, “whiny”, “sour grapes”, and “aggressive” [0][0][1][2][3].
I have the following questions for you all if you have the time to answer them.
1. What should an official press release from an leading official of a country’s national space program read like? If you have one or more examples, then please do share.
2. Should this official press release make mention of the opinions of foreign space scientists / foreign space officials and address those opinions, or should this official press release make no mention of them?
3. If one of the long-term goals of space travel is to colonize another planet in order to avoid human extinction in the case of a catastrophic world war, then is not nationalism in human space flight antithetical to that goal? Quote from Elon Musk: “If there’s a third world war we want to make sure there’s enough of a seed of human civilisation somewhere else to bring it back and shorten the length of the dark ages” [4].
4. One of the shortcomings of Soyuz seems to basically come down to some form of “it is old”. Given that this forum is Hacker News and we routinely have posts about how some specific instances of old technology have no modern viable successors with similar track records, or old ideas being rediscovered in newer technology (e.g. language features that existed in Common Lisp for decades), why does the sentiment for Soyuz so differently with with that of old technology like older programming languages or older but still used chip designs?
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478044
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478215
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478087
[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23478013
[4] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/11/elon-musk...