Video: Linkspace Rocket Makes 300 Meter Hop
The Chinese company LinkSpace is following in the footsteps of Masten Space Systems, Armadillo Aerospace and SpaceX in conducting hops of its launch vehicle.
97 responses to “Video: Linkspace Rocket Makes 300 Meter Hop”
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Isn’t funny how they are copying SpaceX and not the NASA SLS? Shows you even they recognize which is the future of spacelift.
Uuuuhhhhh, all indications are the Chinese are pursuing a a SLS style booster. Like anything the Chiese do, they’re going all out and full spectrum. This team is covering the low end and developing the baseline for VTOVL booster operations. You may not have caught on, that the Chinese move to dominate, own, and play the long game. Unlike Americans they’re willing to work on 2-3% profit margins. Enjoy Space X’s current lead, and hope BF(x) works as a concept, but here comes the competition. Immortal, well funded, well organized, and backed by government policy. I realize that there’s some detriment to all that, and I know that tickles your emotional centers, but these guys won’t be going away, they’ll always be there getting better all the time.
Yup. That’s why, when short-sighted people denigrate the Space Force, I just shake my head at their ignorance. Thank you President Trump for getting this right.
One does not need to be ignorant of spaceflight to not back the creation of the Space Force now. I have two payloads on Mars, one on Titan, several that have gone to orbit on shuttles, I’m fluent in orbital mechanics, and write an orbital mechanics package of my own that I use. I’m am in no way ‘ignorant’ in spaceflight. I’m also well versed in the balance of forces of real deployed strategic nuclear and conventional forces from today going all the way back to the original systems of the early Cold War. The same can be said for reconnaissance and communications systems. And I don’t back creating the US Space Force now. It’s too early.
…You may not have caught on, that the Chinese move to dominate, own, and play the long game…
Your own words.
Again …. NOW is not the time. Now does not mean never. The strategic balance of deployed forces has not radically changed. In a pioneering effort like this, history shows it’s better to let the pioneers show their hands first, and you react. Examples are the C-5. Pioneering very large jet transport. AN-124 is better by nature of learning from the mistakes of the C-5 and copying what worked. STS. First operational spaceplane. Buran was going to be better. The Soviets designed out many of the mistakes of the Shuttle at many levels and copied what worked well. There is a real detriment to going first, and to be blunt America plays checkers in a world that plays chess. Given our societies inability to plan ahead and think things out, going second does us a lot of good in that we can react to a real strategic situation instead of addressing science-fiction.
…Given our societies inability to plan ahead and think things out, going second does us a lot of good…
Using your logic…going second in developing the nuclear bomb would have been just the right move. Hmm…
We actually went third. We finished first. We used first.
If you say so…
Tube Alloys was the 2nd effort. Can you guess who was first? Or …. Are you uncertain?
I need to make a Tube Alloys Ltd T Shirt.
Somehow I get the sense that you’re missing the larger picture. But good talking to you…
Quite to the contrary. I understand. I’m just driving home the lesson that your assumptions about your opposition are wrong.
When you look at the long history of China you see it follows a pattern where the more they try to project power outward, the more unstable they become internally which leads to an implosion and fragmenation. This is followed by the folks they annoyed dividing up the spoils resulting from it. Then China begins the long rebuilding all over again. This is a direct result of the centralization of power and decision making which is the same today as has always been for thousands of years with President for life Xi just being the latest emperor.
China is not totally isolationist like they were in the past. They do engage and learn from Western companies, and when you stand back and look at the effects of their colonial practice in Africa, it’s not early as ruinous as Western practice. They’re much more like the British this time around. They invest in real infrastructure, and really do contribute to the overall knowledge base of the locals. Yes, they do look the other way and even encourage local corruption more than the West does. But in the end, they’re doing real development in the locality and push the local corruption to meet some level of functionality. There’s a reason the third world wants Chinese imperialism over Western development. I think they’ve learned from history and are behaving differently. I’m not saying ‘good’, but they are practicing a form of imperialism more effective than what we practice today. Additionally, they’re not paying the price of giving wealth and mobility for the locals to want to travel to China. Africans when given enough money to move want to go to Europe or the USA. So they’re not paying for all the side effects of their economic development. The Europeans and Americans are. It’s not treasure fleets raiding and trading. What does it mean internally? Well there you of course have a better point to make. But that’s a tiger the Chinese have been riding every since they opened up to us in ’78. So far, it’s not killed them yet.
China alternates between opening up and being isolated. In terms of the world today they about as open as when Marco Polo visited them. But the pendulum will soon swing the other way.
I don’t think the average African-in-the-street prefers Chinese suzerainty to Western development, it’s just that Western development is pretty much limited to oil and gas and, now, not even that. It’s African governments that were – at least initially – more open to becoming Chinese vassals as the Chinese were more tolerant of their generally kleptocratic and authoritarian regimes. A number of them now seem to be having second thoughts.
As for the current status of the Chinese regime, it is in somewhat the same position as that apocryphal fellow who jumped off a tall building and said, “so far, so good” as he was passing the 25th floor.
Yep. BTW here is an example of a “happy” Silk Road Client state. Of course since this is a Kenya newspaper you won’t see it on your social media flow.
https://www.standardmedia.c…
Kenya is angry with China over the mistreatment of Kenyans living in various Chinese cities.
Yes, looking at trees instead of the forest.
Don’t forget to make an Operation Hurricane to go with it.?
There are some really cool historical tidbits to make for t-shits. I was thinking of a series of shirts for all the war scare crisis events of 1983.
Like the Nuclear Freeze movement?
But as I said before in another post, you act just like them. I don’t see why you hate them. You make up a whole world of expectations of the future based entirely on your emotional reaction to systems. Just as you hate renewable energy for it’s origins in government labs and the fostering of the industry from government largess, they hated nuclear weapons because of Hiroshima. Both the nuclear freezers and your reactions to renewable energy are both based in irrational emotional reactions to the technologies you both opposed. You’re both the same animal.
More psychological projection. The irrational and emotional one around here is generally you.
Renewable energy has not, for the most part, been a product of government research anyway, just government subsidy. I oppose its imposition by government fiat – as is going on in Germany and other parts of Europe – because it is inherently far less reliable than fossil or nuke baseload capacity. Sufficient in-network storage would remedy this inherent weakness, but that is far too expensive as yet in the requisite quantities. It is the insistence of people such as yourself that fiscal, physical and engineering realities be ignored in favor of dysfunctional political ideology that is emotional and irrational.
