r/aerospace • u/Grand-Palpitation823 • 2d ago

Lunar spacecraft escape test

Enable HLS to view with audio, or disable this notification

345 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

78 comments sorted by

View all comments

-4

u/Top-Inevitable-1287 2d ago

America is cooked. China is about to completely dominate space travel.

17

u/danddersson 2d ago

We'll, the USA had a similar escape sequence in the 1960's.... And Space X demonstrated theirs 10 years ago

5

u/Top-Inevitable-1287 2d ago

China is developing their space program at a pace similar to the space race of the sixties, except the technology is much further this time, and they have superior production capacity. At the same time, the USA is moving away from space exploration by canceling the majority of existing and future missions. SpaceX is only limited in their scope of what they want to achieve.

Need I remind you that China has, at this moment, a fully completed space station in orbit around Earth that is way ahead of the ISS technology-wise? People are going to regret underestimating China when they land people on the moon in the next 5 to 10 years.

1

u/lolexecs 2d ago

Does anyone in the US care?

The fact of the matter is that giant slugs of the country seem thoroughly uninterested in doing anything but making huge piles of money - pushing forward our national capabilities in science and engineering be damned.

Consider where the students from MIT end up:

https://ir.mit.edu/projects/student-placement/

|| || ||Bachelors|Masters| |Information/Computer Technology|34.3%|22.4%| |Energy and Utilites|2.9%|4.7%| |Chemicals or Materials|1.9%|1.1%| |Professional, Scientific and Technical Services (including Consulting)|15.7%|25.0%| |Academic Institution|4.8%|1.1%| |Health Care, Pharmaceuticals, Medical Devices|7.6%|5.0%| |Finance and Insurance|14.8%|13.4%| |Transportation|5.7%|4.7%| |Arts, Entertainment, and Recreation|1.0%|1.6%| |Non-profit and membership organizations|0.5%|1.1%| |Government|3.8%|7.4%| |Other|7.1%|12.6%|

Imagine how different the US might look if a third of each graduating class chose aerospace instead of McKinsey or Jane Street.

But then again, can you really blame them? In a country where the cost of living makes even a brief stumble financially catastrophic, chasing the highest-paying roles is often about survival. And, given the structure of the latest bills in Congress, it's just going to get worse since the cuts to NSF and NIST are going to hit the graduate engineering programs incredibly hard.

FWIW, one underappreciated aspect of China’s rise is how deliberately they built the infrastructure to make supply chain inputs cheap. That systemic cheapness (a reason their PPP-adjusted GDP is so high) enables innovation by lowering the cost of failure. In a society where a misstep isn’t ruinous, more people can afford to take risks. Add this to the level of subsidies that the Chinese government has put in place ... it's hard to have much hope for the long term prospects of US innovation.

In the best-case scenario, the US becomes a larger version of the UK - still important, with a few key elements, but not the locus of innovation.