- Solar panels smaller in area than ISS but produces similar amount of power, indicating much more efficient solar panels
- Ion thrusters to keep space in orbit
- Automated docking of cargo and crew capsule. Semi-automated docking of large station components like the 23ton labs
- A robotic arm similar to ISS that walk along the joint points on the station. It has expandable attachment system, allowing not only astronauts to attach, but also a smaller more precises robotic arm to attach that can manipulate external experiments.
- It has a crew airlock and a cargo airlock, the cargo one is larger than the one on ISS.
- It can also release small satellites through the cargo airlock.
- Dozens of external experiment attachment points, some (maybe all) has power and control
- What looks like pretty good communication links with the ground. Experiments can be controlled and monitored from the ground, saving astronaut time.
- What looks like some advanced experiment equipment, including three very accurate atomic clocks, near absolute zero cooling systems etc. But I am not well versed in physics to speak on these.
- It will operate a space telescope; telescope can dock with the station for servicing and upgrades, and equipment uploaded by regular space station cargo ship.
I think it is a well-designed system, surprisingly capable in terms of research capabilities. As China's space industry is completely sanctioned by US and Wassenaar Arrangement, all technology here are from Chinese industries and local supply chains: materials, precision manufacturing, communication equipment, sensors used for guidance/automated docking, robotic arm, ion thrusters, solar panels, networking and control system within the station, even to the logistic system of building, launching and running the station. Then there is the whole rocket system themselves, 100% success rate thus far with CZ-5/B, CZ-7 cargo ship, and Shenzhou launch vehicle. And then the global positioning and communications satellite network. And then there is the whole research equipment part. There are millions+ ppl involved in all of the projects here.
Avoids path lock-in by exploring alternate solutions lines, and ensures that if one country decides to slow down (because politics) then the world doesn't lose its only leading-edge space program.
Healthy competition for the betterment of all!
Some cooperation would be great, of course. Like the US / USSR space cooperation in 1970s, despite bitter ideological and military rivalry.
But I’m not. I was simply saying that the sanctions have nothing to do with their ability to obtain western tech.
https://www.history.com/news/industrial-revolution-spies-eur...
Why would they waste time and their own money researching things when they can just steal it and then give that information to private and public Chinese industries? That is their entire MO. The Chinese are also responsible for $200-600 Billion worth of IP theft against the US every year.
They will do whatever it takes to make China #1 and see nothing wrong with doing this.
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...
- https://www.cbsnews.com/news/chinese-hackers-took-trillions-...
- https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/10/16/china-intellectual-prop...
Because this way you'll always be behind.
The Chinese would be supremely unintelligent if they didn’t use that advantage.
What happens to the US is that they "borrow" a lot of intellectual capacity from abroad, and they have been doing that for a lot of time.
Also, stealing IP and resources has been the eternal strategy of empires to build themselves, US and Europe included.
99.99% of china’s migrant workers are Chinese. I don’t understand what not including migrant workers gives you unless you assume china will import labor from other countries someday?
BTW competing with Lockheed-Martin and even Sukhoi seems to be harder, too.
Because competing with Boeing and Airbus means building cost efficient aircraft in large volumes. Building cost efficient planes in large volume is way harder than building a singular space station with barely any cost concerns.
But really, there’s an order of magnitude more engineering that goes into so many facets of rockets and rocket engines. On paper they’re similar, but the stresses and constraints are much, much higher.
Orbital rocket engines are not “point up and ignite fuel.” You’re right, they don’t need air intakes - they need cryogenic liquid oxygen and all the support equipment involved in using it! Jet engines have it easy being able to harvest the oxidizer as they fly.
There are many, many, points of failure in modern rockets . You could argue that jet engines were the precursor to modern turbo pump design.
edit It’s also worth noting that the turbopump environment is dramatically more hostile in rockets. LOX is really nasty stuff at those temperatures and pressures.
They have hacked nearly every F100 they needed to and steal hundreds of billions in IP annually already.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_intellectual_pr...
- https://www.cnbc.com/2022/03/09/china-state-backed-hackers-c...
- https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/02/politics/china-hacking-espion...
On a more serious note, I find it quite unfair that Western conoany go into China to take advantage of loose labour laws and child labour, and then they complain when loose IP laws hit them. Like you knew what the deal was from the outset.