The Nuclear Freezers weren’t anti-nuclear ban-the-bomb types anyway – they were stooges of the Soviets who opposed only U.S. nuclear weapons. As soon as the movement failed to deter U.S. deployment of Pershing 2 and cruise missiles to Europe, the Soviets promptly folded the movement and it disappeared as quickly as it had sprung up.
Because we had both the money and technology to do so.
And we were able to make use of Italians, Hungarians, British, German, and of course our own local talent. The Germans poured about as much money into the A4/V2 as we did into the Manhattan Project. The Germans had the money and slave labor to make it work, if they would only admit that Heisenberg did not understand the whole process.
Money and freedom attracts talent, just look at what the Germans went through just to get captured by the Americans at the end of the war. And look at those fleeing China and now Hong Kong as China cracks down on it.
A story from my old HS days you might like. An old friend from HS, Mr Gudzi’s grandfather was in the Ukrainian Insurgent Army during WW2/GPW. His faction raided a Soviet Army transport unit, painted the stolen American Studebakers in an American paint scheme, and faked American uniforms as best they could. They then drove from Western Ukraine to Germany in May 45 until they meshed with an American column and turned themselves in and registered as DP’s. I went to HS with a bunch of Ukrainian Americans and exiled Soviet Jews, so was exposed to what the other side of the Iron Curtain was like. My best friend David lived in the USSR until 1981.
Anything is better than winding up on the wrong side of Nazi Germany or the USSR. I’d gladly have made atomic bombs for the US if I was facing the terrors Europe was facing then.
I am Polish and was raised in Chicago in a neighborhood with many refugee families from Eastern Europe. My step-brother and step-sister were raised in Poland under the Soviets until they escaped to the west after communism failed there. One of the kids that was in my grade school classes had parents who survived the concentration camps as did my doctor. So I appreciate well the freedom found in the United States.
Lot’s of Poles in Chicago. On the beach recently it seemed they were ganging up and acting almost like Russian gopniks.
Funny how it is always OK to show racism against Polish-Americans and to continue to use those racial sterotypes and insults…
Yes. All those foreign scientists – most of them Jews – chose to come work here in the U.S. rather than go to the ovens in the Third Reich. Imagine that.
Heisenberg certainly had his limitations. A significant one, I should imagine, was trying to build an atomic bomb with minimal reference to what the Nazi regime officially regarded as “Jewish physics.”
And Starship is better because it learns from the mistakes Elon Musk made on Falcon and Dragon. It also recognizes the mistakes from the DC-X and Space Shuttle.
The USSF is “too early?” It’s at least four decades overdue.
If you are referring the the Long March 5 it is smaller than the Falcon Heavy. The stories you give out on China remind me of the stories of how Japan was going to dominate the world in the 1980’s. We are still waiting for China’s GDP to be larger than the U.S. GDP. Actually the China economy is already reaching its limits if their current food shortage in any indication.
Long March 9.
As for Japan vs China. I agree that China can very well meet the same end. It’s just that they’re a lot bigger, and can probably pull off making their currency a reserve currency allowing them to borrow like the US does. Thus they crash much further along the process than when Japan crashed.
The Long March 9 isn’t even at the view graph stage of development….
China has three crisis that are emerging that will stop their rise, a demographic crisis, a debt crisis and an overly aggressive foreign policy that is turning the world against them. In case you missed it Australia, India, Japan and Korea are all expanding their military to counter China while moving away from doing business with them. Most of the “Silk Road” countries are also turning hostile to China enslaving them with huge debt for their infrastructure ventures.
Long March 9 is very much past the viewgraph stage. The engines are already under.
Your side has been using that as an excuse for American business to keep the transfer of American industry from the US to China for well over 20 years. I’ve been hearing that illusion touted for over 20 years now. Like that lie you like to tell everybody about how deficit spending will spur so much economic growth that the increased tax income will pay off the debt. The GOP has become the eyes closed part. You guys have closed your eyes to deficit spending, transferring of American industry to China, the effects of your economic policies on the American people, you guys turned your back on Gen Shinzeki and ended his career when he should have been put in charge and given a medal, turned your back on the existence of the growing insurgency in Iraq, turned your back on Iran’s take over of Iraqi politics, global warming, and now the COVID-19 pandemic. You guys have just become inferior leaders up to no real world challenges. Go back to 8 Chan and read your Q Anon. It’s what’s giving you your political gain these days anyway.
Why do you insist on confusing me with the old keynesian economists which infest both political parties? I have told you repeatedly that the cutting edge of economics has moved on to complexity economics. In complexity economics how you spend and the level of debt makes a difference, unlike the Keynesiam model.
You also seem to keep forgetting I NEVER voted for President Trump and have voted for VP Biden. Really, you would almost think you are campaigning for President Trump with your attitude. Democrats will not win if like you they keep doing their best to drive the moderate Democrats away. It’s the moderates that determines who will win, not the extremists like you.
As for Global Warming, you johnny come lately newbies make me laugh. Where were you in the 1970’s when the development of nuclear power that the environmentists opposed would have prevented it? Remember, the first government agency to fund global warming research was the A.E.C. when they funded the monitoring station in Hawaii in the 1950’s. Remember Willy Ley and Isaac Asimov were writing about in the 1940’s and 1950’s while the first predictive model goes back until the late 1930’s. Sorry, but you are DECADES late to the battle.
I’m not an ‘anything’ economist. What I’m interested in a good technical analysis of what the public sector needs to look like in order to eventually gain a balance of some sort. I’d like to see a specific accounting of global debt, and what it means if serviced and if not. No school of economics I’ve ever seen actually even tries to deal with that. Everything I see always boils down to …. borrow today, we’ll save tomorrow and outgrow the debt. …. change that theme a little here or there and call it something different.
I’m not taking you to task for voting for Trump (I do remember you saying you did not vote for him.), I’m taking you and the GOP to task for deliberately closing your eyes to the processes of the past 30 years that are grinding down the society you people say you’re the professionals at running.
But why are you associating me with the Republicans? Or is everyone who disagreeds with your world view a Republican?
I basically view political parties like George Washington did as something that has the potential to destroy the Republic by splitting it into two warring groups. Folks like you seem to be a good illustration of that type of group think behavior.
Well then I do owe you an apology. I thought you associated yourself with the GOP. I knew you were not pro-Trump. My apologies.
I am pro-free markets which folks confuse with Capitalism thanks to Karl Marx. I view the role of governement from a pragmatic perspective and on some things I agree with the Democrats on, other the Republicans, while in others I think both parties are wrong. I also think its important to understand history for both solutions and to understand today’s world.
