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As last module docks, China completes its space station

nytimes.com

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Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#351

Post by ElevenLathe »

XorNot wrote: post #204
ElevenLathe wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's true in a way but just pushes things back a level of causality: if we train more people as aerospace engineers, then we will have fewer trained people in other specialties. We have a finite supply of enthusiastic, smart young people to drive change. The best answer of course is "do both" and make sure more of our young people are happy, enthusiastic, and able to access necessary training and education. There are…

You don't have a finite supply of people. Because people get to choose what they do. Even the dictatorships can't order people to become a good X if they don't have the interest. It's the height of entitlement to think you're able to demand more of some profession come into existence. The worst regimes on earth can't manage it. The most you get to do is incentivize and make available the training and access and proce…

We absolutely can do it, and have. Post-sputnik, government funding poured into STEM, and we convinced huge amounts of young people that they wanted to be scientists and engineers, and nobody was coerced into anything. We trained enough engineers in that short time to staff a literal moonshot program plus every half-baked weapons system idea that crossed a desk anywhere in the Pentagon plus tons of other more speculative stuff like packet switching networks (aka ethernet, the internet, etc.).

It's not necessary to dictate any individual person's career in order to shift the numbers in aggregate.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#352

Post by __m »

rtkwe wrote: post #215
avmich wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? Because this way you'll always be behind.

If you start from behind and are trying to execute from first principals you'll usually lag behind too just because you have to relearn all the things countries like the US did on your own.

Well or by capturing nazi scientists

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#353

Post by npnpnp »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #228
npnpnp wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By that logic, scramjets are the simplest of all! But really, there’s an order of magnitude more engineering that goes into so many facets of rockets and rocket engines. On paper they’re similar, but the stresses and constraints are much, much higher.

Rocket engines point up and ignite the fuel. They don’t need air intakes, nor can they benefit from them. They don’t need to be reused (SpaceX’s strategy isn’t common). Rocket engines came a few decades before jet turbines for good reason. Heck, there is a good argument they were invented during the Tang or Song Dynasty in some kind of crude but representive form.

It depends. SRBs are pretty simple (yet still incredibly hard to make remotely safe).

Orbital rocket engines are not “point up and ignite fuel.” You’re right, they don’t need air intakes - they need cryogenic liquid oxygen and all the support equipment involved in using it! Jet engines have it easy being able to harvest the oxidizer as they fly.

There are many, many, points of failure in modern rockets . You could argue that jet engines were the precursor to modern turbo pump design.

edit It’s also worth noting that the turbopump environment is dramatically more hostile in rockets. LOX is really nasty stuff at those temperatures and pressures.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#354

Post by 2Gkashmiri »

adrian_b wrote: post #250
jonnybgood wrote: post #235

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a little more nuanced than being a traitor to science given China's strategy in regards to acquisition of scientific research and technology. China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.

It would be interesting to see some concrete examples of what is claimed in "Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China." Whenever I search recent research articles about any topic, I see a very large number that are published by China, and which are freely available. The quality of the Chinese research is quite uneven, there are many papers that are just g…

what is stopping those naive americans from going to china, buying those "stolen and improved but not shared with us legally" products and sell them on their own back home? its not like chinese businesses would sue them or anything so whats the big deal as you say?

they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#355

Post by eatmyshorts »

lovich wrote: post #223
tunesmith wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"sanction" is one of the dumbest words on earth. "to give official approval" vs "impose a penalty".

There’s a few other self antonyms just in English. “Cleave” immediately comes to mind

"table" is an antonym depending upon your location. For Americans, in the context of a discussion, the verb "table" means to set it aside and stop discussing it. For Brits, it means to bring up a topic and discuss it.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#356

Post by beeboop »

carabiner wrote: post #246
zokier wrote: post #120

The frustrating aspect for me about CNSA is how little PR they do, at least towards west although I don't think even inside China they are giving that much extra info on the missions and their progress. Just compare the media spectacle around e.g. Perseverance rover wrt Tianwen-1. Sure NASA has more material to work with but still we are getting frequent mission updates and almost daily new pics to ogle; meanwhile th…

Western media cherry picks negative stuff about China. Or they add their favorite caveat, "Experts say there could be military applications to China's ambitions." Ya, just like every fucking tech advancement in the US?

Western media cherry picks negative things about any country that isn't under the US's thumb. It's wild how much xenophobia US media causes that people aren't seeing, especially around Russia and Russians. Americans think of Russian leaders as awful people while also praising liberal US presidents that have continued death and destruction on foreign countries too.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#358

Post by FooBarWidget »

natch wrote: post #334
FooBarWidget wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China I'd like to see sources backing up this claim. Huawei for example has 5G patents and research centers outside China. Hualong-1 nuclear plants are exported abroad. Seeing that China is big on business and making money, it makes no sense to keep technology for yourself. There's so much money to be made by selling t…

It seems to me research centers outside of China are used to recruit willing experts from other companies whose knowledge of proprietary information can then be unethically harvested and absorbed by Huawei.

That sounds like... How other research centers also work? If you're not hiring someone for their knowledge and experience on a topic, then what are you hiring that person for?

And when these people leave, they take their experience at Huawei with them. Now some other company benefits from Huawei's experience.

People hire me for my 10 years of DevOps experience so that I can help them implement practices. They don't hire me to reinvent DevOps from first principles without using any of my previous experience.

Just what part of hiring people for their experience is "unethical harvesting"? If there's evidence of people being specifically hired to diverge trade secrets of a previous employer, in violation of NDAs, then you'd actually have a case.

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#359

Post by jorgesborges »

whydat_whodat wrote: post #349
jorgesborges wrote: post #4

Last week I stood outside my apartment and watched Tiangong fly across the sky[0]. What an incredible time to be alive. [0] https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/

Very nice! If you don't mind, are you open to discussing your tech stack on that? I am curious as to: - What provides the 3D earth model - What calculates the satellite trajectory and plots its arc - What client side & server side frameworks you used for the web app itself

Not my project but here’s a blog post from the author.

https://james.darpinian.com/blog/how-see-a-satellite-tonight...

Re: As last module docks, China completes its space station

#360

Post by yencabulator »

peter303 wrote: post #75
jorgesborges wrote: post #4

Last week I stood outside my apartment and watched Tiangong fly across the sky[0]. What an incredible time to be alive. [0] https://james.darpinian.com/satellites/

Tiangoon flybys can reaches magnitude -2 now. Bright than most planets. Next bright evening flybys overUS in early December. The ISS, which has five times more modules, reaches magnitude -4 sometimes. Third brightest thing in sky.

I have watched the ISS go overhead in the middle of a very sunny cloudless Los Angeles day. It can be very visible, when you know the timing & direction.
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