US concerned NASA will be overtaken by China's space program
(interestingengineering.com)
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 18 Feb 2024 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/12108179
from L4s@lemmy.world to technology@lemmy.world on 18 Feb 2024 14:00
https://lemmy.world/post/12108179
US concerned NASA will be overtaken by China’s space program::undefined
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If they were truly concerned, they’d start giving it the funding it deserves.
They’ve tried everything except actually funding NASA, and they’re all outta ideas.
NOTE: China WILL overtake NASA, the same way they are dominating the renewable energy sector — because they invest heavily in science, and they do it early. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand this shit.
But hey we tried giving a shit load of money to a billionaire space nazi instead!
Won’t someone think of the investors!
Maybe we need to give more to the space phallus that the other asshole billionaire built. Maybe that’ll fix it.
You guys male me wanna cry…
Unfortunately that company is the best hope we have to stay ahead. With their low cost they can monopolize the worldwide launch market(except Russia and China). So that funding, strategically, must continue.
What should also happen is funding spacex competitors, so we stay on the bleeding edge.
Is China staying on the bleeding edge by funding a bunch of private companies?
China has privately held space companies, yes. They are funding them, yes.
Maybe we should give money to fund education and research instead of banning books and attacking each other.
I came here to say exactly this.
Perhaps a space race with China would rekindle the motivation for our money grubbing demagogues to actually fund it.
No, it won’t. They’ll just relocate to China, or maybe a super yacht out in international waters. They’ll continue milking every last cent out of the US until it’s a dead dried up husk of a nation and then they’ll just move to the next one. Their supporters are too stupid to realize where the end of the path they’ve been told to walk is going to take them, and they’d rather blame anyone else but themselves for all the problems they face. So no, a space race with China won’t fix shit.
Judging by the state of the US, you’re much more likely to be right than I am, you cynical bastard!
😂
That goes double for our educational system, which has been aggressively gutted by the GOP: People aren’t just born engineers and scientists. These greedy assholes have doomed us as a country.
EDIT: GOP stands for Grand Old Party, which is the Republican party in the United States.
Also to whoever asked and deleted their comment: There’s nothing wrong with asking questions when you don’t know what something means or otherwise want clarification.
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So expect a big increase in private space missions
Yeah, but Israel /s
So this is the power of diversity
What? Your comment doesn’t even make sense!
This is the power of not funding your space program and actively destroying your own educational system, which is where things like engineers and scientists come from in the first place.
Are you trying to say NASA hires “too many women, LGBTs and brown people”, and that this is holding them back?
Is there something about straight, white cis males that makes them better at rocket science?
I don’t believe in racial science and “superiority”, however I refer to hiring based on only merit and not just for the sake of fulfilling a diversity quota. The tech industry has suffered enough because of this.
You don’t happen to have any numbers to back that up, by chance? Because you’re sure saying all the right things to make it sound like you’ve been wildly mislead about hiring diversity laws, and if we know what specific flavor of kool-aid you’ve been peddled we might be able to clear up the wild misconceptions / blatant lies
Well, Braun was a Nazi…
This is a good thing. Competition with the USSR made NASA what it is.
Only if the US actually competes. Given the fuckwits in congress, that is far from assured.
“Can you give me one bill…”
Gee whiz, maybe we should have been properly funding our space program all of these years instead of wasting it on making the military industrial complex filthy fucking rich and the world less secure overall?
Especially stupid considering last time they gave the space program appropriate funding, it led to a lot of advancements that the military industrial complex could use.
Nonsense, surely their shortsightedness will pay off in the long run!
You make it sound like the military advancements were an unexpected byproduct, as opposed to the real goal.
The goal was optics. Kennedy didn’t know what advances would result from Apollo. He wanted to show that the US was better at science and technology than Russia.
The science of putting a ballistic payload anywhere, including heaven.
The space race was awesome because it let the two countries measure their dicks (specifically their military dicks) without actually obliterating the planet.