China right now is acting much like Germany and the Soviet Union did in the 1930’s while USA firms are doing business there the same way they did business with both countries during the same era having failed to learn from history.
I’m not a free marketeer anymore. However I do understand that the private sector develops a more advanced level of functionality, variety, and enriching set of products than a Soviet modeled enterprise. I look at the economy as a horse. It needs domestication, and to be directed. Free economies interacting with Japanese style state capitalists, is toxic to the ‘free market’. The ‘free’ market simply gets reverse colonized. So at this point in my life I see the government as a force of domestication, and as protector against Japanese style state capitalism.
American political parties are woefully underdeveloped to deal with the problems the United States faces today. The way Western Europe generated enough political sophistication to deal with their problems was to spawn several political parties and let them specialize. That’s not going to happen any time soon here, the US is continuing to pursue comic book levels of complexity to our politics. As such we can no longer even operate our own society. We’ll see more of the likes of Flint Michigan water, or the USS Bonn Homme Richard to come.
The American economy needs neither “domestication” nor “direction.” That’s exactly what the Japanese tried in the 80s and the lack of results speak for themselves. Japan’s greatest economic days were between the end of WW2 and roughly 1975. After that, the Japanese government, which had been essentially destroyed by the war, had reconstituted itself to the point where it reasserted control of the economy, destroyed Japanese dynamism in the 80s and has continued to preside over a subsequent three decades of stasis and even decline.
And if you think the Europeans have been able to “deal with their problems,” you are employing a very very exotic definition of “deal with.” The Europeans seem to “deal” with problems by pretty much denying them and doubling down on statism as my many interactions with Europeans on these forums makes quite apparent.
It’s hard to deny that at least one U.S. party has gone completely over the edge into “comic book politics” though. That would be the Democrats. Or are you under the impression that Flint, MI’s water and all the rioting, killing and destruction in major U.S. cities these days are somehow the work of Republicans and the right more generally?
You are wrong. Just plain wrong. The Japanese government funded the losses of Japanese car makers selling in the USA for as long as those losses occurred. They also re-tooled their manufacturing set every four years. So that by the time the 80’s came around they could manufacture engine blocks good for over 100,000 miles of use. At the same time an American engine block was start crapping out after 35,000 miles. New stamping machines, new assembly line robots, meanwhile Detroit was still using engine block lines from the 50’s and 60’s. Instead of tooling up themselves as the Japanese showed them how, they just simply started purchasing Japanese engine blocks. After all that and more, Japan did indeed run out, but Detroit was destroyed, and the American auto industry eventually moved to Mexico and eventually China. Your oversimplification of history and economic models is inferior to the real problems of dealing with the real world.
The Japanese never lost money on cars exported to the U.S. Toyota started selling vehicles here in the mid-60s when Japanese wage rates were far below those in the U.S. The father of one of my high school friends drove a mid-60s Corona. Toyotas were not high-quality rides in those days, but they were even cheaper than VWs. Later, when Japanese wage rates were comparable to or above those in the U.S., the Japanese carmakers opened assembly plants here to get access to some of that cheap coolie American labor. The Koreans have since followed suit.
The U.S. automakers were in serious trouble by the 70s for several reasons. One was parochialism. The Germans, English, Italians and even the French had been selling modest numbers of cars here since right after WW2. But, with the exception of the VW Beetle and Kombi van (Microbus), never made much headway. Detroit makers simply thought of the American car market as basically theirs and that Americans would always buy mainly what they put on offer.
A lot of what the American makers built in the 70s and 80s, in consequence, was utter garbage and not even well-made garbage. Even Cadillacs and Lincolns became cheap and plastic-y pimpmobiles.
These failures of execution were mainly the fault of the American car companies having been winnowed down to a handful and to all of them having been run for a generation or more by people who were neither the original founder-entrepreneurs nor even senior people who had worked under them. That was not yet true of the Japanese or Koreans and the difference was stark.
The American auto industry’s attempts to rescue its flagging fortunes by seeking low-wage production in Mexico and China have proven unavailing as the so-called Big Three continue to lose market share. “The American auto industry” is still a significant part of the U.S. economy and is, in general, in reasonable shape, but that is only because it increasingly consists of U.S.-based plants built and operated by Asian and European automakers.
What has been needed to revive the American auto industry as a home-grown enterprise is – surprise, surprise – some actual home-grown enterprise. Which we now have in the form of Tesla and which seems in the process of expanding to include other start-up BEV carmakers. Just as SpaceX sparked NewSpace in its industry, Tesla is sparking “NewAuto” in its industry.
No amount of bureaucratic, governmental “direction” would have produced either result.
What funded and backed all those overseas competitors to Detroit? …..Do I hear it? Do I hear it? Yes, it was the governments of those countries. Even with your take on events, it was state sponsored corporations executing an industrial policy that beat out the Americans. This is why I say you and your economic ideas are incapable of dealing with reality. You live in a fantasy world.
The British auto industry was state-owned after being nationalized by the Socialist government that succeeded Winston Churchill in power after the end of WW2. It’s enormous success in invading the U.S. car market is, of course, the stuff of legends now.
Oh, wait – that was the British music industry. That’s very different. Never mind.
The Japanese auto industry was never state-owned. It certainly benefited from government-imposed import tariffs on foreign-made vehicles and some of its constituent companies have been bailed out by the Japanese government. Which makes the Japanese auto industry pretty much equivalent to the U.S. auto industry.
The auto industries of many countries – certainly those of France and Italy – have had similar levels of protectionist and bail-out assistance from their respective governments.
That only the Japanese and Koreans have been successful as mass car marketers in the U.S. is not due to the machinations of their governments but to the quality of their products. If the degree of government involvement in a particular foreign auto industry was directly correlated with success in the U.S. auto market, we’d all be driving Hillmans and Vauxhalls and Humbers instead of Hondas and Toyotas and Hyundais.
Your entire thesis is, as is not unusual for you, garbage.
German cars?
German cars – excepting VWs – have been luxury brands. Even in that niche they get stiff competition from the Japanese and from Tesla. The only German car that was ever a mass market success in the U.S. was the original VW Beetle.
Andrew, You are confusing free markets with free trade, two different economic concepts. It is like calling a comet an asteriod.
What makes a comet different from as asteroid? I want to hear your understanding of that.
Comets originate in the Outer Solar System, (Kuiper Belt and Oort Cloud) and so have large frozen “atmospheres” of water and other volatiles that boil off when entering the Inner Solar System on elliptical orbits. Asteriods are rocky bodies formed in the inner Solar System with more circular orbits that never consolidated into a major planet. Comets may get “captured” by one or more planets and after losing their “atmosphere” appear like asteriods but analysis generally will show they originated as comets in Outer Solar System.