Lastly not every society believes in the concept of intellectual property, it is not even clearly defined - for instance EU does not issue software patents.
And hey, our (American) IP laws were a lot less strict when we were catching up to the British Empire.
Countries generally try to set their laws up to benefit their industries (to the extent possible).
Lots of links to Wikipedia lists of examples in other threads here.
Then the US will try to incur some diplomatic cost for China, which does have a pretty bad reputation on this front... it's all part of the big game.
All developing nations, whether China or Russia or Somalia, don't enforce some laws. Sometimes it's lack of strong state, sometimes it's lack of beurocratic capacity, or a concious decision. Anyone going into these countries is aware of this.
IP, Labour laws and bribes in case of China.
Clearly western companies take advantage of the two latter, and cry foul about the former. Massive hypocracy.
Meanwhile western government dont enforce their own laws for any kindof accoutability of major business leaders. Chinese will answer for IP theft on the same day CEO of Nestle will go to jail for taking advantage of child labour and slavery in their supply chains.
So probably we will have to wait for judgement day
https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2016/feb/01...
The thing is,anybody these IP theft cases are also against Chinese law, they his choose to ignore it when it benefits them.
Corruption is everywhere, it's not an excuse to strive for anything less than right and truth. "Bevause they did it" is not a good reason.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Chinese_spy_cases_in_t...
It seems unlikely that any country could monopolise any particular weapons technology for long. I assume the US also has programs to extract any innovations from China or Russia.
And those are only the ones who’ve been caught
We tend to forget this since the US came into its own as an industrial power generations ago, long before China did. While China's form of government is quite different than most Western governments, in a way that gives them a reputation of being isolationist and secretive, that doesn't mean their path to technological advancement has been any more dishonest than that of other nations.
Put another way, we frown on China's technological espionage so much because we view them as an enemy from a government & "values" perspective, not because "we" have cleaner hands. I personally would prefer that China didn't have all the latest tech capabilities because I don't like the idea of increasing the global influence of authoritarian nations, but if China had a non-isolationist democracy, I might not be so upset about this.
The co-orbit strategy is excellent, a short trip for repairs and easy to fit into existing schedules if something goes wrong. It's no James Webb but was never intended to be, about the same size as Hubble but with 400x the field of view. Guessing it will be cranking out the discoveries.
However it doesn’t get much coverage in western media beyond a Cold War / environmental risk angle.
Reminds me of the coverage of the US launches I watched as a kid.
I'm guessing this is an ongoing thing, and since the clip popped up on Reddit it seems at least ‘social media’ pick up on such output.
We had every opportunity to collaborate with chinese scientists aboard the ISS before this crap. The man is a traitor to science.
Interestingly, you inadvertently (?) demonstrated OPs comment by using the opposing definition from GP.
I'd like to see sources backing up this claim. Huawei for example has 5G patents and research centers outside China. Hualong-1 nuclear plants are exported abroad.
Seeing that China is big on business and making money, it makes no sense to keep technology for yourself. There's so much money to be made by selling them!
2. belt and road
Belt and Road is an international infrastructure investment (and direct construction) project, not sure how its related to technology. It's also no different from all other nations' international aid programs, in that it both helps the receiving nation and makes them indebted to the originator.
FRANCE INVESTIGATION The strange saga of how France helped build Wuhan's top-security virus lab MAY 31, 2020 BY KARL LASKE AND JACQUES MASSEY The maximum-level biosafety laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology was the first of its kind to be built in China, and has been the centre of huge speculation since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic which originated in that city. The laboratory, which is equipped to handle Class 4 pathogens (P4) including dangerous viruses such as Ebola, was built with the help of French experts and under the guidance of French billionaire businessman Alain Mérieux, despite strong objections by health and defence officials in Paris. Since the laboratory's inauguration by prime minister Bernard Cazeneuve in 2017, however, France has had no supervisory role in the running of the facility and planned cooperation between French researchers and the laboratory has come to a grinding halt.
> have no say in the running of the top-level biosafety laboratory > Beijing signed an agreement on future cooperation and collaboration
These are far from what was claimed by the OP
And when these people leave, they take their experience at Huawei with them. Now some other company benefits from Huawei's experience.
People hire me for my 10 years of DevOps experience so that I can help them implement practices. They don't hire me to reinvent DevOps from first principles without using any of my previous experience.
