Sell the SLS/Artemis/Orion program to me

[pendell]

If you realize that the only sources you have are explicitly fictional, then I'm not sure why you're trying to insist that it is the correct name? L

Ive never said people woudlnt know what you're talking about. Sure they will. But that's also the case with "the Sun" or "the Moon". In fact, it's virtually never not the case, because context clues would inform you if it were about a different sun or moon pretty readily.

Also, the entire global scientific community uses what the IAU uses. That's the "I" part of IAU. Not sure why you seem to think they are some sort of maverick group that want to declare their own thing willy-nilly.

They aren't ; I acknowledge their authority in such matters, and if I were writing a peer-reviewed scientific paper, as opposed to a random post on a fan web site, I'd be using the official terminology. Since we're friends discussing scientific development, I'm using the SF names because I find them more evocative.

And if it's all the same , I'm going to henceforth bow out of arguments over names in this thread.

Respectfully,

Brian P.

[asda fasda]

About Luna and Sol, they are quite correct names for Moon and Sun, only in Latin, also they are the names of Roman gods for those celestial bodies. To be honest as far as I'm concern Moon and Sun are incorrect as for me It always were Księżyc and Słońce : P

[Tyndmyr]

Yes, those old fuddy duddies with their "degrees" and their "conferences yo discuss best practices to encode designations of billions, if not trillions, if not quadrillion, if not... of stars", and their "recognition by the global scientific community", what do they know?! The point is, you're not satisfied, and it's their fault, the old farts!

Speaking of, do you even know offhand who is in charge? Heck, can you even name one member without googling (and then googling that person to see who they are)? Is your complaint about the system and the people who run it actually based on the system, or the people who run it, or are you just regurgitating anti-intellectual diatribes because how you imagine it is must be how it is?

Names are just conventions. So long as both parties know what is being referred to, the rest doesn't much matter. Memorizing the names of the IAU officials seems...wildly irrelevant. Who cares?

Call it the Moon, call it Luna, either's good for the purpose of conversation.

Quibbling over the words seems less interesting than discussing designs for orbital stations to facilitate exploration and settlement of our solar system, so I'm gonna do that instead.

I knew I'd seen something like this recently. The Spinlaunch orbital accelerator . The idea is that we use a centrifuge to generate speed until the payload is moving fast enough to escape gravity, at which point the payload is released and flies into the air. As it travels up, both gravity and air resistance work to slow it down. If you've calculated the trajectory and acceleration just right, the result is that the object winds up in stable LEO.

Even if it is not capable of doing *everything*, we can do a multistage launch system. If some sort of orbit stabilization package is required to correct the orbit to not intersect earth(which seems likely), that's still a great deal less fuel burned per launch. Immense amounts of fuel are burned just getting out of our atmosphere and up to speed. Every efficiency we can add reduces the tyranny of the rocket equation.

1) As Lord Torath says, use Luna* herself as the third orbital body. Fire the projectile such that it uses lunar gravity as braking to arrive at one of the points it can then orbit constantly between the two masses. Heck, if you REALLY want to be clever set it up on a trajectory where it uses BOTH objects for gravitational assist/braking.

Sadly, probably can't *both* do a maximally efficient slingshot maneuver and also hit lunar orbit for refueling for the same trip, as if memory serves, slingshots are more effective the closer one gets to the body one's orbiting.

I agree that we're likely to need some stabilization/course adjustment package. It isn't even just for the math, you can get a certain degree of inaccuracy thanks to atmosphere. On the way out of the earth, there's going to be turbulence, winds, etc. Even the best weather prediction is inherently imprecise on that scale. You could have the orbital math down perfect, but if winds start shifting during launch, the resulting deviation ends up being pretty decent over enough distance.

If we get standardized resupply packages down to a relatively modest lift cost, that's huge. A lot of the ISS's money is continually burned on just resupply of essentials. Fuel for maintaining altitude, food, water, gasses. Yeah, we try to recycle as much as we can to minimize that burn, but if you can optimize that resupply issue, a lot of problems become a lot more manageable. Maybe we can actually get a station that utilizes centrifugal force to simulate gravity to a decent approximation. That, plus being able to lift sufficient shielding, overcomes two very large obstacles to human habitation of space.

We'll still need rockets for humans, specialized cargo, and so on, but paying rocket prices just to lift water into orbit is brutally limiting.

[Peelee]

Names are just conventions. So long as both parties know what is being referred to, the rest doesn't much matter. Memorizing the names of the IAU officials seems...wildly irrelevant. Who cares?

