I've seen in several places that most of the time it's not worth sending the state of the art into space. Maybe for some low orbit stuff that doesn't need to last long but for the neccesarry shielding and for interplanetary missions, travel times, means it's generally easier to work with stuff several generations old where all the potential problems have been thoroughly documented.
Most importantly, we cannot use the “Chinese technology is backwards” meme, racist or not, as a reason to dismiss it. China will soon have the largest economy in the world. It has launched to orbit 48 times this year (46 successfully), more than all other nations combined if you exclude SpaceX and Rocket Lab. In other words, its national space agency has beaten the sum total of all other national space agencies.
This year it became the third nation to attempt to land on Mars and the second to do so successfully. It’s building a space station and planning a Moon mission for the 2030s. It’s also developing reusable rockets.
The difference between China and the rest of the world is that it sees its space program as a matter of national pride and is willing to spend whatever it takes, while we see our space programs as sources of pork and the general public barely notices or cares.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Sure. But China's space program is a lot newer than ours, and they dont release a lot of information about it. We have sent many rovers to space, this is they're first one, is it not? So if the pictures they send back seem fuzzy, perhaps its because they are using a bad camera. I'm sure they'll eventually get better.
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.China's space program now is like the USA's or the SU's were in the '60s and '70s. When you need to compete with others, you spend as much money as you can on it.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.Just because it's newer doesn't mean it can't be as technologically advanced. It's the leapfrog effect, where China takes advantage of advantages made by the US and Russia in earlier decades.
And the only real reason China's space program hasn't grown faster is because those other countries aren't sharing their knowledge and technology. It's a bit cheap to portray a country as technologically behind when your country is the one trying to keep it that way.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest timesThe leapfrog effect only goes so far and won't take a country to the cutting edge of a technology or industry. For that you have to develop a domestic research and development base that is as innovative as your international rivals. I do not know that China has achieved this with regards to cameras for space exploration (and neither, I suspect, does anyone else in this thread). It's worth asking the question, anyway.
I will admit to a slight bias against the Chinese because they have a much more centralized political and economic system than the West does, and also because they tend to conceal their own mistakes. IMHO, more open and democratic systems are more innovative in the long run (I admit this has little to do with the lunar rover camera specifically).
I'm done trying to sound smart. "Clear" is the new smart.Electronics sent to space are typically hardened against radiation, which among other things means using larger die sizes for semiconductor fabrication. They also tend to be specced out years if not decades in advance, so are guaranteed to be well behind the state of the art when finally launched.
Another way to address this problem is redundancy, which is how SpaceX in particular gets away with using mostly off the shelf hardware.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"No, they're distinct phenomena. An electromagnetic pulse overwhelms an electronic system with more current than it can handle, forcing it to shut down, damaging it, or both. Hardening against EMPs involves Faraday cages, more robust circuit breakers and diodes, preemptively shutting down systems, and a lot of other stuff that I won't go into here because I'd have to look it up.
Radiation works much more subtly. High-energy photons or cosmic rays will plow through a circuit, depositing a tiny amount of energy on a macroscopic scale, but on a subatomic scale it's enough to change the energy states of electrons and flip bits in transistors. These manifest as errors that seem to show up out of nowhere. You might be performing the calculation 2+2 and get -2147483645 because the parity bit got flipped.
The smaller your circuits, the more vulnerable they are to these events. The chips we use today already have to deal with quantum tunneling effects because the components are so tiny. Making a circuit larger means there's less chance of any one subatomic event having enough influence to flip a bit because there are literally way more atoms in each transistor.
Hardening a spacecraft's electronics against radiation can also mean adding more error correction bits, running operations multiple times and comparing results, and having multiple redundant computers performing each operation. Most importantly, the time it takes to design, build, and validate those components means that what goes into any given spacecraft may be many years away from state-of-the-art, even if it was bleeding edge when it was first conceived.
