Competition for SpaceX. Remember the days when news like this would have been about NASA? Remember NASA?
“China completed its first maritime recovery of a rocket booster on Friday, as search and recovery teams retrieved the first-stage of a Long March-10 carrier rocket from the sea, a milestone in advancement of reusable launch vehicles technologies, Central China Television reported on Friday, citing the China Manned Space Agency.
The recovery was conducted following a low-altitude demonstration and verification flight test of the Long March-10 carrier rocket and a maximum dynamic pressure abort flight test of China’s new-generation crewed spacecraft Mengzhou, which was carried out on Wednesday at the coastal Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site in South China’s Hainan Province, according to the Xinhua News Agency. …*
The Long March-10 carrier rocket and the new Mengzhou spacecraft are primarily developed for China’s crewed lunar missions, and will support the near-Earth space station operations. The return capsule of the spacecraft is designed with reusable capability, the agency said. …”
So the ChiComs are about a decade behind SpaceX. Typical Chinese copy technology.
Funny that they’re still using Long March for rocket names after all these years. The long march through the institutions was far more innovative and successful but it wasn’t especially Chinese. Even that was European.
That is not really anything to get excited about. SpaceX copied technology from the 1990s Delta Clipper-X reusable rocket.
Ideas are free to roam. The US did not invent the automobile – but did a much better job than the Euros in the early 1900s of turning something that had been proven to be technically feasible into something that was economically successful. The US did not invent the jet engine either, but again the pre-1970 US did a much better job than the Euro inventors of turning a feasible idea into a commercial success.
But all of that was before the post-1970s US decided that training people in gender studies and law was better than training them in manufacturing. That is why we are all typing these thoughts on Chinese-made keyboards – yet another technology which China did not invent but now dominates.
Exactly. Hence, your invocation of a dead-end project from the 1990s is to SpaceX as the invention of the automobile is to Henry Ford. The ChiCom project is more like the Rambler.
Clipper-X : SpaceX :: Euros : Ford
And yet, SpaceX is an American company — African-American, if you will. Likewise, Anduril is entirely homegrown. I doubt they have many gender studies grads on staff.
SpaceX and Anduril may use Chinese-made keyboards but that’s not exactly an innovative, high-tech product that is hard to reproduce because it requires high-level intellect. I bet even a gender studies graduate could be trained to assemble a keyboard.
Dominating the coveted keyboard-production industry is the path to technological supremacy, amirite?
If you say so. Go back 70 years to the 1950s. Germany was the leader in rocket development – now Germany is insignificant. The US was then probably about a hundred years ahead of the ChiComs – now you tell us that they are only 10 years behind SpaceX, and NASA is about as relevant as Germany. The trend lines are obvious.
Some of us want to sit on our ancestors’ achievements. Others of us want us to get our act together so that the trend lines do not cross.
Here’s a question which does not get discussed in polite circles: How many Chinese-made parts are in the American SpaceX rocket versus how many US-made parts are in the Chinese recoverable rocket?
Neither Elon Musk nor Palmer Luckey is my (or your) ancestor. And none of your comments speak to the fact that SpaceX is ahead of the Chicoms by about a decade — right now, not in the past — and making progress fast. The trend line is obvious alright; SpaceX is a rocket to the stars. The ChiComs have been on the long march since 1970 (Long March 1). That was over a half-century ago.
I don’t know and neither do you. However, I do know that Palmer Luckey has specifically addressed this issue for Anduril. I also doubt Mr. Musk is unaware of the issue. I mean, it’s not like you are the one discovering the problem today. Maybe get your head out of the ChiCom propaganda bubble. Global Times is the CCP’s English-language tabloid, published under the auspices of the People’s Daily, the official newspaper of the Chinese Communist Party.
Since we are both operating in a vacuum of real information, please do share Palmer Luckey’s assessment.
Reports I have seen over the years say that every major US weapon system, from submarines to satellites, includes Chinese-made parts. Also includes Russian-sourced materials, but that is a whole other conversation.
Bottom line – we cannot sit on our laurels talking about how great those who came before us were. If we choose to continue doing that (which seems to be what we as a society are doing), history will deal with us in the accustomed manner.
A little bit lazy, don’t you think? Some might suspect that the interview does not really do a great job of supporting your point. Maybe Luckey is lucky, and can build high tech weapons without needing any rare earth magnets?
Of course not! You are making an extra-ordinary claim in a world in which everything from toasters to automobiles have Chinese-made parts; a world in which the US Department of War has evinced serious concerns about Chinese parts and Russian materials in most of its weapons systems.
The extra-ordinary claim “that Palmer Luckey has specifically addressed this issue for Anduril” may be correct, but no serious person is going to accept it without demonstration.
Hardly that but you conveniently left out the part where I pointed you to the resource right here on Scanalyst. Use your prodigious search skills to find the thread about Mr. Luckey and watch the videos. It’s not rocket science.
Given Lorentz’s abject failure to back up his extravagant claim, here are a couple of links to articles about the problem of US dependence on China for weapons systems.
“U.S. domestic production capacity is a shriveled shadow of its former self. Crucial categories of industry for U.S. national defense are no longer built in any of the 50 states. With just 25 well-constructed attacks, using any of a variety of means, an adversarial military planner could cripple much of America’s manufacturing apparatus for producing advanced weapons.”
