181–190 of 359 posts
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Scale of production has never been the problem, achieving escape velocity is. We need to invent fuels that weigh less to have any hope of getting enough stuff into space to undertake any seriously large achievements.
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Scale of production has never been the problem, achieving escape velocity is. We need to invent fuels that weigh less to have any hope of getting enough stuff into space to undertake any seriously large achievements.
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.
I can definitely believe China might give that a go.
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All things considered, 90 days is pretty good for how harsh of an environment Mars can be. Also, there are dozens of ways to make the mission last longer but no ways of accomplishing that without adding more weight.
This makes me think about the way we define “harsh”. 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.” “L…
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.
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Space research in the US started before the Germans joined, but it never worked... The US had to bring Germans to make the whole thing successful.
I think you mean, German Jews brought their innovations to the US because Germany tried to kill them.
This is so cool, imagine it would meet Perseverance and the droids would engage in some battle friendly cooperation! 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
The two rovers are 1873 km away from each other.
calculation and sources: https://gist.github.com/krisoft/4f06624a79f4a0df1107fb29be99...
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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'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 .
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.
>Now that Zhurong has got down successfully, scientists will try to get at least 90 Martian days of service out of it, studying the local geology. 90 days, doesn't that seem short?
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.
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.
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…