China makes space program breakthrough, bye bye Elon!

There were very different accounting rules, so it's hard to compare numbers between countries. The numbers in that Wiki piece are ludicrous.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid spake the secret code <112r6j7$1cjnp$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

There it is: the full court stenography service for Beijing, now with extra Elon Musk garnish.

China recovers one booster in a net and suddenly Jan is out here declaring the end of SpaceX like a man who just saw a bicycle and announced the death of the automobile. Falcon 9 has been landing and reusing boosters for years. China has demonstrated that it can copy the basic idea, attach a different capture mechanism, and get a headline out of RT. That is not "bye bye Elon." That is "hello, 2015, but with more party-approved triumphal music."

The funny part is not the Chinese test. The test is interesting. The funny part is the reflexive slobbering from the usual America-has-failed amen corner, where every Chinese press release is treated as scripture and every American success is dismissed as luck, fraud, hype, or some billionaire's personality disorder.

China is not a magic engineering monastery populated by flawless Confucian rocket monks. It is a gigantic authoritarian procurement machine riddled with tofu-dreg projects, corruption, face-saving, bad incentives, fake numbers, censored failure, and official reporting that often has the evidentiary value of a hostage video with subtitles.

That does not mean China cannot build good hardware. Obviously it can. It means you do not read a Chinese state-adjacent victory lap the way a goldfish reads food flakes. You ask what was recovered, what was inspected, what failed, what will actually fly again, what cadence they can sustain, what payload penalty the system carries, and whether the next ten launches work as advertised.

But no, that would require engineering thought, and the real point here was never rockets. The point was Elon. It is always Elon. Somewhere in Jan's head there is a little bell that rings every time SpaceX is mentioned, and then out comes the same damp sermon about American decline and Chinese inevitability.

America has problems. Procurement rot, regulation sclerosis, Boeing disease, NASA cost-plus swamp gas, all real. But pretending the CCP is some incorruptible engine of truth and competence is not analysis. It is just bootlicking with a launch animation.

Call back when the recovered stage flies again, flies routinely, and closes the operational gap. Until then, this is an interesting Chinese milestone and a very boring Jan milestone: another RT link, another Musk fixation, another little bow toward the red press office.

There it is! All the noise you make will not stop thousands of Chinese rockets landing on US intersections and them taking over the police and traffic lights. You will need to learn Chinese.

Row your little boat or canoe and apply for political asylum in Europe?

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid spake the secret code <1132s9g$3lah5$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

Thank you for demonstrating the point more efficiently than I did.

I raised specific issues: Chinese state-adjacent reporting, propaganda, corruption, tofu-dreg projects, unverifiable victory laps, and the rather large difference between one recovered booster and a reusable launch system with demonstrated operational cadence.

Your reply to that was "thousands of Chinese rockets landing on US intersections" and "learn Chinese."

That is not an answer. That is cheerleading with a fever.

You did not address whether the recovered stage will fly again. You did not address inspection results. You did not address reuse cadence. You did not address payload penalty. You did not address state media. You did not address the obvious RT-to-CCP stenography pipeline. You did not address the comparison to Falcon 9's actual record.

You just waved a little red flag, made explosion noises with your mouth, and declared victory over an argument you carefully avoided touching.

This is the usual authoritarian fanboy routine. When China announces a thing, you treat the announcement as proof. When America demonstrates a thing repeatedly, you treat it as marketing. When asked for details, you produce fortune-cookie geopolitics about rockets in intersections and traffic lights speaking Mandarin.

China may well become a major reusable-launch competitor. Nobody serious rules that out. The question is whether this specific claim survives ordinary engineering skepticism, not whether Jan can type "bye bye Elon" while saluting a press release.

So try again, but this time respond to the points.

What was recovered? What condition was it in? Will it fly again? How many times? At what cost? With what payload hit? With what demonstrated cadence? Based on what source that is not doing propaganda burlesque?

Until then, this is not engineering discussion. It is just Beijing pom-poms with a NewsFleX header.

------------------------------------------------------------------^ I see you end your sentence with a point :-)

Did you know China invented the gunpowder?

Jan Panteltje snipped-for-privacy@comet.invalid spake the secret code <11335pi$3ohvh$ snipped-for-privacy@dont-email.me thusly:

So we have now gone from reusable booster recovery to "China invented gunpowder" and punctuation giggling, which is a useful admission that the engineering argument has escaped over the fence and left you holding a Wikipedia link like a toddler with a receipt.

Yes, China invented gunpowder; then it took the Europeans to turn it from court fireworks and ceremonial noise into artillery, firearms, naval power, siegecraft, and a continent-spanning military revolution, which makes "copycat!" a rather funny squeak from someone trying to convert ancient chemistry into a modern launch-cadence argument.

The original question was whether one Chinese recovery test supports your "bye bye Elon" victory lap; your answer was not reuse, inspection, payload, cost, cadence, or flight history, but "gunpowder!" because apparently sci.electronics.design needed a field trip to the remedial end of net.kook.

That is exactly what many of my clients are avoiding. The millisecond a patent application gets published it will be copied. And we all know by whom. Hence, they often opt to maintain trade secrets. Just like with the WD40 formula that only around half a dozen people know.

Low skilled worker, yes. Top notch engineers rarely come from poorer countries, with few exceptions such as Russia.

Yep.

Musk scared the living daylights out of all automotive companies. That was no small feat.