Now what is the difference between free markets and free trade?
It’s not that clean there are exceptions. Like say 238/P Read. So is a comet still a comet out in the Kuiper Belt when it’s not out gassing?
So I’m not going to go to the internets for an official definition. Let’s see if my guttural understanding is sufficient. I’m prepared to be technically wrong. Free markets would be in my understanding a legal space within the jurisdiction of a national or state government that would allow trade within a set of rules limiting regulators authority over commerce. I would estimate that free trade is a similar set of regulations over regulators between two or more governments allowing trade to function within those limits.
The Japanese in the 80s would have had a much easier time of making the yen a reserve currency than the Chinese would have now with their funny money. The Chinese are now nose-to-muzzle with a double-barreled demographic disaster entirely of their own making and the PRC is neither liked nor trusted by much of anyone outside its own borders. Ironically, the main asset the Chinese have left is that trillion or so dollars of U.S. treasury securities it has bought over the last three or so decades. There’s some irony for you.
Dude, …. again you show ignorance of history YOU LIVED THRU!!!! Dude, Japan when thru the very same demographic bottle neck. And are much much further along the timeline as it plays out. And they printed the very same funny money. Remember? It was based on overvalued real estate. So much so that it drove up the price of rice and caused a crisis in the early 90’s. As I asked for before, I ask for it again. I want a date or a date range for the ‘fall of China’.
I’ll go on the record why China is different from Japan. China owns far more manufacturing capability than Japan did. And China is establishing a mercantile based empire so they can effectively borrow other peoples money by establishing closed trade deals with individual countries. That’s the difference, and that’s why I don’t think they’ll collapse soon. They already have controls over other economies and can move their debt about the globe.
You seem to be old enough to have lived through much of the same history, but you were apparently on acid or something while it was going on. Japan does have a very severe demographic problem, but the Chinese one is far worse and was made that way by deliberate government action. Neither is likely to be solved via government action.
China has more aggregate manufacturing capability than Japan – or the U.S. for that matter. But China is also a much larger country than either the U.S. or Japan and has been putting essentially all its national resources not needed for its military and internal security apparat into export-oriented manufacturing for more than 40 years. China’s percentage of total world manufacturing output stands at about 30% – roughly twice that of the 2nd-place U.S..
But that total is misleading. Chinese productivity is still well below U.S., Japanese, Korean and European norms. As China’s working age population diminishes, as it is now beginning to do, that productivity gap is going to bite harder and harder. Increasing output by simply yanking more bodies off the farm and throwing them into manufacturing production ceases to be possible when the supply of fresh bodies dries up and more of the ones you have retire every year.
The growing move to repatriate more and more critical production from China back to current customer nations is also going to hit Chinese manufacturing hard. China’s threats to withhold medications, PPE and other medical goods during the Covid-19 pandemic is going to result in a permanent diminution of large-country dependence on China as a supplier of same – and much else besides now that strategic self-sufficiency is once again an agenda item.
The Chinese economy is almost comically lopsided in terms of exports vs. domestic consumption. The U.S. has always consumed much more of its own manufacturing output than has post-Mao China. China is not going to be able to quickly achieve a similar balance as its demographic and other post-Covid-19 problems mount.
I don’t recall you ever before asking for a “Fall of China” date. The date would, in any case, be for “Fall of the PRC,” not the “Fall of China” as I don’t see those two things as being remotely equivalent.
Back in the mid-80s, I did some projections anent the probable future of the USSR. The USSR was in its mid-to-late-60s then. I figured the USSR was virtually certain to see its 75th anniversary in 1992, but had essentially no chance of seeing its centenary in 2017. The U.S. economy would simply grow at a rate that would double its size relative to the USSR’s economy by that time so that the USSR could be deterred even more effectively by then at a lower percentage rate of U.S. defense expenditure. We would, in essence, spend them into collapse. That’s pretty much what happened, though I was a bit too optimistic about the Soviet Union’s longevity as it turned out.
I think something analogous, though not entirely identical, awaits the PRC. 2024 will be the 75th anniversary of the mainland success of Mao’s civil war. The PRC will, most probably, still be around by then – though, as the example of the USSR shows, one should never say never about such things. But I think the PRC has essentially no chance of lasting until its own centenary in 2049. In exactly what year in the next 29 the PRC will suffer its brittle fracture, I don’t know. I’m inclined to think that point is likelier to come prior to the 2034-5 midpoint of that interval than during its back half – say a 75% probability by 2034-5.
If that’s how things play out, I have a decent shot at living to see it. I have rather less probability of seeing it if it happens during the back half of my stated interval – I would be 98 in 2049, assuming I was not already ashes in an urn.
My belief that the PRC is getting nearer and nearer to its “sell by” date – and that the lead-up to its collapse will feature increasing domestic turmoil driven by implacable and merciless demographics, is what makes me scornful of talk – by both PRC-fellators like yourself and by neo-“Yellow Peril” types – about “upcoming” Chinese dominance of space. By the mid-2030s, the PRC is likelier to be history than to be establishing any bases on the Moon.
East Germany wasn’t the Soviet Union, the Soviet Union wasn’t Red China.
As much as it would be wonderful to see a bloodless extermination of Chinese communism, I’m very doubtful the commies are at the brink.
The underlying culture of China is probably a better fit for communist rule than Russia ever was. In addition the Chinese Communist Party of 2020 is a very different animal than the 1988 Communist Party of the Soviet Union.
The Chinese communists have devoted great effort to learning from the mistakes of the Russian communists. The Chicoms went for Perestroika first and almost no Glasnost. On top of that advantage there is the benefit that the Chinese Communists have from modern information technology to monitor and control the populace.
I wouldn’t be surprised at all if the CCP is still going strong at year 2049.
You, Like Andrew, have entirely left demographics out of the equation. It’s demographics that are going to sink the PRC. China’s next 40 years aren’t going to remotely resemble its previous 40.
The Soviet Union was at its scariest and most arrogantly confident in the late 70s under Brezhnev. A little over a decade later, it was gone. The Chinese PRC regime is working itself toward a similar fall.
Oh I haven’t forgotten demographics. China IS in for trouble because of demographics. But I don’t see how that trouble threatens the CCP hold on power over China. That trouble more limits how much power China will have to threaten other nations.
I also have to quibble about the Cold War behavior of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union may have seemed scariest during the time of Brezhnev, but I’d say that wasn’t actually true, knowing what we know now.
