81–90 of 138 posts
i remember apollo 8 so well. how brilliant. is anything that good ever going to happen again? often these days i think not.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In living memory of most of us, China was just a deeply impoverished nation known for little more than exporting cheap unreliable crap. Any achievement they did make was framed as being stolen from somebody else. Yet now, their successes in space, industry, science, and technology are completely taken for granted. Funny how quickly things change! The status quo of the world is constantly shifting. Those nations which…
> Any achievement they did make was... stolen from somebody else. Yet now their successes in space, industry, science, and technology are completely taken for granted. The two aren't necessarily in contradiction, you may note. Do we have reliable evidence showing Chinese IP theft has slowed? Many nations "bootstrap" internal industry with organized mass IP theft. The US extensively (and quite intentionally) stole fro…
At the end of WWII, not only the Soviet Union has moved piece by piece many industrial factories from Germany to Russia, but also USA and GB have "stolen" massive amounts of IP from the occupied Germany.
One of the most notorious cases in how the American industry of making magnetic tape recorders (e.g. Ampex) and of making magnetic tapes for them has been founded based on the samples brought back from Germany.
The case of the liquid-fueled rockets directly connected to this Apollo story needs no further mention.
Whenever they could get away with it, no country has refrained from copying foreign better technology.
While there in no doubt that China must have done this frequently in the past, in recent years there are little chances for them to benefit from this, because now in many domains their products are much more innovative than anything made in USA, and also in research publications they have many that are also more innovative.
I do not believe that sabotaging the Chinese companies that were on the brink to take most of the market share from US companies like Qualcomm and Micron has been the right strategy for counteracting the Chinese threat.
This is just a temporary setback for them and there is the risk that they could emerge from it stronger, no longer fearing any US blackmail.
This should have been either saved for a more critical moment, when it could have a greater effect, or the so-called "sanctions" should have been real sanctions, and not just anti-competitive measures, i.e. they should have been tied to some political demands made to China, e.g. to recognize Taiwan as an independent country, or to give up their claims to extend their maritime borders.
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Makes sense; if you want to build a lunar base, you gotta have Venezuela and Azerbaijan on your team, otherwise it's basically futile.
Venezuela would make a pretty attractive launch site.
there's a reason that there are launch sites in French Guiana and Florida.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Any achievement they did make was... stolen from somebody else. Yet now their successes in space, industry, science, and technology are completely taken for granted. The two aren't necessarily in contradiction, you may note. Do we have reliable evidence showing Chinese IP theft has slowed? Many nations "bootstrap" internal industry with organized mass IP theft. The US extensively (and quite intentionally) stole fro…
Besides the often quoted IP stealing from GB, there are also more recent examples. At the end of WWII, not only the Soviet Union has moved piece by piece many industrial factories from Germany to Russia, but also USA and GB have "stolen" massive amounts of IP from the occupied Germany. One of the most notorious cases in how the American industry of making magnetic tape recorders (e.g. Ampex) and of making magnetic ta…
Not just the Soviet Union. The USA also moved factories piece by piece.[0]
The reverse example occurred during inter-war period, when US companies extensively outsourced to (cheap labor in) Germany. The US companies who exported their factories all made huge profit on paper, which promptly evaporated the moment war broke out. A lesson for the modern age, perhaps?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Venezuela would make a pretty attractive launch site.
only for retro-grade orbits, meaning you lose the "boost" from the rotation of the earth (in fact, you have to work against it) there's a reason that there are launch sites in French Guiana and Florida.
Apollo 11 was when we first arrived somewhere new, yes, but it was Apollo 8 when we first dared to venture out into the dark. For the first time we surrendered the ability to quickly return to Earth in a matter of minutes or low-single-digit hours.
Collins’ autobiography Carrying the Fire is easily the best of the astronaut memoirs, and is written purely by Collins without a ghostwriter. It wasn’t one of the talents NASA was looking for, but I’m glad they sent an excellent writer to the moon.
So sad. We really need to get back to the moon, not just for the adventure, but for the technology. There was a lot of technology that came out of the space program that wouldn't exist, even today.
A general problem with all such claims is establishing that without the space program, the technologies would never have been invented.
So sad. We really need to get back to the moon, not just for the adventure, but for the technology. There was a lot of technology that came out of the space program that wouldn't exist, even today.
Can you give examples and explain why? BTW, integrated circuits are not such a technology. A general problem with all such claims is establishing that without the space program, the technologies would never have been invented.
It's a decently long list, though not all of them from Apollo obviously.