Another piece of this is that space agencies are extremely leery of making changes to validated hardware. Once a design is proven to work, you do not change it, lest you have to go through mountains of paperwork and revalidation. So a rocket or satellite design built 15 years ago is still being made today exactly as it was then, even if that means maintaining custom fabrication methods that are only used for that one design. Even if you do push changes through, they can take years to enter production.
One reason why SpaceX (to harp on my favorite subject again) has moved so quickly is that it has rejected that paradigm of obsessive validation and freezing successful designs. Of course, in order to get certified for flying humans, Falcon 9 and Crew Dragon must go through those bureaucratic validations, so they are effectively frozen. That is part of why all of the frenzied innovation is going towards Starship.
Final edit: I am not saying that hardware validation is bad, just discussing different paradigms for it.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 12th 2021 at 10:47:50 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Fighteer's Weekly Launch Activity Update
Back from my brief vacation, I can now provide a juicy update for everyone here. This past week may not have broken a record for launch counts but it was close with seven, although one of those was suborbital. China launched twice, Russia sent more tourists to the ISS, Blue Origin sent more tourists to space, ULA launched STP-3 to geosynchronous orbit, SpaceX launched IXPE, and Rocket Lab launched more BlackSky satellites.
This coming week is slightly less crazy at six launches, although we are expecting three on Monday and Chinese company ExPace is booked for two of the week's total. That may be a mistake but it's what the schedule says. Although it creeps into the week after next, SpaceX is aiming for three launches in four days, which I think would also be a record.
Of course, the big event for the end of the year is the James Webb Space Telescope on December 22, which I'll put on the schedule as we get closer.
As always, visit Next Spaceflight
or Everyday Astronaut
for details, and you can see the Google Doc I created here
.
| Launches | Landings | Launches | Launches | ||||||||||||
| Provider | Orbital | Suborbital | Stg 1 | Stg 2 | Cap | Payloads | Crew | Nation | Orbital | Suborbital | Vehicle | Orbital | Suborbital | ||
| Arianespace | 6/6 | 20/20 | China | 46/48 | Antares | 2/2 | |||||||||
| Astra | 1/2 | 1/1 | European Union | 13/13 | Ceres | 1/1 | |||||||||
| Blue Origin | 6/6 | 6/6 | 6/6 | 6/6 | 14 | India | 1/2 | Delta | 1/1 | ||||||
| CASC | 43/43 | 82/82 | 6 | Iran | 0/1 | 1/1 | Electron | 5/6 | |||||||
| ExPace | 2/2 | 2/2 | Japan | 2/2 | Epsilon | 1/1 | |||||||||
| Galactic Energy | 1/1 | 1/1 | Russia | 14/14 | Falcon | 28/28 | |||||||||
| GK LS | 1/1 | 38/38 | South Korea | 0/1 | GSLV | 0/1 | |||||||||
| i-Space | 0/2 | 0/7 | Taiwan | Hapith | |||||||||||
| ISA | 0/1 | 1/1 | 0/1 | United States | 45/48 | 9/12 | H-Series | 1/1 | |||||||
| ISRO | 1/2 | 19/20 | Hyperbola | 0/2 | |||||||||||
| JAXA | 1/1 | 9/9 | KSLV | 0/1 | |||||||||||
| KARI | 0/1 | Kuaizhou | 2/2 | ||||||||||||
| MHI | 1/1 | 1/1 | LauncherOne | 2/2 | |||||||||||
| Northrop | 4/4 | 6/6 | Long March | 43/43 | |||||||||||
| Rocket Lab | 5/6 | 2/2 | 13/15 | Minotaur | 1/1 | ||||||||||
| Roscosmos | 9/9 | 2/2 | 9/9 | 9 | New Shepard | 6/6 | |||||||||
| SpaceX | 28/28 | 1/4 | 27/28 | 1/4 | 5/5 | 1169/1169 | 12 | Pegasus | 1/1 | ||||||
| Starsem | 7/7 | 248/248 | Proton | 1/1 | |||||||||||
| TiSPACE | PSLV | 1/1 | |||||||||||||
| ULA | 5/5 | 16/16 | Rocket 3 | 1/2 | |||||||||||
| Virgin Galactic | 2/2 | 2/2 | 1/1 | 8 | Simorgh | 0/1 | |||||||||
| Virgin Orbit | 2/2 | 17/17 | Soyuz | 21/21 | |||||||||||
| VKS RF | 4/4 | 4/4 | SpaceShip | 2/2 | |||||||||||
| Totals | 121/129 | 10/13 | 35/36 | 1/4 | 15/15 | 1662/1699 | 49 | Starship | 1/4 | ||||||
| Vega | 3/3 | ||||||||||||||
| Zoljanah | 1/1 | ||||||||||||||
Notes:
- Landings: Stg 1 = Stage 1; Stg 2 = Stage 2; Cap = Capsule/space vehicle.
