> Last April, a Chinese space station, the Tiangong-1, fell to earth after officials lost communication with it.
As discussed previously on HN, this was not an accident, but a planned deorbiting of an obsolete testbed. The loss of comms was not intended, but it happened three years after the last mission there and two years after the designed lifespan of the station.
Really odd how American media coverage of this event is so thin and most comments in social media are negative. I suppose the Chinese didn't help by keeping it really quiet themselves until it landed.
American media has this weird thing where they need to trivialize every single Chinese accomplishment. Every report of economic growth is followed by some "economic 'expert'" talking about how the Chinese economy is on the verge of collapse (and has been for about 70 years now), tech and medical breakthroughs are followed by rumors of corporate espionage and stealing technology, and everything is swept aside as a "big whoop".
A lot of it reeks of jealousy. I can very much understand not liking China's government, but a lot of great things are being done by Chinese people.
I think it’s partially that US diplomats get constantly told by Chinese officials about how unstable China is. Everyone in the PLA is obsessed with ancient Chinese stories about ancient Hegemons and they took the lesson that the worst thing a rising power can do is “ask the size of the emperors cauldron” and risk freaking out the hegemon prematurely. I think you’re right that China’s progress is being under counted. But I think that’s exactly what the communist party desires (though only in foreign media, domestic media is a completely different story)
I figured none of this out. I just read Michael Pillsbury’s new book. He was a diplomat in the Nixon administration and has since felt that a lot of mistakes were made.
It's the same with a lot of topics about non-American things. Have you ever seen a economic report on France from an English medium not declaring it dead?
The far side of the moon is a bit of an old Cold War sore point for Americans. The Soviets flew a camera over it on Luna 3 in 1959. Then published an atlas in 1960 so they could name everything. The US only got to the far side of the moon in 1968, albeit with humans on aboard Apollo 8.
> “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”
That's a bit of a stretch. Landing on the moon is incredible and a huge congrats to everyone involved, but nobody "dared not try" to land on one side over the other. There just wasn't any particular need to do it.
NASA was busy "daring" to land on Mars. The ESA "dared" to land on Titan. And Russia, well, they're keeping the ISS alive right now so I won't criticize their achievements.
They returned amazing photos but had some crazy issues. The lens cap didn't pop off on at least one of the cameras for Venera 9-12 (yep, all four). The Venera 14 lens cap popped off but landed under the surface tester arm meaning they could test the lens cap just fine but Venus, not so much.
Imagine sending a probe to another planet, land successfully, and survive the hostile environment (for a little while anyway), only to have the issues with the lens cap. Again, and again, and again, and again.
Space is like programming in that mistakes don't tend to be glorious, but just simple and mundane. The most famous example of this is almost certainly the Mars Climate Orbiter. [2] This probe was successfully launched and made it all the way to Mars. It was supposed to be an orbiter but ended up getting too close and most likely burnt up in Mars atmosphere. The culprit? Ostensibly some of the most qualified scientists with extensive oversight, regulations, and all that. And they were brought down by one operational system using imperial units, the other using metric.
A more recent failure has been on Curiosity. While it's been hailed a great success, it's had some major issues fulfilling with what was one if it's primary objectives - drilling into surface level targets and starting to measure things from the inside. It became inoperable after a few superficial utilizations. The most likely culprit? A piece of debris got caught in a drill feed mechanism. It could've been fixed by a man on the ground in a matter of minutes, but there is no man on the ground of course. NASA did manage to get a 2 inch drill without the stabilizers in the mid part of last year [1], thought there have been no updates since.
In many ways this is why I think people tend to rather overestimate the value of probes and remote robotics in general. Robotics, even to do relatively simple things, is incredibly hard. Trying to do not so simple things on planets tens to hundreds of millions of miles away in conditions unlike anything you can perfectly replicate on Earth? Well, you better send a few copies and just hope that what goes wrong on one probe/lander/etc (because something will go wrong) works out on one of the others!
Also, when they finally didn't have the lens cap issue, they couldn't measure the soil compressibility, because an ejected lens cap landed right where the probe was to do the measurement.
But to be fair to the Russians, the cameras weren't an important part of the mission (except for showing off), and getting rid of the caps at 700K temperature, 92bar pressure and sulfuric acid rain, while still preserving the cameras in working condition, is probably very difficult.
That is in 70s. And even in this century, space programs fail all the time, think of ESA's attempt to land on Mars, one of the roller never makes to send anything back.
The Soviets did an admirable job in even succeeded sending one of those photos back.
02:14 - The drill system had a special series of tubes that used Venus' surface pressure to operate the mechanism for retrieving the soil sample, this is the seals being popped off to allow the pressure to rush in.
02:42 - Soil being injected into chamber
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Just unbelievable to understand that you're listening to the sounds of Venus from the surface of Venus. For anybody who'd like to know the location that's at 13.25°S 310°E on a basaltic plain near Phoebe Regio. That lander lasted for 57 minutes in temperatures of 869F with a pressure of 94 Earth atmospheres. The most remarkable thing to consider is that this all happened in 1981. Now 38 years ago. It's such a shame that the space race ended. There's no reason at all to think we wouldn't have been on Mars many years ago had it persisted.
