This is strange. The video URL contains the correct starting time specification, but when I click play in either Chrome or Firefox it starts at 0:00. But if I copy the URL and paste it into the address bar on either browser, it starts at the specified time of 939 seconds.
I edited the post and expanded the compressed URL to the full form:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJtYec5LwjU&t=939s
and it made no difference.
I have no idea what is going on.
In order for Russia to compete with China it will have to abandon the commie style launch technology development to which JFK doomed the West for half a century. I don’t see that happening. The only half-way functional commies left are the Chinese.
But at least the West has a glimmer of hope of escaping communist domination in the wake of the LSPA of 1990 and the DotCon bubble shaking loose a bunch of network effect capital from Treasury-instrument coddled institutional bankers of Wall Street to fall into the hands of people like Musk and Bezos*. So the big wins are in finding the right systems level designs, as Musk appears to be doing with Starship/Falcon Superheavy.
In this environment, China is likely to be the winner by simply industrially copying – which they are expert at doing in general and appear already to be doing with Musk’s system’s level choices. In that event there may end up being a BRICS space station, with Russia providing Orion style nuclear propulsion, which would be a real shit-show.
* Bezos appears to have succumbed to Amazon’s network effect monopoly Fentanyl serenity.
Here is more information about Gleb Karakulov in a Grauniad article from 2023-04-05.
The Guardian has reviewed an interview with Karakulov by the Dossier Centre, a political information outfit founded by the exiled Russian billionaire Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and confirmed the credentials of the senior Russian communications engineer, who travelled with Putin extensively and helped transmit some of his most secret messages.
So, he comes across as Russian Snowden, with access to high-level secret material in his communications job, but not himself a member of Putin’s inner circle.
I’ve become increasingly sceptical of the “Putin has Parkinson’s” rumour. It’s been three years since this was all over the media, with lots of reports in March 2020 that he was afflicted and a chorus in November 2020 saying he would resign in January, 2021. Now, three years later, there’s no evidence the “symptoms” upon which this diagnosis-by-YouTube was based have progressed. Parkinson’s is a progressive, degenerative disease, and while its progression can very greatly among individuals, it would be unusual not to see any progression over a period of three years.