The “for all mankind” angle was a great way to frame things for the population of Earth, for sure. But just like mobile chemical WMD labs in Iraq, sometimes the given justification and actual justification are two different things.
Don’t get me wrong, there absolutely were beneficial optics. Something doesn’t have to just be for one thing. But it was always primarily about practical demonstration of weapons capacity under the facade of human exploration.
The dick measuring is what I was referring to by “optics”.
My B!
I don’t disagree, but has anyone found corroborating evidence or documentation, past speculation and reasonable assumption?
No, I don’t think anyone has definitely proven that George W Bush and Colin Powell KNEW that the WMD claims in Iraq were bullshit when they were presenting them as the primary justification for the war.
It’s just the nature of the beast.
Ha, I was actually taking about the space program, but same for the invasion. Although, I feel like more people have come forward about the invasion being BS than early space program stuff.
People behind the scenes are siphoning NASA space research money and turning it into space profit instead. The growth of private space companies starting in the US is no coincidence. Blame oligarchs for steering the country into a dead end.
Don’t worry, I do.
Hate on spacex and its competitors as much as you want, im not saying you dont have cause.
But defunding NASA caused this. Those billionaires looked and said holy shit, the entire nasa budget is only that much? And they arent building rockets anymore? I can literally fund my own space program? Ide be crazy not to
The government has funded SpaceX, not musk.
To be fair, it’s not as if those things are mutually-exclusive. For example, you know how the Hubble Space Telescope is this extremely unique and nigh-irreplaceable scientific instrument that cost a pretty big fraction of NASA’s entire budget?
Well, it turns out we actually have dozens of the damn things; it’s just that we couldn’t be bothered to actually point more than one of them away from Earth instead of towards it.
Hell, a decade ago the National Reconnaissance Office gave NASA a couple for free 'cause they just had 'em lying around, but (as far as I know) NASA hasn’t managed to scrounge up enough money from the couch cushions to spruce 'em up and launch 'em yet.
They certainly don’t have to be, but there is a well established pattern of the US government getting waaay too chummy with corporations to the point that it can undermine what’s best for the people in pursuit of corporate interests.
NASA and all it’s bureaucracy was overtaken by private corps years ago.
Privatization was NASA’s strategy. They actually oversee the distribution of funds to private companies. Space X is paid out of NASA’s budget.
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Choosing Musk and SpaceX for Artemis is likely NASAs biggest mistake.
It was always part of Musk’s plan to cripple NASA funding and pump that money into SpaceX.
If you look at the Artemis mission and think starship is the weakest part of the plan, you are simply not being objective.
NASA is a fraud. Musk is just the latest goofy face of govt black projects. Keyfabe
SpaceX has launched more successful missions this year than every other space agency put together.
Fuck Musk and all that, but if you’re posting this bullshit, you have Musk derangement syndrome.
for real. and starship is an awesome program
At least for ISS, the choice is either Musk or Putin.
I don’t know which one is worse, especially considering Musk is aiding Putin via Starlink in Ukraine.
But as someone who works in the industry, it is a bleak outlook. NASA absolutely needs more funding for its human spaceflight exploration, Earth Science, robotic exploration, and astronomy/astrophysics.
Who would have imagined that decades of funding cuts and pressure to rely upon Musk would allow another nation to take the lead? (Sarcasm)
While US youth are rotting their brains via china’s tiktok, Chinese youth are actually learning about science and other useful skills. Of course this is going to happen
Best summary.
We’re in the second cold war right now and nobody is talking about it. How is tiktok still on the app stores?
Someones getting paid.
It’s so obvious.
Wait. This is a joke right? You really think all youth in america is just messing around on tiktok (yeah just forget facebook, twitter, myspace, instagram and whatever other social media we’ve had) and ALL youth in china is doing science?
No but I do believe this is the intended purpose of tiktok
So they had no issue relying on Russia to service the ISS ever since they shutdown the space shuttle, but now they’re afraid of China… doing space science faster?
