231–240 of 359 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Your homework? Thank you for taking us to Mars.
Being part of the "western" aerospace industry and collaborating with NASA, I do consider it our homework, yes.
Being part of the "western" agricultural industry, you keep eating our homework so we have to do it again.
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…
Is it the Vikram lander that was destroyed while landing because of a software glitch?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes!! Moreover, China has optimized the process of massively scale production of everything. This is good as it decreases prices. Seeing it as a global humanity achievement... this is great.
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.
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
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
> Are the landing sites even remotely close to each other? The two rovers are 1873 km away from each other. calculation and sources: https://gist.github.com/krisoft/4f06624a79f4a0df1107fb29be99...
I'm curious, their landing vehicle seems to have less moving parts than the respective US rovers that use a complex sky-crane. Is there a particular benefit to using the sky-crane?
Congratulations to China, it is always great to see advancements in space exploration.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
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.…
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.…
Buran made an orbital flight. I think the reason of the project's failure was lack of funding, not technology in that case.