There is no question the postwar leadership of the Soviet Union were all true believing Communists first, and Nationalists second. But the damage the Soviet Union suffered during WWII and the enduring economic and social weakness of the Soviet Union after WWII was greatly underestimated by the West during the Cold War.
The Soviet Union was actually the most dangerous and scariest under Stalin. Every evolution of the successors to Stalin were more and more hemmed in by the failures of Socialism and the rebirth of the West, and the policies of those Soviet leaders reflected that weakness with retrenchment.
The most dangerous Communist leaders after Stalin were those furthest from the central control of Moscow. Mao and Castro were truly insane mofos who desired immediate nuclear war with the West and thought Moscow cowardly for not doing so.
I don’t disagree with any of the history you lay out.
But most of that has the benefit of it being hindsight – aided, to some degree, by several years of reasonably unfettered access by Western scholars to Soviet-era archives. To outside observers, the Soviet Union looked pretty scary in the 70s and early 80s.
To people like Andrew T., China now has that same fearsome external appearance as did the old USSR. Died-in-the-wool socialists and statists simply can’t believe that anything can stand against socialism and statism despite repeated real-world demonstrations that these regimes are nearly as fragile as glass after they reach a certain age.
Yes, Stalin was scarier than any of his successors. That was also true of Mao and Castro. Original Gangsta revolutionaries tend to be like that.
But Stalin, Mao and Castro are all dead. Brother Raul does the best he can to make trouble like his brother did, but he utterly lacks the resources and his latest sugar-daddies – Chavez and Maduro in Venezuela – are dead and running out of sugar, respectively.
The current “emperor” of the PRC seems to fancy himself a direct successor to Mao, but he’s not. Xi’s a clever and ruthless careerist and opportunist and has none of Mao’s revolutionary mystique, despite his ceaseless efforts to gin up some plausible counterfeit.
As today’s Chinese workforce ages into infirmity and is only inadequately replaced – and as the rest of the word has notably less to do with China than formerly – times will get increasingly thin and tight there. A lot of older Chinese will have only a single child to look after them in their old age. And those only-children will increasingly lack the time if they are still employed, or the money if they are not.
The Chinese government will have nowhere near the resources needed to even feed all these oldsters, never mind look after their medical complaints.
What the Chinese regime will do about this is unknown. Doubtless, the wish by PRC nabobs will be that they could do something analogous to what the Inuits are said to once have done and just put the old and infirm on ice floes and let the tides and currents take them where they would.
If anything remotely resembling this is attempted, there will be mass unrest – to put things mildly. People just a bit younger than those the government tries to “ice floe” will quickly appreciate that they are standing in the same line and, as the saying goes, nothing concentrates the mind so wonderfully as the knowledge one is slated to die in the morning.
Enough people with no way out and nothing left to lose equals regime change. And not, I suspect, a particularly tidy regime change either.
How dangerous is China today?
Yes, it is important not to over inflate China. But…
Economically, demographically, maybe even technologically, China is a more dangerous opponent to the West today than the Soviet Union ever was during the Cold War.
China is due for economic crisis. They may very well already be in the midst of crisis, a crisis that was just temporarily abated from 2008, when they indulged in an orgy of domestic construction of things like ‘ghost cities’.
But even so, relative to the West China is stronger than the Soviet Union was. Today, the United States is deindustrialized. That wasn’t the case during the height of the Cold War.
The greatest strategic weaknesses of China today are raw material resources and food. They need to import both. Chinese moves to secure both of those things in the near future is something to keep an eye on.
The United States is hardly “deindustrialized.” We’re still the #2 manufacturing nation on the planet and will be repatriating a lot of off-shored industry now that the U.S. tax system has been modified to remove most of the former disincentives to domestic manufacturing investment.
China also has nowhere near the strategic nuclear weaponry stockpile the Soviets had accumulated by the late 70s and early 80s.
China will be dangerous so long as the CCP is running it. But those days, I think, are winding down.
During the Cold War, the U.S. was #1 in industry. Now who is #1?
How confident should we be in the true count of Chicom nuclear weapons? The Chinese DF-41 mobile ICBM has been operational since at least 2017, with test flights going back as far as 2012. How do we really know how many they really have?
Unlike the Russians, the U.S. has no agreements, no protocols for limiting strategic nuclear weapons with China, nor similar means of verification. A serious intelligence problem with mobile ICBM.
It took the U.S. about 5 years to build and deploy a force of 1,000 Minutemen ICBM back in the early 1960s. Why should we assume the China of 2017 couldn’t do just as well?
The majority of Chinese industry is devoted to producing consumer goods for export.
Mobile ICBMs can be tracked by overhead surveillance – the most useful and ubiquitous of which is probably provided by outfits like Planet these days. Siloed ICBMs are in fixed positions and are hard to hide. Hiding the construction of such is essentially impossible.
The idea that China has some huge secret stash of strategic weaponry up its capacious Mandarin sleeves is just nuts.
Concealing from satellite reconnaissance, the construction of and location of mobile ICBM is actually pretty easy. Which is why mobile ICBM were such a critical issue in the SALT/START negotiations. See page 13…
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuk…
Even hunting down mobile Scuds proved a tremendously difficult task during the 1st Gulf War, despite allied dominance of Iraqi airspace.
And I wouldn’t belittle Chinese industry as mere consumer products for export. See this world comparison of steel and aluminum production…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wi…
The first Gulf War was 30 years ago. A lot has happened in the overhead surveillance world since then, mainly much of it becoming commercialized. With essentially continuous coverage available over most of the world, concealing military preparations from surveillance has become nearly impossible. That will be reinforced by the numerous commercial synthetic aperture radar constellations now being deployed. The Gulf War SCUD hunt would have gone rather differently if today’s commercial overhead surveillance assets had been available to Stormin’ Norman.
The Soviet Union produced a lot of steel and aluminum in its day too. Along with concrete, steel and aluminum were a sort of Holy Trinity to the Soviet Commies. This was at a time when semiconductor production had already come to matter a lot more to combat power than raw metal tonnages. The Soviets never got very good at making semiconductors. The Chinese are also laggards in this tech.
If you hope that microchip production is the saving grace, too bad for the U.S. that such production is centered in Taiwan. A more vulnerable location is hard to imagine.
https://www.ft.com/content/…
Mobile ICBM are easy to keep hidden when not moving and easy to conceal from satellites when moving. Large commercial networks of SAR satellites do not yet exist and even when they do countermeasures can be applied, countermeasures as simple as timing of ICBM movements. Even if your faith in such networks is justified, that’s years of more production of Chinese mobile ICBM before such a large force is ever revealed by your hoped for network.