Ignoring the fact that this is not even a real concern, maybe don’t spend morbillions on free munitions for Israel or Lockheed’s next stupid idea.
They defunded NASA so hard that they started hallucinating about going back to the moon with 15% of the Apollo budget.
At the time, Russia wasn’t as……problematic. We had been working with Russia as an International Partner since the very early days of ISS and even during Shuttle/Mir.
Obviously they did become problematic, but we didn’t have other options until SpaceX. Now that’s….obviously got its own issues, but Russia is vastly different than China when it comes to space. Russia needs the money, China already has it.
The fact that NASA had to rely on Roscosmos in the first place is shameful. It highlights long standing issues facing the space program. I think some of these problems trace back to the cost of the ISS. It’s been hard to convey the importance and investment into the future the station provides.
For China their station provides proof of concept that they can achieve similar results one day both to themselves and the world watching.
The amount of money spent on Apollo was insane. A reduced budget should have been sufficient. It’s just been weighted down by shit cost-plus contracts and the abomination that is SLS.
The fear of China here is that they are basically single handedly their closest competitor. They’re the only other nation thats managed a Mars Rover landing, building space station, and have their own plans for Moon and Mars with taikonauts( astronaut equivalent) on the ground in the future.
One can only hope.
The last time that happened, we explored the moon and developed the space shuttle program. We got microchips and memory foam.
Ideological rivals encourage congress throwing money into big science. Apollo returned $14 on the dollar. It’s a good investment.
Export all your technology and jobs to cheaper labour to make more profit. Now you will slowly become bankrupt, as no one can afford the enshitification products and services.
Enshittification doesn’t just mean “things get worse”
US: continually decides to not fund scientific exploration of space
Also US: GUYS! BE AFRAID! ANOTHER COUNTRY DID DECIDE TO SPEND MONEY ON IT! NOW WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO IF…UM…WELL, I GUESS IF THEY TAKE OVER SPACE…? Or…wait, what are we concerned about? Ah, fuck it. Cut NASA’s budget again. We got genocide to fund and taxes to cut for the wealthy.
Same with Republicans and the border.
“Do something about the border!”
“Ok, we need funds. Please give them to us.”
“No! Do something about the border!”
“We can’t because you won’t give us the money.”
“Too bad! Do something about the border!”
Didn’t Biden agree with those idiots that the border is the most important issue of the day?
Probably. I don’t remember. I do remember them screaming that something has to be done about the border, then the Democrats gave them virtually everything they asked for on the border and Biden said he would sign the bill, but then Trump told them not to agree to it because it would hurt his campaign and they shot down the bill that would have given them what they wanted.
And the really sad part is that half the country, at least half the country, doesn’t even know.
Yep, you have a ghost president calling the shots for half the elected representatives, and the current president condoning a genocide. Really no winning.
Remember when you just told me that I support genocide by existing because I haven’t rioted?
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Maybe you aren’t the best person to be talking about this. Because apparently you think around 8 billion people support genocide.
I’m sorry that you’re having so much trouble with this thought process. Good luck with the genocide.
I’m not having any trouble at all. You believe my lack of death means I support genocide, unless I do the things you’ve said. And since you claim I already support genocide, you must know for a fact that I didn’t do those things you said.
Therefore, I support genocide by existing.
Are you going to pretend you didn’t write what I pasted above?
Honestly, I’m just waiting for you to tell me to kill myself. That’s the next step.
Go outside lol.
Why, would going outside make it so that my existence would not force me into supporting genocide?
As long as you don’t accidentally vote for Biden or Trump on your way back in, you’ll be fine.
No, you already told me I supported genocide no matter who I voted for or even if I didn’t vote. So that isn’t true.
my god, like, could you stop using the genocide logic to do this shit? you see “the people in Gaza deserve to be targets of a genocide because they didn’t rise up against Hamas”
Yes. And now we’re going to have two senile coots yelling “He let the illegals in!” back and forth at one another as we stumble into another national embarrassment of an election season.
