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Comment by bryanlarsen | Hacker News Reader

Falcon-9 first landed in 2015 and was regularly landing within a couple of years. So being 10 years behind means "almost ready to go".

suborbital Yuanxingzhe-1 landed may 2025, and orbital Zhuque-3 was really close to landing in December. Long March 12A also tried in December although it wasn't as close to success.

So if China is 10 years behind, they've caught up. We won't know if they're 10 years or further behind for a couple years more, though.

And while China may be 10-15 years behind on their Falcon-9 equivalents, they're likely less than 10 years behind on their Starship equivalents.

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China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things. They are not even hiding it anymore. It's almost comical how much they copied SpaceX. And I'd be surprised if they hadn't supply-chained themselves into some level of access in all the big aerospace corpos by now. But Europe? Developing this kind of stuff from scratch in a few years without an unregulated messy startup ecosystem and no army of state sponsored hackers? No chance.

Curious - Any sources? Looking at publicly available details and copying them might be intellectually dishonest if it was a piece of coursework, but this isn't an academic research project. Taking features from something that's known to work is the fastest way to get to something working.

If there's actual smuggling of designs or trade secrets going on, I'd be more interested. But if it's just "the rocket looks the same on the outside", that's hardly "industrial espionage".

Bloomberg's podcast "The Big Take" has been running an interesting series on Chinese industrial espionage called "The Sixth Bureau". Here's a link to the Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38L5UzLwt-s&list=PLe4PRejZgr...

>China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.

Few layman know this but France is one of the biggest industrial espionage players active in the US and Europe, after Israel of course.

In fact, according to Wikileaks diplomatic cables from Berlin quote: "France is the country that conducts the most industrial espionage [in Europe], even more than China or Russia."

Basically, every nation on the planet engages in espionage for its own benefit if they can get away with it. There's no honor amongst thieves.

Singling out China as if they're the only ones doing it, or the ones doing it the most, is both naive and hilarious.

Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased. The fact they had to be stolen does not give them more weight. There is a lot of bias in US governmental opinion on french technology that such a small country cannot be so advanced without stealing; opinion which started with the french nuclear and space program. My opinion on those discourses about France, China or the USSR in the past are just mostly propaganda from the US MIC to ensure continued funding.

>Diplomatic cables are not a source of truth, they are heavily biased.

As opposed to...?

> China also had made industry espionage their way to go in these things.

They're even espionaging from themselves in the future!

Dude, have you ever _been_ in China? They don't need espionage, they're now way ahead of the world in technology, except in a few areas like biotech research and semiconductor manufacturing.

For the last decade, China has been having more engineers in _training_ than the total number of engineers in the US. Sure, the quality of Chinese universities is not that great, but the sheer number of them has its own power.

I strongly suggest to anyone who thinks this isn't true to go to Shenzhen and then SF.

One feels like the future. The other feels like you will get shot.

Nonexistent relevance to rockets.

Rockets are notoriously complicated, though. Only a few nations even managed to get to the orbit, and not for a lack of trying.

SpaceX is a rare bird - a space startup that actually achieved not just spaceflight, but (so far only partial) reusability of launchers. Most space startups died long before that, including Carmack's Armadillo Aerospace. Given that they are gone, we don't think of them often, but the total graveyard of defunct space startups is quite sizeable.

Russia seems to be slowly losing their space capabilities. The EU still does not have a human-rated launcher. These aren't small entities either.

Getting to space is a dangerous business with extremely thin security margins, where previous experience matters a lot.

I think China will eventually have reusable rockets, but it will take some time.

China has at least two startups that launched rockets into space. Zhuque-3 launch even almost landed a booster.

It's the second-mover advantage. Once you know that something is possible, you can often avoid exploring all the dead ends.

whats the issue with that? US just cloned the Iranian drone.... all countries do this

Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it. Heck, I bet DJI or similar could make a better version just by looking at it if they really wanted to. The drone markt is super saturated with cheap, practical components. But copying a self landing rocket is simply not possible without knowing a ton of internal details that you will never get from watching videos of it.

"Anyone who has seen a picture of that drone could copy it." and yet they bragged about taking one and reverse engineering it to make a clone.... so your saying US of A couldn't copy it by picture alone? it took them this long to get a intact one to clone?

The first rocket may take off sooner than 2040. But Starlink is not just a rocket, it is a complete business process, with a launch regularity and price. A Starlink satellite's worth of space on a Falcon 9 costs 500k-750k. With about ten thousand satellites, which last about five years, this means maybe a billion and a half per year spent on the space arm of the business, not counting ground stations. If they had to spend, say, ten times this, Starlink wouldn't be profitable today. And that's pretty much reality: the Ariane rocket costs ~$100m to Falcon's ~$15m (nobody knows what Zhuque-3 costs); I think cost per kg is 5000 vs 900. You could get it down to ~1.5B a year by narrowing it to just the latitudes overhead the EU, but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.

Sure but the Chinese military can easily afford that.

> but then you cut the potential revenues too and have the same problem.

How many starlink clones are there really customers for?

Many people have fiber, and in an urban area you'll probably prefer 5G, if you can't get fiber or wired internet.

Starlink is great if you live in the middle of nowhere, but few people do.

Even if you could do a competitive launch cost, the number of customers is limited.

Starlink is equally great no matter where you live :)

But you’re right, in urban areas it should be possible to do better. If you can get 1Gbps symmetric fiber then get the fiber. Sadly in the US it is not always possible to do better than Starlink, even in urban areas. It’s gotten better in the last decade, but many cities are still stuck with really bad options due to bad choices in the past.

All the airlines, all the trains, and other government-supported entities may have a strategic interest to use a local version of Starlink. But everyone else? I don't think anyone will buy a service that will be 10x more expensive, 10x slower and 10x more energy hungry than Starlink -- this first mover advantage may be hard to beat.

China is a full blown superpower and it should surprise no one when they catch up to or surpass the West in technical feats.

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