Just what part of hiring people for their experience is "unethical harvesting"? If there's evidence of people being specifically hired to diverge trade secrets of a previous employer, in violation of NDAs, then you'd actually have a case.
Whenever I search recent research articles about any topic, I see a very large number that are published by China, and which are freely available.
The quality of the Chinese research is quite uneven, there are many papers that are just garbage, but there are also many which are surprisingly creative and original, exploring promising alternatives to those that had already been studied by Western research.
I frequently see statements from naive Americans that all that the Chinese do is based on copying, but unfortunately for USA, that was true only in the past and it is no longer true today.
Just because you don't follow them doesn't mean they don't exist. Plenty of ongoing IP theft cases show this is not true. This case closed a few years back that pretty much wiped out a Billion+ dollar US company: https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/chinese-company-sinovel-wind-...
This example is immensely funny to me, since in the 90s the NSA stole trade secrets related to wind turbines from the German company Enercon and passed it on to the US company Kenetech, who then managed to get a patent in the US.
English sources are a bit scarce, but here's an article that references it:
> Some months later, a former NSA agent admitted that the organisation had secretly intercepted Enercon's data communications and monitored conference calls. The NSA passed all the information it gleaned on to Kenetech.[1]
There's also a report on ECHELON for the European parliament that mentions this case among others[2]. Some more cases became known through documents leaked by Snowden.
To complete this circle German intelligence services would now have to steal trade secrets related to wind turbines from China, but sadly they're explicitly forbidden from conduction industrial espionage - to the chagrin of German companies who are feeling disadvantaged.
[1] https://www.irishtimes.com/business/electronic-spies-torture...
[2] https://irp.fas.org/program/process/rapport_echelon_en.pdf
They are indeed IP theft in their genetics!
ftfy
I don’t claim there is no creativity in China. But to claim that everything that looks new to you is therefore original goes too far.
they copy you, you copy their advances back and you are back in parity.
In China the repercussions for what you described may go way beyond the legal framework, you may be labeled a spy or something like that. This hasn’t applied to doing that in US / Western countries
I mean, a few hundreds years ago, the US continent was populated by Savages. They got educated and civilized now.
So give China another 1 hundred years. They'll be as civilized as US today. They probably would routinely threaten nukes for countries not practicing the "wholistic democracy" [1]; they'll also cut supply of key components from global supply chain when India is approaching their supremacy; and sanction Vietnam because they dont act like dogies...
Any such actual event happening?
I have heard this stated repeatedly, but my Google search reveals no actual reporting, other than the ones where the foreign party voluntarily exited or being forced aware from their own political pressure (that is not from Chinese side).
It is true that Chinese companies do what you described, I think at some point there was even an offical slogan for it. But this is just as much due to the "capitalist" side as to the "communist" side. I'm pretty sure if an American company was behind technologically they would do the same. I recall Tesla poaching battery and car manufacturing specialists for example. Not saying that is great, but it would be naive to assume they would do otherwise.
> China doesn't collaborate, it just takes until it reaches scientific and technological parity. Once parity is reached, China cuts collaboration agreements and keeps further advancements within China.
Regardless of what strategy the government is pursuing, I know personally that many Chinese researchers do collaborate on an honest basis. They have to put a lot of effort into dispelling the prejudice that they just want to leech technology for their government.
Its problem is that it appears to mean the opposite of what it means, not that it has two contradictory meanings.
Try "The mighty sequoia, protected by thick bark and with its foliage typically high above the flames, was once considered nearly impervious to fire."
I would say what are you talking about? That makes no grammatical sense.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/cleave#Etymology_2
> (intransitive, rare) Followed by' to or unto: to adhere, cling, or stick fast to something.
Something can cleave to another thing, but you can't cleave two things together. It's grammatically the same as the word "cling". You can cling to something but you can't cling two things together. It doesn't make sense.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-antonym lists several similar pairs, in which two contradictory senses developed from one older sense. (Along with many more pairs that are the results of different patterns.)
I should hope so after over a decade. AFAIK they haven't changed the solar panels since the last one was installed in 2009 and the design was probably fixed well before the first one was installed.
> A robotic arm similar to ISS that walk along the joint points on the station. It has expandable attachment system, allowing not only astronauts to attach, but also a smaller more precises robotic arm to attach that can manipulate external experiments
Canada Arm also walks along the ISS too using alternating ends that astronauts can be attached to.