My original claim remains true, that as of today the U.S. has no real means of knowing the true size of the Chinese mobile ICBM force. At best we have a rough estimate.
https://fas.org/sgp/crs/nuk…
…The United States and Russia rely on their own national technical means of verification (NTM) to collect most of the information needed to verify compliance with arms control agreements. But, since the 1980s, the treaties have also mandated that the two sides share information through data exchanges and notifications, and conduct on-site inspections to confirm that information. The verification regime in START used these monitoring measures not only to confirm that forces were consistent with the limits in the treaty, but also to detect and deter potential efforts to violate the treaty. With the end of the Cold War and the new relationship with Russia, the United States and Russia may both have more confidence in the other side’s intent to comply with its arms control obligations. However, both will still want to monitor the other’s forces and activities to confirm compliance and to foster cooperation and transparency.
…
National Technical Means of Verification (NTM)
The provisions governing the use of NTM are in Article IX of START and Article X of new START. They are virtually identical. Both treaties state that “for the purpose of ensuring verification of compliance with the provisions of this Treaty, each Party shall use national technical means of verification at its disposal in a manner consistent with generally recognized principles of international law.” Both also indicate that the parties undertake “not to interfere with the national technical means of verification of the other Party” and “not to use concealment measures that impede verification, by national technical means of verification, of compliance with the provisions of this Treaty.”
You’re correct about the vulnerability of Taiwan. We need to repatriate a lot of semiconductor fabrication to the U.S. Fortunately, the Trump tax reforms have paved the way for bringing a lot of capital-intensive manufacturing back to the U.S.
It’s true that, once built, mobile ICBMs are a challenge to keep track of. But that chore is getting easier by the month as commercial multi-spectral surveillance assets proliferate.
The easiest way to keep tabs on total numbers of such things is to concentrate attention on the production facilities – counting truckloads in and truckloads out, for example.
All of this gets easier as more and more physical surveillance assets are placed in LEO and AI-based image analysis improves. The advantage, more and more, lies with the eyes in the sky, not the people on the ground trying to hide their activities.
I think the threat of Chinese mobile ICBM is a lot greater.
When looking at the history and concerns of the US nuclear treaties with Russia, it’s clear that despite all the mandated cooperation, such as prohibition on concealment and prohibition on interference with means of verification, that at best it only reduces the possibility of a ‘breakout’ scenario. At one point we even had people on the ground outside the Soviet factory making the mobile ICBM, counting each one as it left.
I think it is quite possible we are already in a breakout scenario with China. They could have been actively concealing mobile ICBM production for years already.
The thing is, is that we don’t know. How could we?
Apparently human intel inside China has been a disaster in recent years, with the Chinese busting up what network the CIA did have. And satellite imagery recon can’t tell us the answer either. The last hope might be signals intel?
I just came across this long, detailed, story about economic assessment of the Soviet Union during the Cold War years. Interesting stuff. Thought you might appreciate it…
https://tnsr.org/2018/02/as…
It also provides an interesting context by which to understand the economy of China today, and the potential threat of China to the West.
I think that China is more dangerous to the West than the Soviets ever were, because China is stronger economically than the Soviets ever were. The per capita GDP of China is beginning to pass Russia, and already exceeds Brazil.
Thanks for the link. But I’m old enough to have lived through much of the Cold War including spending the first 18 years of my life living 50 miles from a major SAC bomber and interceptor base in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. That, you might say, gave me quite a rooting interest in the whole subject.
Right up until the end of the Soviet Union, the academic “Kremlinologist” community and the U.S. intelligence apparat solemnly assured us that the Soviet economy was at least half the size of that of the U.S. Then the Soviet Union came apart like a cheap suit and it turned out the USSR had a GDP that was roughly equal to that of Spain.
The U.S. intelligence apparat has been particularly incompetent when it comes to foreseeing the major dislocations of world geopolitics over the last six decades. Time and again it has been caught utterly flatfooted. As a result I pay very little attention to what it has to say about the Chinese. For institutional reasons it has a baked-in tendency to see only enemy strengths and not enemy weaknesses.
That is certainly not to dismiss Chinese dangerousness. But the Chinese are no more ten feet tall than were the Soviets before them. They are eminently containable if the U.S. can muster the political will to do so. I think Pres. Trump has the political will, especially during a second term.
But The Swamp will oppose him including some within his own party. He really needs to comprehensively clean house in executive branch agencies. Perhaps the Durham investigations will prove to be the thin edge of the wedge where that project is concerned.
Something else you might appreciate, long but relevant to our discussion. I like this guys content, his educational background is economic science, even though his current focus is on history.
https://www.youtube.com/wat…
Japan got rich before Japan got old. Now look at them.
China is getting old before they are getting rich. Catastrophe.
Andrew, It is like asking for a date for the next big earthquake. All you see is the building up of the pressure until some event triggers it. It could be the flooding resulting in a failure of the Three Gorges Dam or it could be the apparent food crisis in China, or a war with India or??? But make no mistake the pressure is building and when it happens it will probably be ugly as all the countries bullied by China are sharping their knives and just waiting for the opportunity for revenge.
I think that’s an apt analogy. Except that preparing to deal with China is not like preparing for the Big One to hit LA and San Diego. As China builds you have to deal with the day to day losses they can and do incur on us as well as the co-opting of the American business sector. With an earthquake, all the damage comes at once with no damage during the build up. The events may act the same in their timing, but the damage is totally different. The rise of China is an ongoing challenge for us to deal with with damage done during the buildup to the fall. While in an earthquake, almost no damage is done until the event.
During a second Trump administration, the Chinese will be suffering a lot more damage inflicted by multiple countries dialing their reliance on China as a supplier way back than they will be inflicting.
“Immortal?” “They’ll always be there?” Yeah, sure. That’s what “all the smart people” thought about the Soviet Union back in the day. “Backed by government policy,” huh? That would be policy from the same government that gave China the One Child Policy? That government?
“You may not have caught on, that the Chinese move to dominate, own, and play the long game.” The “dominate and own” aspiration has been transparently obvious since 1949. But the Third Reich, Fascist Italy and the Empire of Japan once had identical ambitions. None of them proved good at playing even the short game.
China now looks entirely like it’s following in the footsteps of all the latter-day failed “new model” empires. Face it, there is zero evidence of China being an effective long game player for at least several centuries. The One Child Policy and the coming half-century of Chinese hard times it made inevitable suggests very strongly that China is still light years away from acquiring the knack.