They must have made some huge advances since the last time I checked in on them because they haven’t exactly been considered sophisticated in the art of rocketry for a couple centuries now. They first had a person in space in 2003 and they’re still using the same Shenzou line of rockets since that time. They’ve had some controversies about where their boosters are landing and covering people with Hydrazine which is also an outdated fuel type, imo.
Yeah you missed the part where they have a fucking space station and a growing private sector of reusable launch vehicles that are copying SpaceX.
We’re impressed by a space station? What is this, 1976?
I’ll admit it’s an improvement over their situation before the early 80s where 88.7% of people in China were below the poverty line.
Yeah, a space station is actually pretty impressive given that no other country besides the US and Russia have one, and that will be gone by 2030 with no plans for a replacement. If you don’t think a Space station is impressive then you’re very ignorant. So in a few years China will have the only space station in space. They launch multiple rockets per week while the US just has SpaceX launching at a similar cadence. Go stick your head in the sand if you want, but outside of SpaceX the Chinese have a better space program and just saying “we did it x many years ago” is completely irrelevant to today. All of the tech isn’t here anymore. There is no space shuttle. The SLS is a boondoggle that will never fly after a few expensive Artemis missions. ULA is basically bankrupt and trying to get sold. Boeing Space is a disaster. Today is what matters and I believe Chinas space program is in a much better place than ours. Today. It’s a result of attitudes like yours that handwave away anything that China does and leads to stagnation and complacency and corruption
The ISS was designed and built in various countries across 4 continents in the 80s and 90s, I would hardly call it only Russia’s and the USA’s. I honestly respect India’s Aerospace more than China’s current level of technology. Even the UK, who historically have had no interest in the field, are in the midst of planning 2 massive Space Ports in England and Scotland.
I’m not dismissing the failures of USA Space Program, it’s so inefficient to its core that Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos each started their own rocketry firms that blew conventional compartmentalized industry pricing out of the running. I’m just striving for accuracy of Chinese Failures. They’re not currently neck and neck with us, at all. When they figure out how to make coal powered rockets, then maybe I’ll sweat a little, lol.
Dang maybe we should take a fraction of the trillions we spend on the military to fund scientific research, and also health and education while we’re at it so we’d get even more potential scientists.
Yes, race harder please.
Have they considered renaming it X and firing all their expert staff to make NASA more profitable?
SpaceX is already a thing. What is it with Elon Musk and the letter X?
Looking at their space station, I think China already has overtaken NASA.
Their station has like three modules (with plans to add 3 more) and capacity for 3 people. The ISS has at least 16 modules (maybe over 30 depending on what you count as a module) and capacity for over a dozen people.
Like many things from authoritarian countries, it looks nice but isn’t even close in terms of capabilities.
Authoritarianism is not equal to capabilities. In fact, the Soviet space program was significantly more capable for a very long time
Don’t worry guys, the US Space Force will make sure they are prevented from entering space.
Huh. I wonder if funding NASA better might help, Republicans?
If we fold it into the space force and say it’s for targeting woke weirdos…we’ll get a billion dollars through congress by tomorrow
We could just say the “anti-woke” part and not even bother with the space force part and that would probably work.
The woke boogieman is the biggest thing to scare them in years.
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The woke boogeyman scares us because it, itself, is a set of false threats that are distracting us from real threats.
Like, we’re worried about war, a shifting global power structure, the degradation of systems of detente that keep the worst in humanity from emerging, and the woke crowd wants us to treat the feelings of exclusion of trans people as the most important threat on the board.
The woke movement is a boogeyman movement, and that’s why we treat it as dangerous. The woke movement is a push to get new boogeymen added to our threat list and moved to top priority over things we know will actually kill us.