If you don't know anyone in the IAU, it's probably safe to say you're not very familiar with how they do things, and thus complaints about how they do things are likely based on either blind conjecture or questionable third party sources. It's a quick and dirty question to gauge a probable degree of familiarity.

For example, I have issues with a number of people in organization X. I haven't "memorized" any names so much as I know who the people involved are and what their operations are like. If I didn't, then my complaints with org X would probably be easily dismissable as I'd have no idea what I was actually talking about.

I did not think this was a point of confusion when I tossed it out, but I was being rather flippant about it, so I may have been wrong.

[Tyndmyr]

If you don't know anyone in the IAU, it's probably safe to say you're not very familiar with how they do things, and thus complaints about how they do things are likely based on either blind conjecture or questionable third party sources....I did not think this was a point of confusion when I tossed it out, but I was being rather flippant about it, so I may have been wrong.

It is hardly a matter of confusion. It is a point of pedantry.

I don't care in the slightest what the IAU considers the official term, or how they arrive at that determination. If someone says Luna, and I understand they mean the big rock orbiting the Earth, the individual work habits of a number of officials provides nothing to that conversation.

Use the official term. Use another term. English has quite a few terms, so long as you can make yourself understood, talk how you will.

[Peelee]

It is hardly a matter of confusion. It is a point of pedantry.

It's not pedantry, though. It's a proper name. You can say my ancestral home is Österreich, but I'd ask why you are speaking German, because in English it's Austria. You could call my friend Jorge "George", but his name is still Jorge, not George. Proper names are fun like that.

You can call it Luna all you like, but someone asking "why you speaking Italian" shouldnt come as a surprise if you do. Just as you may not care that everyone calls it Austria here and you insist on calling it Österreich doesnt mean anyone is being pedantic when they point out you're suddenly speaking German.

What you're describing is called "linguistic descriptivism", and hey, I wonder if anybody said anything about that a week ago?

While I'm all for linguistic descriptivism, proper names tend to be prescriptivist.

[Rakaydos]

Prior to 2017, the SLS existed for one reason- to keep shuttle technicians employed.

Problem is, they're technicians, not engineers- Noone in the shuttle job set had actually built (let alone designed) a launch vehicle since Endeavor.

{scrubbed}

Commercial alternatives (not just starship, ANY commercial alternative) are better for returning to the moon. {scrubbed}

[Tyndmyr]

It's not pedantry, though. ....
What you're describing is called "linguistic descriptivism", and hey, I wonder if anybody said anything about that a week ago?

If you have linguistic standards that you wish to impose on everyone else, yeah, that's pretty far into pedantry.

But if pedantry is what you're after, hey. Luna isn't specific to the Italian language. Luna is the Latin term for Moon, and is thus used as a term for it by a whole bunch of languages with Latin roots. Italian, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Romanian, etc. And heck, English takes a very larcenous approach to such words. We crib words from these languages basically all the time, and English would be nearly unrecognizable without them.

It's akin to using the term Sol to describe the sun. It is easily recognized by almost everyone and has a long history of usage.

As for your insistence on prescriptivism, what authority does the IAU have over language? I didn't elect them. They don't have a divine right to rule. They didn't conquer us. I'm not employed by them. There is no justification for it to have authority over language. The IAU gets to use whatever terms it wants for itself, but it has exactly no power over anyone here, nor does it control language.

Hell, what'd we call the craft we put on the moon? The Lunar Module, yes?

If I were a prescriptivist, I'd probably put "lunar" into an English dictionary(Oxford, in this case), and see what came up.

of, determined by, or resembling the moon.
"a lunar landscape"

So, if you're insistent on derailing the conversation into linguistic quibbling, look, we have a clearly applicable definition from an authority on the English Language. I shall continue using this term, and if you have further complaints about it, please direct them to the authors of all English encyclopedias.

[Lord Torath]

<snip>

<snip>

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!


The OP mentioned the Orion program in the thread title. That's not the nuclear-bomb-propulsion system is it?

[Peelee]

If you have linguistic standards that you wish to impose on everyone else, yeah, that's pretty far into pedantry.

Dude, proper names. Not pedantry. No more so than me correcting people who call me "Peele", despite it being obvious who they're talking about.

You can ignore it all you want but that doesnt make proper names not proper names.

[Rakaydos]

What do you want me to do? LEAVE? Then they'll keep being wrong!


The OP mentioned the Orion program in the thread title. That's not the nuclear-bomb-propulsion system is it?

Project Orion was a pre-NASA plan for nuclear propulsion.

