301–310 of 359 posts
It’s my opinion that the first space race served as a proxy for an even more expensive arms race, and a way to channel unavoidable nationalism/idealism into good for all humankind.
The United States and China cannot avoid competition, as Thucydides would assert. A space race is a blessing in this context - I hope it heats up.
So China has put a probe on the Moon, launched a space station, and landed a rover on Mars, just in the last few months? Asteroid sample return is the next logical step. Looks like the second Space Age is in full swing.
What I find very exciting and something that is totally lacking from any news articles and discussions I have seen outside space-geek circles is that China is actually very much open to cooperate with other agencies. The China Russia plan of a base on the moon is open to partners whom would like to join: International Lunar Research Station. https://spacenews.com/china-russia-open-moon-base-project-to...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Buran made an orbital flight. I think the reason of the project's failure was lack of funding, not technology in that case.
Also I think the Soviets realized the shuttle was a badly designed and expensive frankenvehicle that did not fit any mission profile particularly well.
I had no idea they had a rover on the way, very cool! What is the objective and the interest in the Utopia site?
It has a ground penetrating radar to see stuff 100 m below the ground, something that no other Mars rover has done before. I think that's pretty cool!
Is this type of survey also possible from the orbiter? Though it would not be as hi-def as from the land level, but more extensive coverage.
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Operation Paperclip was a secret US intelligence program in which more than 1,600 Nazi scientists, engineers, and technicians were taken from Nazi Germany to the United States for government employment after the end of World War II in Europe, primarily between 1945 and 1959. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Paperclip
"were taken" suggests they had no say in the matter, which is not true at least in the case of many. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wernher_von_Braun#Surrender_to...
To the extent that high value workers knew that they were treasure to be looted they might have decided that the US was a least worse option.
For me what has always been amazingly fascinating about all of these missions (even more so for the Voyager missions) is to be able to work with so much latency! In today's world, where we are used to working with millisecond latencies across thousands of kilometers, just to be able to do something with latency of minutes to tens of hours, boggles my mind! Amazing accomplishment of humankind!
On the code side of these rover and landers, you also have to deal with radiation/vacuum-hardened chips. From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result. This being HN, there may be a person on here that can sp…
Modern computing is all complementary mosfet based. You have a transistor to pull the signal up quickly, and a transistor to pull the signal down quickly.
The thing with CMOS is that, if both transistors turn on at the same time, it creates a short circuit. Depending on details of how the silicon was actually made, a short like that could either permanently cause damage, or it could just cause the circuit to transiently crap out until it reboots.
Exotic radioactive particles have a tendency to turn mosfets on when they smash into them. This can cause those sorts of short circuits. Some computers blow up, while others just stop working until power cycled.
In space, you obviously don't want to use the computers that blow up when that happens. If you use the computers that just transiently fail, then you generally need to have redundant computers able to keep the rest of the system running while they reboot the computer that failed. That does add a lot of software complexity, but at least the computers are relatively normal.
Transistors are less likely to be toggled by radiation the larger and more capacitive (slow to toggle) they are, so if you make a computer with big slow transistors, it will be unlikely to crap out even if a bunch of radiation is hitting it. That's handy because the software can actually be really simple. You just run your program and trust that it will be reliable enough to get it's job done.
Not all errant transistor flips cause a short circuit, they may just cause a miscalculation. Most of the calculations a computer does don't actually matter, and no one ever notices. It does mean the computer is slightly irrational, though, and that's bad for a computer. There's chips that have hardware support for detecting miscalculations and memory corruption. There's nothing particularly special about writing software for them. Typically you just need to implement an interrupt handler for when the hardware detects corruption, and you need to write a task that periodically reads every physical memory address so that the memory controller can proactively fix any bit flips in the memory.
It seems pretty silly to get all up in arms about copying other peoples' stuff. That's how humanity has innovated throughout the ages: Copy what works and innovate on top of it. 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 iter…
I think the main gripe with China's process is that they don't do the latter. They produce replica's then herald them as original works of the mightiest country on the planet. Everyone everywhere steals, but China does it with a little more 'F-U' than most countries, and tend to use what they steal to oppress.
I spent a few years working for a defense contractor out of college, and Chinese IPs were probing every internet facing server we had 24/7.
https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-tactical/chinese-knock...
https://futurism.com/the-byte/china-is-working-on-what-looks...
> Industrial Espionage.... > Crying "No fair! You stole it!" sounds more like a petulant child than anything else.
Pointing it out as a matter of economic and national security is far from a childish thing to do. If you're government is willing to subjugate people into slave labor at a massive scale while at the same time stealing the IP born from fairer societies, that creates an uneven competitive landscape, which ultimately works against the fairer societies. Think of it this way: Safety nets cost money, but the return you get is smarter people taking bigger risks and creating new useful things. If you get all the benefits of that (IP) and don't have to pay, you will win, and create a crappier world in the process. I'd liken it to brain drain. You spend all this money educating people only to have the return on that investment go elsewhere.
I know the immediate response to this is going to be "But America did such and such...". I don't care what America did. When someone is on trial for stealing a car, talking about how someone else stole a bike isn't a defense.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the code side of these rover and landers, you also have to deal with radiation/vacuum-hardened chips. From the little I understand, these chips behave a quite a bit different than the types of stuff we work with. For one, you have to assume that your programs will be corrupted via cosmic rays causing bit-flips. Chips are slower and more rigorous as a result. This being HN, there may be a person on here that can sp…
Well, it really depends on the nature of the radiation hardening. Modern computing is all complementary mosfet based. You have a transistor to pull the signal up quickly, and a transistor to pull the signal down quickly. The thing with CMOS is that, if both transistors turn on at the same time, it creates a short circuit. Depending on details of how the silicon was actually made, a short like that could either perman…