Nah. When the Chinese get there they might find a McDonald's :-)

Once a trade secret is lost (or reverse engineered or disclosed by an unhappy ex-employee), there is no legal protection available. Hardware is relatively trivial to counterfeit as most components are COTS. Tools to deencapsulate devices and microprobe die are no longer exotic.

Software products tend to be more complex -- but, tools to decompile are increasingly performant.

And, all a thief needs to do is *copy* the product to compete for your customers.

The only "sure" way to secure your market is with an ongoing relationship with your customers -- support, repair, enhancements, etc. So, they

Arcade pieces were routinely copied within weeks of their release -- short circuiting man-years of development costs. Why would an owner/operator pay thousands of dollars for your LEGITIMATE game when he could buy a knockoff for a fraction of the price (often just a set of ROMs to plug into a board he already owns -- from a previous counterfeited game!)

Ah, but when you deliberately design the code to ensure the copied game is considerably buggier than the original, the operator soon discovers that HIS customers won't play it so he has a harder time recovering his purchase price.

We had a Big Pharma blatantly copy one of our products (as everything was "open", almost by necessity). And, saved a fair bit of money on their second and subsequent purchases. But, now discovered WE weren't supporting THEIR product and they had to tool up a design group to keep the factory floor operating. "People" cost a lot more than kit and they represent a recurring investment instead of an expensed acquisition!

You need relatively few "top notch engineers" to generate billions of dollars of revenue -- reified by all those "low skilled workers". And, most products make do with "average" engineering talent, leveraging the work of other folks who've designed "modules" on which they have now tied their fortunes.

I very much doubt if Germany and the US have different rules about recording who died of what.

Third world countries don't have reliable birth and death registration procedures, but Germany is definitely not a third world country - it does have universal health care. The US results may be less reliable, but not much less reliable.

Cambridge Instruments hired a brilliant Chinese mechanical engineer. He been sent to Cambridge from China to do a Ph.D. there, and got a job with Cambridge Instruments after he'd completed the Ph.D. The Cambridge Instruments personnel department threw out the guy's CV but fortunately his wife played badminton with the wife of one of the engineers, and the CV got to our chief engineer despite the personnel department, and he got hired.

In the three years before the American got wind of him, he completely changed the way Cambridge Instruments built its electron microscope columns - no more grub screw adjusters to get each lens aligned. Each element was precision machined to be a perfect fit and you had to heat out the outer bits and chill the inner bits before you put them together, but once you had put them together they didn't move at all.

Top notch engineers are rare in every country, even Russia (though we had one of them too).

So many times we hear of personnel or accounts nearly wrecking a company when they are allowed to control policy. Would the company not do better to train-up personnel and accounts specialists from within their own ranks? They wouldn't need as broad a knowledge of these subjects as fully-qualified specialists but they would know enough to deal with the affairs of that particular company and would be loyal to it.

My feeling is that personnel specialists known all about what goes wrong with people after they have been hired, and very little about the work they do if it doesn't go wrong.

They haven't got a clue what highly trained specialists do, or how they do it.

There were some UK companies that kept single units below 250 people, and required the boss and his secretary to do all the hiring and firing.

The Eurotherm group worked that way. It wasn't perfect, but I don't have any personnel horror stories from my brief time with them.

One of the many benefits of a "capitalist economy" is that badly run businesses fail. And employees can quit a stupid place and go somewhere better, or start their own business.

There are countries where the government runs everything and controls the residence and employment of everyone. That doubles-down on failure.

My advice to big bureaucratic companies it to contract with small efficient outfits to do all their electronics.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

It can take quite a while for them to fail, and even in the most capitalist of economies senior executives have been known to bribe politicians to get themselves government contracts.

Starting your own business takes quite a lot of capital.

Not all that many. It's known to work badly.

And you imagine your business to be an efficient outfit.

Small outfits tend not to have enough capital (in money or expert engineers) to take on big jobs.

Cambridge Instruments took on the job of making a shaped beam electron microfabricator from Thompson-CSF in France. Thompson-CSF thought that they were handing over a pre-production prototype.

When we got into the detailed design, it turned out to be a proof-of-principle machine and Cambridge Instruments didn't the resources to do all the work required to get it into production. It would have cost about five million UK pounds to finish the job and it cost Cambridge Instruments that much to buy itself out of the contracts that had been signed, but that was what they did.

That usually takes way too long. For example, if you need a good analog engineer with RF experience that requires more than a decade "on the beat".

I had $22,000 of personal savings, which was more than we needed.

What's really useful is to have ideas.

Little quick-turn PCBs are better.

John Larkin Highland Tech Glen Canyon Design Center Lunatic Fringe Electronics

Execs from big companies, yes. Big companies are not known for efficiency. They are know for big meetings that drone on and on ...

It doesn't have to be that way. If you do need capital you'll have to raise it, and potentially leave a country that is hostile to start-ups for a country that is less hostile.

Not all that many? Nearly all. That's why there are signs in Cuba reading "Socialismo es muerte", even at the risk of the poster being caught and tortured in their gulags.

It is. Have you visited? I did.

You use external ones, such as consultants :-)

I am doing exactly that for an oil business right now. They are too small to hire their own analog guy. So I am their go-to guy for that. You don't need to have all the knowledge and all the talent in house. You do need to have a knack for finding it though and the main tool for that is still ... the telephone.

Well, AFAIK Cambridge flamed out in 2021 despite a government bailout years earlier. John's company is still around :-)

On the third attempt? You have mentioned two earlier businesses that didn't last.

Of a sort.

If you like trivia.