After a record nine months in orbit (for a drone).
Imagine the cope if Chinese astronauts beat Americans to the Moon and Mars.
Moon seems exceedingly unlikely at this point, but unlike what the :melon-musk: fans say, Mars is still competitive
I would like to repeat my oft stated assertion that sending humans to mars is ridiculous, pointless hubris, and we should focus on sending more capable robots.
And I would like to assert that sending people around the cosmos is extremely cool, but sending a blimp to Venus would be more ridiculous and thus cooler. :yuri:
So what you're saying is that the Chinese are planning to send spy balloons to other planets?
Projection yet again! I think NASA is the only space agency that has developed concepts for it.
No.
I wanna go to Marx and Jupiter and all the fucking planets. I wanna live in the Space Age goddamnit!
I think there's a lot to be said for inspiring kids to take a serious interest in the sciences (a real issue, even though it's been STEM-lorded to death online). Space travel is super fucking cool.
More concretely, there are all sorts of broadly useful technologies that were pioneered in the space program. There are studies on the ROI of NASA and we get like 8-9 dollars in GDP from every dollar we spend on it (not the best measurement, but it illustrates the point).
Back in the Apollo days, yeah, it was about $7 per dollar, and a large bit of that was weapons. Today, it may be as high as $40 per dollar and largely pays off in things that we use daily. None of the sensors we take for granted in a smartphone would exist without space development.
NASA has brought you everything from velcro, to strain detectors, to the sensor that tells your headphones they're on your head.
sending humans to mars is ridiculous, pointless hubris
probably, yes, but a manned moon base would be cool as fuck and potentially actually provide us with very valuable resources like helium-3
I love the naming conventions china uses for space stuff.
Super cool they have space plane. Hopefully the solar system can be painted red before porkie induces Kepler syndrome or something.
the naming conventions
"Chinese reusable experimental spaceplane" or "divine dragon"?
Such a poetic name for a rocket. Like, I wish Mao could have lived to see the Long March commemorated by it.
*Meanwhile in America* "The Thunder-Cougar-Falcon-Eagle-Burger has landed. 😎👍👍"
America's habit of naming it's attack helicopters after Indigenous nations it exterminated is uniquely ghoulish and sadistic.
The Americans have really not been in a roll recently. Space Launch System? Descriptive, but uninspired. Orion? It's not even propelled by nuclear bombs. Starship? Bro, that's an intrastellar spacecraft.
Man, Orion drives are so fucking cool. Just the purest, most cocaine fueled 3am brainstorm idea.
"What if we propelled a giant lead plate through the system by pooping out a string of exploding nuclear bombs??!?!?"
Fuck, I like that we're talking about sci fi and space a bit today. Things have been so bleak lately and space is so damn cool.
Of course their best use is lifting things out of a gravity well but blowing up a hundred nukes on Earth produces fallout :ooooooooooooooh: What we really need are pure fusion mini hydrogen bombs but who's gonna invent that? Militaries want to be able to poison millions, defeating the purpose of clean nukes!
I think I'll make some posts on absolutely ridiculous space concepts
There's a clean thermal nuclear fission drive concept called the "nuclear lightbulb". All fission products are contained in the reactor, except for radiation which is allowed to escape through a special "window" where it heats a propellant like ammonia that then escapes from a conventional nozzle for thrust. The fictional Discovery from 2001: A Space Odyssey used this. Some designs have other windows which are used to allow photovoltaic panels to provide electricity from the reactor radiation.
It's less efficient than just blasting fission products NERVA style out the back, but far safer. It's too low thrust to be used to get off a planetary surface but would be great for deep space usage.
Ah yeah I have heard of the nuclear lightbulb - the design is very pleasing to the eye. Nuclear thermal rockets are cool but definitely a couple tiers below pulse propulsion. Speaking of blasting fission products out the back, you gotta look up nuclear salt water rockets and fission fragment rockets. Anyway, do you know if NASA or other scientists ever addressed the possibility of nuclear thermal rockets blowing up? Everything I've read kinda glossed over the potential environmental issues...
NERVA doesn't blast fission products out the back, it's a closed-cycle nuclear fission rocket. All the fission products are contained. NASA has tested it a bunch of times on the ground and it works just fine.
You are correct that open-cycle (blasting radiation everywhere) designs are often more efficient.
I'll just be happy if the US has a competitor with enough rough parity to keep them from deploying too many weapons in space. The planet sucks enough without Washington dropping kinetic energy weapons anywhere in the world on twenty minutes notice and with no possible warning or defense.
Seeing last year, and the year before that, and regularly for decades.
And no it wasn't; the objects that the militaries of the world regularly witness appear to be capable of movement outside the realm of human capability.
And no it wasn’t; the objects that the militaries of the world regularly witness appear to be capable of movement outside the realm of human capability.
what
The USS Nimitz video (of an UAP) showed disturbing flight capabilities, difficult to explain given the current state of technology if one assumes it has a human origin.
Since then, the recent hearing in congress / to AARO suggests such unexplained encounters have been a common occurrence around military ships; at least as far back as the cold war. Also not only in the US but in the USSR as well.
This is small and autonomous, so there's no need for ejection.
Most of those issues stemmed from the fact that it was trying to carry both people and cargo. Had it been specialized for people (ala Dream Chaser) or cargo (ala X-37b) it would have been a lot more efficient.
(Chun-Li emoji) You must defeat Shenlong to stand a chance! (Busted up Guile emoji)
Amazing how they left out that congress passed a law that barred NASA from cooperating with China and this article paints it as though their lack of cooperation is due to some malign drive to outperform the US