And thing that really, really scares us, is that the system that has proven to be the salve for the ills of massive unleashed violence, the system we call free market economics, is being targeted by the woke crowd because they refuse to read the history of the things they’re proposing. They’re all like “we don’t want people to suffer so let’s abolish private property”. That’s like saying “we don’t want people to drown, and people tend to drown when they’re near boats, so let’s destroy this boat we’re all in, to prevent drowning!”
It’s terrifying to us because there are serious things to be afraid of, and the woke movement is asking us to ignore or even embrace those things.
There is no “woke movement.” That’s exactly why you’re scared of a boogieman. They don’t exist either.
Call it “search for extraterrestrial woke intelligence” and they’ll melt.
Intelligence that doesn’t come from jeebus?! They’ll burn that ark before it leaves the ground
Search for god or his patio or whatever…now you’ve got Midwest money
“Search for extraterrestrial divine intelligence” or “a strategy to get closer to God through space colonization”, say, a Stanford torus in some L point (that’s so expensive that it ain’t gonna happen, but they’ll also be very excited, I think).
Instead, I think we should defund China.
rapturous GOP applause and cheering
They are likely going to fund it less and give more and more of its mission over to space force and private companies is my guess
That would also work.
The only thing that won’t work for space is the thing we’re doing now:
Progress only stops under a narrow set of conditions that need to be actively implemented by the government. Progress is actually natural, and progress stopping requires enormous centralized effort to interfere with people getting things done.
I disagree privitizing space will do absolutly nothing but lead to balooned costs and stagnation.
Theoretically private programs would be an increased cost over a NASA only program since private companies want a profit margin.
But Congress being what it is tends to require NASA programs to create jobs in a lot of different voting districts across the country which leads to an insane amount of inefficiencies.
We can’t have nice things because of pork barrel politics.
Private Companies however have no insintive to actualy innovate, if you look at them they are all taking decades old NASA and USSR Space program tech and resuing it … and callling it innovation
I’m sorry… this is not true lol. You know what SpaceX is up to, right? At the least, but there are tons of interesting and innovative companies. I mean hell look at Stoke Space
Switch the funding for the MIC and NASA for one year. We’ll have fusion power cracked in 5.
We all live on this rock. Floating through space.
Anyone who doesn’t want to spend more time looking out is someone with something in their closet you don’t want to look in.
Ad Astra per Aspera
“To thorns, to stars”?..
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well, I think he meant: Per aspera ad astra
just remember that almost all older languages had fewer nouns and verbs, so “thorns” here is referring to difficulty and obstruction
so more meaningfully translated, this old Latin saying is closer to “through great treachery is the path to the stars”
Yes, I know the saying, just was a bit unkind
Ok so the Starfleet quote is “Ad Astra per Aspera”. Should it be Per Aspera ad Astra? Asking for Latin grammar lessons
I mean it’s not that hard to recognize “thorns” meaning difficulty and obstruction.
But as I’m saying this, I remember that younger generations didn’t spend time outside as kids. So they may never have pushed through a thicket of thorns.
Eventually, we’ll have people who’ve lived their entire lives in zero-G, and they won’t have an intuitive understanding of the feelings implied by the phrase “stand up for oneself”. They won’t understand the state of motivation versus fatigue implied by “holding one’s chin up”, that the posture of one’s body was a function of the interplay between gravity and dopamine.
Ad Astra Per Aspera
Going for the Starfleet quote, sorry my Latin is lacking
Yes, that’s right
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Anyone concerned that the US will be “overtaken” by anything coming out of China right now needs to go read about what’s been happening in China for the last 5 years.
What do you mean?
If you watch anything other than chinadaily (the CCPs propaganda channel) you’d know exactly what I mean.
I wasn’t trying to say you were wrong…I legitimately don’t know what you’re trying to say.
Dumbest answer to a simple question, congrats! 🥳
I’m sure throwing more money and contracts at Musk and SpaceX is going to help solve the problem any day now. /s