- Payloads: Spacecraft (Progress, Dragon) count as one payload for this list regardless of how many things they're carrying.
- Vehicle: For simplicity, these are grouped by family regardless of specific capabilities.
Recent and upcoming launches
| Nation | Provider | Rocket | Payload/Mission | Reuse | Liftoff | Status |
| China | Galactic Energy | Ceres-1 | Golden Bauhinia 1-03 & others | Dec 07, 2021 04:12 UTC | Successful | |
| United States | ULA | Atlas V 551 | STP-3 | Dec 07, 2021 10:19 UTC | Successful | |
| Russia | Roscosmos | Soyuz 2.1a | Soyuz MS-20/Space Adventures | Dec 08, 2021 07:38 UTC | Successful | |
| United States | Rocket Lab | Electron/Curie | "A Data with Destiny" | Dec 09, 2021 00:02 UTC | Successful | |
| United States | SpaceX | Falcon 9 Block 5 | IXPE | B1061.5 (JRTI) | Dec 09, 2021 06:00 UTC | Successful |
| China | CASC | Long March 4B | Shijian 6 Group 05 | Dec 10, 2021 00:11 UTC | Successful | |
| United States | Blue Origin | New Shepard | NS-19 | NS4 | Dec 11, 2021 14:45 UTC | Successful |
| China | ExPace | Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown | Dec 13, 2021 02:00 UTC | ||
| Russia | Roscosmos | Proton-M/Briz-M | Ekspress-AMU3 & AMU7 | Dec 13, 2021 12:07 UTC | ||
| China | CASC | Long March 3B/E | Unknown | Dec 13, 2021 16:10 UTC | ||
| China | ExPace | Kuaizhou 1A | Unknown | Dec 15, 2021 02:20 UTC | ||
| United States | SpaceX | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Starlink Group 2-3 | B1051.11 (OCISLY) | Dec 17, 2021 | |
| United States | SpaceX | Falcon 9 Block 5 | Türksat 5B | ? (?) | Dec 19, 2021 03:58 UTC |
Events
- Soyuz MS-20 (with Yusaku Maezawa aboard) is scheduled to depart the International Space Station on Dec 19 at 23:56 UTC.
Fighteer's Weekly SpaceX Report
- The Booster 2.1 test tank has been rolled back to the production site after apparently receiving a cryo-proofing regimen from the orbital tank farm.
- The Super Heavy booster quick disconnect hood has been installed on the orbital launch mount. This hood will shield the delicate fueling and power systems from the blast of the rocket's engines at liftoff.
- Booster 5 was rolled out of the high bay again and moved near to Starships 15 and 16. It is not known if this is because that's the only place to store it or if it will be scrapped for some reason.
- Another test tank, dubbed Booster 6, has been assembled. It is not clear what this will be used for.
Ars Technica Rocket Report
This week's Rocket Report
covers the following topics, some of which we've already discussed.
- France to accelerate reusable rocket plans
(already discussed)
- Astra's next launch will be from Florida
(already discussed)
- Colorado-based Ursa Major has raised $85 million
to accelerate its production of liquid engines for small launchers and hypersonic vehicles. It has not yet built any orbit-capable engines but plans to.