The current Orion program is the NASA project to build a deep-space rated reentry capsule designed to be launched on the Ares 1 rocket and docked with secondary components launched on the Ares 5 unmanned heavy cargo rocket. The Ares 1 and Ares 5 have both been long been canceled, but the Orion Capsule lives on as an overweight, underperforming -standalone- moon return capsule launched on the SLS rocket. It has been selected for use in the Artemis program to return to the moon, and all the other components of the system have to accommodate Orion's shortcomings for being forced into this solo role.

[gomipile]

Dude, proper names. Not pedantry. No more so than me correcting people who call me "Peele", despite it being obvious who they're talking about.

You can ignore it all you want but that doesnt make proper names not proper names.

I have a proper name and more than one nickname. The Moon has the nickname Luna among science fiction fans. Is that difficult to understand or accept?

[Peelee]

I have a proper name and more than one nickname. The Moon has the nickname Luna among science fiction fans. Is that difficult to understand or accept?

It is difficult to understand when it is presented as the actual name (ie not a nickname). And even then, instead of simply "I know it's not the name but I think it sounds prettier", which is a reply I had no problem understanding and accepting on this very forum, when one says "well I don't care," then yes, it's even more difficult to understand or accept. If someone calls my friend Jorge "George" because they don't care that his name is Jorge, I'm not going to assume it's a nickname. I'm going to assume things of the person blithely calling him "George".

[Rakaydos]

Defending the sanctity of scientific designations of the sun and moon seems an odd hill to die on, when the topic is a flawed government program here on earth.

[pendell]

It is difficult to understand when it is presented as the actual name (ie not a nickname). And even then, instead of simply "I know it's not the name but I think it sounds prettier", which is a reply I had no problem understanding and accepting on this very forum, when one says "well I don't care," then yes, it's even more difficult to understand or accept. If someone calls my friend Jorge "George" because they don't care that his name is Jorge, I'm not going to assume it's a nickname. I'm going to assume things of the person blithely calling him "George".

The moon is not a person, unlike Peelee*. Geographic locations often have many names. In some countries which name you use for a region is politically sensitive and reflect territorial claims. There are also geographic names upon which political names are superimposed , and both are correct within their context. "Great Britain" , for example, is the proper name of the big island off the coast of France. But it's not the country. The country is the "United Kingdom". A geographic name and a political name, both of which are accurate. "Turkey" is a political entity which exists upon "Asia Minor", a geographic location. Likewise , 'America' is the geographic name for a pair of continents on the planet, but that's not the name of any political unit. There are more than twenty countries on those continents, none of which are named "America". There is a "United States of America", and its citizens are often called Americans for short, but that's not strictly speaking accurate. Guatemalans, Argentinians, Canadians, Uruguayans, Brazilians, are all "Americans" too, at least in the sense of inhabiting the same continent.


The Moon is a planetary body. It has many names in many cultures , and all of those names remain valid for the big rock in our sky. There is one specific name that is used by the IAU for international scientific discussion, and within that context is the only proper name to use. However, we do not insist that there is One True Name for this geographic objects in all contexts, and we are not in an international scientific context here on this board. This is a fan board for a web comic, which includes a number of sci-fi geeks, among which I number myself. "Luna" has been a name in the SF community for the moon for at least 7 decades, and I contend for its validity within that context.

I will continue to hold this position until the moon manages to anthromorphically personify itself and demand to be called some other name such as Selene. If human colonists create a nation on the moon and call it, say, the Republic of MoldyCheese, then that part of the moon will be called MoldyCheese and its inhabitants MoldyCheesians, but the geographic name would still be The Moon.

A person has the right to a proper name , and it is respect to call them by the names they give themselves. The moon has no name, however, save those what bands of humans have given to it. Until the moon objects, I see no reason not to continue to use the name I have given it, since it is well understood in the community I am speaking to.

Respectfully,

Brian P.



* Technically speaking, there's no reason a human can't have more than one proper name. "Mithrandir among the Elves, Tharkûn to the Dwarves; Olórin I was in my youth in the West that is forgotten, in the South Incánus, in the North Gandalf; to the East I go not. "

As you recognize in the books, the wizard of many names is referred to as both Mithrandir by Legolas and as Gandalf by Frodo, but he doesn't take offense at either name. Neither name, in fact, is the name he came into this world with. They are names he was given by the peoples he visited, and he accepted them graciously.

For that matter, in the real world and in mythical worlds religious and occultic groups often give a craft name or a secret name upon initiation in addition to the name given at birth. Those within such groups will refer to each other by those names within that specific context but never use them in front of outsiders.