Also I don't think the CanadaArm can roam to the Russian segment, but there's a new European arm that does.
I did forget about those but they did only cover one small part of the array iirc. Most of the original array is still active.
And perhaps some of the things China's station can do are just not feasible to tack onto the ISS, at least not without pushing timelines back past what China might consider acceptable.
Not saying that's what's happened here; certainly China's independent efforts here are largely fueled by isolationism and protectionism. And NASA is prohibited by US law from collaborating with China, unless they get prior approval from Congress and the FBI for each collaboration[0]. But I think, as a general sentiment, sometimes competition can be healthy and push the state of the art forward faster.
"Quick, wind it back in, I need to change the SD card!"
It seems unlikely anyone is as cost-efficient as Falcon 9 with reuse.
It appears to me, as an outsider, that Atlas and Ariane are 4-5 times as expensive to operate. There is probably plenty of room for China to operate more efficiently than that. Especially with their launch volume, which is second only to SpaceX.
China has lots of money (for now...) so they can throw a lot of resources at the problem. In China, quick public successes always take precedence over doing it right.
> In China, quick public successes always take precedence over doing it right.
I'd like to see some evidence for this huge, unnuanced claim. Of course they have an incentive to look good. So do companies all over the world. But to claim that that's all they do is to ignore the elephant in the room, namely 40 years of growth in prosperity that's unprecedented in human history.
Corruption is still a major problem and there is no signs it has gotten better. African Swine Flu as an example can't be contained because that would need unbribeable enforcement. No-Covid only works (in the enforcement sense) because of draconian penalties. Cronyism is an epidemic disease in itself, you can't advance in China, no matter your qualifications, if you aren't highly connected, and most aren't.
Yes, I'm speaking in broad terms. But I did predict a glass ceiling years ago, because the lack of openness means terrible risk management and sophisticated risk management is crucial for sustained exponential. It has finally happened, growth in China shrank after Covid and the recovery is worse than in the rest of the world.
If you need a reason not to trust China look at what happened to Hong Kong with all the promises made by CCP leadership. Look at the CCP attempts to shape policy, including in western universities. Look at the genocide against the Uyghurs. Look at the issue of organ harvesting, which is partly propaganda and partly the CCP itself hinders any attempts to actually disprove the allegations with their lack of transparency. I am forced to consider the CCP as evil-doers in the same order of magnitude as Nazi Germany. And that is before they try and retake Taiwan, which will be an unbelievably bloody business.
India is 1/6 of the world's population and its media sentiment towards China has been trending sharply downwards over the past few years.
Check out figure 15 for South Asia's sentiment on China.
Edit: Some more propaganda https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o96yCGqCHFg <- Will be interesting in a few years, I guess.
China has already overbuilt its highspeed rail system. China really doesn't need another solution for a problem it doesn't have.
Edit: Maybe they could use this to overbuild their already existing net with a dozen to two dozen strategically located stations, as an overlay of hyperhubs, and use the interconnections to conventional HSR as spokes which branch off of these.
To make it even more competitive to air travel, especially for longer distances.
You assume that company is giving an accurate picture of what it has achieved. That's not how it works in China...
China has a lot of systemic issues stemming from corruption and nepotism, but they also have a large population and a culture of investing in the education of their children. It isn't a coincidence that there is a huge number of Asians at elite US colleges, which would be even higher if affirmative action wasn't so prevalent. Its only a matter of time before China will catch up to the US and reach technology parity.
"Catching up" means China is growing faster than the west, both in economy and technological know-how. But at present China is only marginally out-growing the West, even using the CCP numbers.
The US does have the advantage in that high performing individuals on the level of Einstein have a higher chance of emerging due to much more personal freedom and social mobility, but that is difficult to account for because someone like Einstein may or may not emerge in the next 100 years.
Why do you think that's a reasonable assumption to make?
Overall the economic growth is clearly faltering. And with a GDP growth rate that is only one or two percentage points ahead of "the West" the catching up is going to take a lot longer. It's quite the same with education, which is just another industry among many. China is running into a glass ceiling because of its system.
Additionally there is an economic world war raging right now, mostly against Russia. But China is increasingly getting on the wrong side of this, with much of the world opposing China.
[I'm generally surprised by how ill-informed western populace is about their own govts doing.]