- Galactic Energy became the first Chinese private firm to reach orbit twice
with its Ceres-1 rocket. (already discussed)
- Rocket Lab launched its sixth mission of 2021
(already discussed)
- Orbex announced that it has begun construction the first orbital launch platform in the UK in more than a half century
. The platform does not yet have a pad from which to launch and may not actually perform orbital launches.
- Jonestown, Maine delayed a proposal by bluShift Aerospace to build a facility there
for six months over concerns about fishing schedules.
- Russia has selected the first cosmonaut for a Crew Dragon flight
: Anna Kikina. In making the announcement, Dmitry Rogozin pointedly did not mention the name of the spacecraft or the company that builds it. (already covered, at least in part)
- SpaceX launches the IXPE telescope for NASA
(already covered) (NYT, paywall)
- In the STP-3 mission, ULA set an endurance record for its Centaur upper stage
, which completed its final maneuver more than seven hours after launch. ULA holds up the Centaur as a premium upper stage for precise orbital insertion and other capabilities.
- NASA continues to troubleshoot a faulty engine controller on the SLS rocket scheduled for Artemis I, delaying its rollout for wet dress rehearsal until at least 2022 and its launch to some further date. (no article link, already discussed)
- SpaceX resumes work on its Starship launch pad in Florida
(already discussed)
But back to the camera topic, making high resolution cameras is not all about electronics. The most important part of a camera is its optics. No matter how good your cell phone camera is, it won't be able to make sharp images at a distance, as the diameternote of the lens puts a physical limit on the maximum angular resolution. That's why telephoto lenses, and especially telescopes, tend to be so large.
Fjón þvæ ég af mér fjanda minna rán og reiði ríkra manna.This morning, Russia launched its Proton-M rocket carrying two Ekspress-AMU communications satellites into geostationary orbit. I missed the launch, but since it was a commercial mission, Roscosmos streamed it
.
The two ExPace launches lined up for this week seem to have slipped by a few days each, so that leaves China's Long March 3B/E as the next rocket to lift off, at 16:10 UTC today with an unknown payload. I don't expect live coverage. Since I also don't expect coverage of the ExPace flights, the next launch that I'll go into detail on is SpaceX's next Starlink mission on Friday, December 17 at 08:24 UTC.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Ars Technica: With further delays to BE-4 rocket engine, Vulcan may not make 2022 debut
Due to additional production delays, ULA will not be able to take delivery of the flight-ready BE-4 engines for its debut Vulcan Centaur rocket until Q2 2022 at the earliest. This is likely to push that debut back into 2023, although ULA continues to insist that it can move fast enough for a 2022 deadline and that this was the purpose of the "pathfinder" engines that were delivered earlier this year.
The US Department of Defense is counting on Vulcan Centaur to deliver sixty percent of national security payloads to orbit through 2027 as part of the contract awarded last year. The other 40 percent will launch on SpaceX rockets.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"NASA: Boeing to Move Up Service Modules for Commercial Crew Flight Tests
NASA announces that Boeing is going to remove the service module from the Starliner spacecraft that is waiting for its chance to launch on a second orbital flight test and replace it with the one slated for the first operational mission. This will allow additional work to diagnose and repair the problems with stuck valves while also permitting OFT-2 to take place in a reasonable time frame. The window currently under discussion will open in May, 2022.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 14th 2021 at 11:33:40 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Tuesday notes!
Yesterday
, SpaceX transferred Super Heavy Booster 4 back to the orbital launch mount using the new, SpaceX branded crane. Visually, everything is much closer to completion and the booster should begin its testing regimen soon. Many, many systems have to be validated, including the quick disconnect/fueling panel, the Raptor Boost spin-start feeds, and potentially the catch arms.
After completing fueling last week, the James Webb Space Telescope has been secured
to the top of the Ariane 5 rocket that will launch it on December 22.