I think the new head of NASA is much more ambitious and seems genuinely enthusiastically interested in making space exploration work. There was a nice writeup on 'We're not going to [just] do flags and footprints again.' here [1]. The great thing is that even outside of NASA, the future of space looks brighter than ever before at least. In a way we're in our own 1962, which was when JFK gave his 'We do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.' to the moon speech.
Very cool. However, I kinda understand why most landers don't record audio: they seem very focused on achieving scientific objectives and those aren't really advanced by recording manmade sounds.
> “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.”
I don't believe it's a common thinking among Chinese people, but rather NYT carefully picked this particular quote from like a million opinions by the chinese.
Probably true. The guy also didn't even work on this mission. Kind of stupid how everyone is focusing on this statement when he's not even part of the program.
That’s the problem with translating Chinese, there’s a lot of ambiguities. An interesting story from Nixon’s opening to China was that the PLA generals were openly calling the US 霸 which the Chinese translators insisted meant respected leader. But if anyone in the US delegation had read Romance Of The Three Kingdoms in mandarin they would have realized that the PLA generals meant 霸 as in calling the US a tyrannical hegemon to be overthrown. Like if that translation had gone differently I wonder if the US would have even been comfortable opening up trade relations with China.
We have an example of the opposite mistranslation in how we translate the infamous Iranian political phrase "marg bar America" to "death to America" instead of the more reasonable "down with America". http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116
TL;DR: Marg bar in Iranian political culture has been for nearly a century the equivalent of saying "damn" in English. In English saying "damn Iran" doesn't literally mean you wish Iran or Iranians to burn in eternal hellfire, although it would have once upon a time. Rick Steves has an anecdote where, amidst traffic in sweltering Tehran, his translator translated their driver's exasperated exclamation as "death to traffic", causing a lightbulb to go off in Steves' head. (https://blog.ricksteves.com/blog/death-to-israel-death-to-tr...)
Although, at this point I think Iranian political leaders purposefully make use of this mistranslation to antagonize Americans without appearing antagonistic to Iranians. Likewise when the Iranian President stated that Israel needed to be wiped off the map--AFAIU he purposefully made use of a sort of double entendre which could be taken literally or figuratively, appeasing both liberal and conservative Iranian factions.
"Zhu Menghua, a professor at the Macau University of Science and Technology who has worked closely with China’s space administration. “We Chinese people have done something that the Americans have not dared try.” "
The child in me really want to say to Mr. Menghua something like, “how many probes have you landed on other worlds, how many of your probes have left the solar system, where is your flyby and picture of the Kuiper belt objects, and let me know when you put a man on the moon, etc, etc, etc.” However as an adult who has the best thoughts for us as a species and not just a set of competing tribes I will say “congratulations, your success helps advance all of us.”
I'll give you a choice. You can either give yourself a million dollars or give everybody in this world five dollars. We'll also say that the $5 will not cause inflation, so it is $5 'real' dollars. Your answer to this question exemplifies why competition is what drives society forward. Given a choice between something that benefits you or something that would, in gross effect, benefit the world on the order of 38,000x as much - we pick the one that benefits us. Utilitarian thought sounds great until you're the one that actually has to make that decision. At that point cognitive dissonance, probably in the form of a marginal utility argument, will kick in faster than you can blink.
What I'm getting at here is that I think your instincts would be the way to go. China's goals here are not to advance society, but to advance China. And about the time they start achieving things that parallel, let alone overcome, US achievements in space - expect to see the US budget for space development/exploration/colonization end up getting bumped up by a magnitude or two simply because if we don't then we risk falling behind them.
I mean congrats to the team, but I’m really not sure there’s much scientific use in this mission. Don’t get me wrong, there is tremendous engineering and propagandist value that could lead to other high-value missions like mars etc but the reason no one is going to moon right now is that it’s kinda boring from a space point of view. India and the US went to Mars which is enormously more difficult and were able to do science experiments there—incredible. While the ESA mindblowingly landed on Titan which is insane. Congrats to the team but chill out with the hyperbole.
"Though the moon is hardly untrodden ground after decades of exploration, a new landing is far more than just a propaganda coup, experts say.
The crater where the Chinese landed is the oldest and deepest on the moon, so the probe’s discoveries may offer insights into the moon’s origins and evolution. And some scientists suspect that the surrounding basin may be rich in minerals. If exploiting the moon’s resources is the next step in space development, a successful mission could leave the Chinese better positioned."
The hyperbole is perhaps a bit much, but ridiculous statements that there isn't scientific value don't help either. There are ride-along scientific payloads from Holland, Germany, and Sweden, and they landed in the oldest crater on the moon which may reveal secrets about its origins.
As discussed previously on HN, this was not an accident, but a planned deorbiting of an obsolete testbed. The loss of comms was not intended, but it happened three years after the last mission there and two years after the designed lifespan of the station.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15479891
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1