Remove your proboscis from Xi Jinping’s backside and take a look around at the real world and China’s place in it.
Immortal as in Airbus immortal.
You’re comparing China to Germany and Japan in the early 20th cen? No …. No… Laughably no, you totally miss China’s point. They’re being state sponsored Yankees and are going to beat the USA in the world order made by the USA, and slowly push us aside. If you must draw from the early 20th cen , then China is being a British style mercantilism empire built within America’s new world order. As in the new world order as declared in the 1700’s and George W Bush, not the GOP whack boys from the 90’s. By the time the Chinese really want to have a fight, they will have displaced the US so much, it will make little sense for us to fight. For instance, right now the Chinese own 1/4 of pork production in the USA. They’ll own a lot more of our country, and a lot more of the other countries of the world, and private enterprise in the USA will actually act on behalf of China. Try making an anti-Chinese documentary these days. Look at how any WWII movie these days has ludicrous Chinese tie ins as if they were major players in events in the Pacific. Hollywood is already bought. The US business sectors are enamored with Chinese communism. Even Musk loves it.
Well, you’re right that the PRC and Airbus share a common form of immortality – namely none.
China is a locomotive headed, at full throttle down a track on which the demographic bridge ahead is out. The crack-up is not going to be pretty. Meanwhile, you and all the other ever-hopeful lefties looking for some hero socialist dictatorship to displace the U.S. sound exactly like your counterparts of a bit over three decades past who simply couldn’t believe their eyes when the USSR – which looked invincible in 1988 – went to pieces, along with its empire, by 1991. I still get a warm frisson of schadenfreude when recalling the haunted and hollow-eyed visage of Prof. Stephen Cohen as piece after piece of his precious USSR ripped loose or went smash. Every day seemed to bring fresh and unthinkable disaster.
Brace yourself, boyo. That’s going to be you anent the PRC not too far down the road.
I’ve heard you saying that for over 4 years now. Give us a time frame for your clairvoyance to reveal itself in history. Remember how you were arguing with me about 3 weeks ago that Starship would be in orbit by 2022 when just 3 or 4 years ago I was arguing with you that BF(x) was going to be just reaching orbit in ’22. Which is when you were arguing they would be going to Mars….With people.
Okay Q Boy, give us a date for the demise of China. Let’s have it.
You need to hire a copy editor.
I was hopeful SH-Starship would achieve initial orbit – and return – by this year. That’s looking more like a 2021 event now. I never said it would take as long as 2022. Nor did I ever say I thought SpaceX would be mounting human Mars expeditions in 2022. Even Elon never said that.
At least your persistent tendency to misremember – and misrepresent – the past is also still consistent.
I provided an interval – not a date – with probability percentages in another comment below for the fall of the PRC – not the “demise of China” which I don’t see occurring. The PRC is not China. It is, in fact, a manifestation of ideological colonialism by Europeans that has long-outlasted China’s former physical colonization. Marxism-Leninism has little in common with Chinese culture and history. The PRC is a sort of skin tumor on the Chinese body politic. It’s nasty, but can also be excised without endangering the life of its unfortunate victim, though doing so will certainly leave scars.
Yeah, sometimes I’m in a rush. Back in the BFR days you argued that given all the work already put into BFR it would be going into orbit in 2019 – 2020 time frame. Then kept it as Starship was ‘easier to do’. I think I was pretty consistent thinking first orbit would be 2022ish. You also accepted the first manned flight to Mars as 2022ish. Now with the compression of events after the protracted development curve your optimistic timelines are coming in on my ‘overly pessimistic’ estimates for the problem. For the record my basic timeline.
Orbit 2022 to 2023 ish
Tanking 2024 to 2026 ish
Lunar Trips 2027 forward.
Mars: Starship will be found incapable of going to Mars and the first Mars trip with people will be closer to the 2030 time frame if it’s not a spacecraft constructed in orbit.
If they can find funding for all that. That’s going to be a problem.
Frankly, your estimates of SH-Starship-related event dates have been all over the place and rarely as relatively precise and well-organized as in this post of yours, so kudos for that.
I don’t recall ever suggesting 2019 as a date for SHS’s first mission to orbit and back, though I will certainly cop to 2020. I now think that’s probably not going to happen. But Hans Koenigsmann said at mid-year he thought that still might happen, so I’ll be in never-say-never mode right up until 12-31-2020.
The rest of your estimates get steadily less credible the further out they are. On-orbit re-tanking will occur shortly after initial orbit-and-return next year and will prove to be a nothing-burger exercise in terms of drama.
I still think SpaceX can do an initial unmanned cargo-delivery Moon landing in 2022 with their HLS lander. But even if this takes until 2023, it will still be in plenty of time to support an Artemis 3 human Moon landing in 2024.
I’ll repeat my denial that I’ve ever said humans would travel to Mars via Starship in 2022. That, you are either misremembering or making up entirely as a rhetorical exercise in reverse goalpost moving.
SpaceX might still send one, two or a few cargo-only Starships to Mars in 2022 and will certainly send rather more than that in 2024. If there are not at least a pair of human-crewed Starships in that flotilla, there certainly will be when the next conjunction comes around in 2026.
There won’t be a million people on Mars by 2030, but there could easily be 1,000 or more. Perhaps even 10,000.
Listen to yourself. Cargo to Mars in 2022. You realize the payloads have only a year left for completion, and testing. If they’re going in ’22, those payloads are being built now, and have been being built since last year at least. Any evidence of them? Or is this like your global combat radar system idea where you only considered the most basic of basics and never considered the nuts and bolt basics of a system and built up a fantasy world of capabilities that were just around the corner. You’re making this all up.
Global combat radar system? You might have me confused with somebody else there.
I have no precise idea what cargo SpaceX would prioritize packing for an initial cargo-only Starship run to Mars. But I would think power generation and energy storage equipment would feature pretty heavily. Those will both be off-the shelf items from the Tesla catalog so there won’t be any development needed by SpaceX for those. Stuff like that can wait indefinitely for the arrival of crews to unpack and deploy them.
The first flotilla run to include crews will also probably have drilling gear to establish ice/water wells along with Sabatier reactors to make methalox. There would also be habs and electric vehicles and small-to-medium construction equipment modified for Mars operation. Cargo Starships will be cheap compared to the crewliner types so Elon could afford to send several by 2022 and a large number by 2024.
But if SpaceX is busy enough with Moon-related stuff by 2022, it wouldn’t surprise me if the initial cargo-only flotilla for that year was just one or two ships to prove out EDL. The 2024 flotilla would be much larger, especially if it also includes crewliners.