NASA: Webb Space Telescope Launch Date Update
The James Webb Space Telescope team is working a communication issue between the observatory and the launch vehicle system. This will delay the launch date to no earlier than Friday, Dec. 24. We will provide more information about the new launch date no later than Friday, Dec. 17.
Good news: we might get that Christmas launch of JWST after all. Bad news: it's because of yet another technical issue. It's not terribly surprising for such a complex instrument that has never until this point had an end-to-end integration test with its launch system, but it's not helping anyone's stress levels either.
The Kuaizhou 1A launch by Chinese firm ExPace was supposed to have happened about an hour ago but I haven't seen any information about it.
There's another post about sexual harassment in the space industry on Lioness
, this time regarding SpaceX. The report describes an all-too-familiar story of improper behavior towards women going unpunished and unremedied even after frequent reports to HR.
Unlike at Blue Origin, the previous target of harassment reports, this individual says they were able to personally speak with Gwynne Shotwell, SpaceX's president, who said the reports never reached her desk. I'm hoping that she has enough force of personality and will to do something about the problem.
...
Editorializing, I'm starting to believe that there are no heroes in any industry: that this background noise of sexual harassment and complicit HR is so endemic that we aren't ever going to fully uproot it.
NASA JPL: Parker Solar Probe Touches the Sun for the First Time, Bringing New Discoveries
The Parker Solar Probe has passed closer to the Sun than ever before, entering into its atmosphere for the first time of any spacecraft. Also known as the corona, it extends for millions of kilometers from the surface. The encounter occurred in April and was just now published by JPL.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 14th 2021 at 10:31:26 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Editorializing, I'm starting to believe that there are no heroes in any industry: that this background noise of sexual harassment and complicit HR is so endemic that we aren't ever going to fully uproot it.
You are "starting" to believe!? I've been believing it for some time already...
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard FeynmanKurzgesagt explains the "dark forest" solution to the Fermi paradox, in which civilizations would be so uncertain about other civilizations and their threat level that they would reach the conclusion that they should strike first before the other gets a chance to.
One way they could do this is with relativistic missiles, which are small missiles propelled at nearly the speed of light, which would be pretty much impossible to defend against, and even one could destroy pretty much any inhabited planet.
Hope shines brightest in the darkest times![]()
One always holds out hope that one's idols are not as flawed as others. It's a psychological phenomenon.
I replied to that in the Kurzgesagt thread. The "dark forest" hypothesis is related to several other ideas about why we don't see or hear aliens, including the "ancestor simulation", "cosmic zoo", and "Reaper" (which I don't have a better name for) ideas. We've also discussed RKKVs over in the sci-fi threads in the World Building forum.
Suffice it to say that if there's an advanced civilization out there that wants us dead here on Earth, we're d.e.a.d.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 15th 2021 at 8:03:14 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"SpaceNews reports
that the ExPace Kuaizhou-1A launch last night failed. There was no claim of success as usually occurs, and Chinese state media announced the failure hours later without providing any specifics. The mission carried two satellites intended to test "navigation enhancement for autonomous driving".
It is assumed that the second Kuaizhou-1A launch scheduled for this week will be postponed until analysis has been completed.
With that postponement, we have a SpaceX trifecta coming up. Starlink Group 4-4 (previously reported as Group 2-3) will launch from Vandenberg on Friday atop booster B1051.11. This will be the first eleventh launch (and hopefully landing) of a Falcon 9. On Sunday, a Falcon 9 will launch Türksat 5B from Cape Canaveral, and on Tuesday a Falcon 9 will launch CRS-24 from Kennedy Space Center.
Edited by Fighteer on Dec 15th 2021 at 9:07:15 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"

It's not that bad. Their Zhurong rover on Mars is sending back some pretty sweet images. It's a mistake to think of Chinese technology as bad or inherently obsolete. It may not be state-of-the-art, but they are getting really good at efficiently using the resources they have.
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"