Tesla makes no power systems rated to work at 100,000 ft and in the extreme cold of a Martian night and winter. If they were going to pre position cargo with no preparation or systems development on Earth then you’re talking something that can be kept in cold storage. Food and water come to mind. Or inflatable habitats, but again, that has a non trivial development curve associated with it, and likely we’d have seen it by now. Taking solar panels made to operate on Earth to Mars probably means they’re not going to last long. the panels need to be engineered for the wide temperature swings, the ultra cold temperature swings from day to night, and the inverters and power conditioners need to be rated for similar conditions. Also on Mars you’re going to need a de dusting system a product with applications here on Earth. Deploying and maintaining solar farms with totally robotic or tele-operated systems would make a lot of money here on Earth. We don’t see that being developed anywhere. I think any habitat and power systems they eventually come up when they’re really going to go to Mars are going to show up in Antarctica for a two year or so test cycle. That hardware will sell to various nation’s Antarctic programs, and to solar power utilities worldwide. The reason we’re not seeing any of this, is because SpaceX knows they’re not going to Mars any time soon. 2022 is soon. Very soon. One year from now we’re going to be looking at 2022 in the face. And we’re only just now in the very first weeks of the tanks flying …. Once so far.
I don’t see building space-rated electronics and solar arrays as being any great stretch for SpaceX/Tesla. Automatic cleaning systems for the solar arrays should also present no great difficulty to a company that builds 10’s of thousands of windshield wiper systems every year. Ditto Mars-compatible battery packs. Batteries generate a certain amount of heat when being charged and discharged. Just burying the batteries would probably be sufficient to keep their temperatures in a much narrower range than the day-night atmospheric temperature swing on Mars. All of this could be tested straightforwardly at Plum Brook where SpaceX has long been a valued customer.
Habs are a different matter but hardly showstoppers. SpaceX already has a very capable textiles group that makes the Crew Dragon pressure suits. It could certainly gin up its own inflatable habs by the time any such would be needed – that won’t be 2022. In a pinch, SpaceX could even buy habs from SNC and/or hand Bob Bigelow a big enough check to revive BA enough to get some B330s made in time for 2024 or 2026. But I suspect SpaceX would go the in-house route. That’s more their style.
Anent hab tests in arctic conditions, that’s something the company probably wouldn’t want to do anywhere looky-loos could just wander by. So my guess is any such tests would be fairly sub rosa and be done in the Alaskan or Canadian back of beyond.
But even Earthly arctic conditions aren’t a very good analog for the martian surface, especially atmospheric pressure. It might make more sense to do such tests quietly at Plum Brook.
Then, of course, there’s the possibility of not doing either inflatable or pre-made hard-shell habs but boring tunnels. SNC and B330 habs can accommodate only a handful of people apiece. If the first human Mars expedition is a platoon- or company-sized operation, bringing along a suitably modified Boring Co. mole machine or two, plus equipment for making liner blocks would, perhaps, make more sense.
The point is that Musk has a lot of relevant expertise he can draw on outside of SpaceX but inside his corporate empire. And, unlike what’s going on at Boca Chica, none of this work on beachhead building tools would necessarily be done in plain sight.
Sending systems out without testing …. What?! Boring machines on Mars? In 2022? A boring machine? Really? How many 100’s of kilowatts do they consume? Is it into the megawatts? Dude!
The mole machines wouldn’t go to Mars in 2022. There’s no point in having them there absent people to operate them. Nor do I expect such equipment to go to Mars without testing. The Boring Company is already operating its 1st-generation mole machines with 2nd-generation units already in the works. Adapting this sort of heavy equipment to operate on Mars would be an exercise in adaptation, not scratch-building. And the testing could be done here on Earth.
The entire initial Mars base is going to require a lot of power. The majority of the early-phase freight tonnage sent is going to be solar arrays and batteries.
Has Tesla taken a battery back for a year or two’s worth of charge and discharge cycle in sustained temp swings from +20C to -60C? When we see those kinds of tests, I’ll attribute that as a real world sign SpaceX is getting ready for Mars. If they’re going to have infrastructure that’s going to operate for real, those tests will need to go for two years plus.
Tesla has some very large battery installations in Australia and elsewhere that are out-of-doors and have been in place for at least two years. I don’t know about -60C, but the Australian Outback certainly gets way hotter than 20C in winter.
Mars is cold. Very very cold compared to Earth. The way we have structures like solder blobs not crack thru the temp swings is to implant plutonium slugs inside a small insulated container holding the electronics. If Space X can’t keep a Starship’s systems warm, it’s unlikely they’ll survive the kind of cold soaks Mars has to offer. Surviving the kind of cold soaks Mars delivers over a two year period before humans show up won’t be trivial. There’s going to have to be a considerable re-think of large scale thermal management in the absence of a pair of hands to arrange things. Again, there’s going to be a considerable preview of coming attractions before anyone really goes to Mars. The Mars Society’s simulator base in Utah come to mind. We’re going to see efforts like that, but for real and on a much larger scale.
The martian poles are cold enough to freeze CO2, but most of the planet is a lot warmer than that – not a lot colder than nighttime Antarctica.
It will be interesting to see just what publicly acknowledged preps SpaceX chooses to make for its martian expeditions.
I guess you missed the static firing of SN6 yesterday since they did it at the same time as the tank testing. Starship is moving up the development curve while you are still thinking in a linear fashion. That is why innovation always catches folks by surprise as they are stuck in seeing the world from a linear viewpoint. And the barrier to going to Mars won’t be Starship technology, but planetary protection regulation.
You know you Starship Troopers have been asking me some form or another of that question all during the past year when I’d make similar points about a more realistic time frame for the development of the BF(x) concept. Do you really think this engine/tank/test stand test is one of the finishing touches to make the system ready for an orbital shot? Think about all the mile posts you folks invoked with me last all last year. Did they change the overall nature of the long gap between the first announced flight of a full up starship tank vs the date it really happened? I just want to remind you, that it took an additional 9 months to have a tank flight than originally set. Now I have to admit, flying a tank set and almost nothing else, is pretty damn cool, but it’s not a launch vehicle. There’s a long way to go on that front, and likely more delays that will integrate out for several months just as getting the tanks ready for flight took. Additionally the tanks are still under test. How many flights can they take? Flying SN6 will be neat, but I’m paying more attention to how long it takes to fly 5 again. Because if the acoustics are damaging the welds, there’s still an issue on the tank front.
Deep in the Space Access stage. No doubt Carmack and Masten and their gangs are writing assessment reports for 3 letter organizations.