Now that I think of it, we all have different names on this very board. I'm pretty sure that "Tyndmyr" and "Lord Torath" are not the names on their birth certificates. They are board names chosen for use on this board , not valid outside of this particular context.


So many humans have multiple names for many reasons. Board names, craft names, names given at marriage .. how boring it must be to have only one name! -- BDP.

[Peelee]

The moon is not a person, unlike Peelee*. Geographic locations often have many names.

Indeed, and as I mentioned yesterday, if you were to ask about my citizenship for Österreich, I'd ask why you're suddenly speaking German because we call it Austria. Just like how I don't say Estados Unidos, despite that being a perfectly valid name for the United States. Because that's the name in Spanish.

Those, of course, are still close either phonetically or by strict translation, so if you want something differential, we could always go to Germany/Deutchsland.

I am not as confused on this issue as you seem to think I am.

[Rakaydos]

Indeed, and as I mentioned yesterday, if you were to ask about my citizenship for Österreich, I'd ask why you're suddenly speaking German because we call it Austria. Just like how I don't say Estados Unidos, despite that being a perfectly valid name for the United States. Because that's the name in Spanish.

Those, of course, are still close either phonetically or by strict translation, so if you want something differential, we could always go to Germany/Deutchsland.

I am not as confused on this issue as you seem to think I am.

You seem to be confused as to what topic this is. This isnt an IAC meeting, nor a grammar convention. It's a discussion about a moonrocket and associated programs, a concept that has far more examples in scifi than in reality.

[Peelee]

You seem to be confused as to what topic this is.

A conversation can evolve multiple paths. As do threads.

[Tyndmyr]

It is difficult to understand when it is presented as the actual name (ie not a nickname). And even then, instead of simply "I know it's not the name but I think it sounds prettier", which is a reply I had no problem understanding and accepting on this very forum, when one says "well I don't care," then yes, it's even more difficult to understand or accept. If someone calls my friend Jorge "George" because they don't care that his name is Jorge, I'm not going to assume it's a nickname. I'm going to assume things of the person blithely calling him "George".

If the moon is offended and comes to me to talk about it, I'll apologize and use the name it prefers.

Project Orion was a pre-NASA plan for nuclear propulsion.

The current Orion program is the NASA project to build a deep-space rated reentry capsule designed to be launched on the Ares 1 rocket and docked with secondary components launched on the Ares 5 unmanned heavy cargo rocket. The Ares 1 and Ares 5 have both been long been canceled, but the Orion Capsule lives on as an overweight, underperforming -standalone- moon return capsule launched on the SLS rocket. It has been selected for use in the Artemis program to return to the moon, and all the other components of the system have to accommodate Orion's shortcomings for being forced into this solo role.

This is a good summary.

SpaceX is pretty much the only other game in town playing on this level. They've got a launch schedule that is getting pretty darned intense, even if single launches are not as large as some other options. That matters, since sometimes you do want to lift one really big object for whatever reason, but sometimes you can divvy stuff up. Just depends. For stuff like Starlink, SpaceX works extremely well, and they'd likely be a very good resupply option.

Having more than one option on tap isn't a bad thing, too. That way if one launch system is grounded for whatever reason, you've got alternatives. This came up relatively recently when world events threatened the usual ISS resupply schedule. Having a backup plan is great when supporting lives on a station is a possible consideration.

What you see as the role of humans in space ends up being a big factor in what development you hope to see happen. If you just want the occasional robotic exploration mission and earth sats, well....we don't really need to develop much at all. But if you're hoping to see us colonize the solar system, then even these plans would be just the start.

[Trafalgar]

SpaceX is pretty much the only other game in town playing on this level. They've got a launch schedule that is getting pretty darned intense, even if single launches are not as large as some other options. That matters, since sometimes you do want to lift one really big object for whatever reason, but sometimes you can divvy stuff up. Just depends. For stuff like Starlink, SpaceX works extremely well, and they'd likely be a very good resupply option.

SpaceX is not the only other game in town. The People's Republic of China has a very robust lunar exploration program. The program is named "Chang'e" after the moon goddess. They have landed probes and even returned samples from the moon. They have planned launches for 2024 to send unmanned probes with rovers and maybe a flying drone to explore the south pole for resources and bring back samples. They plan on a manned mission around 2030 and claim to be developing their own super heavy lift rocket, Long March 9, that is at least as capable as Starship or SLS.

Maybe some day in the future we will not be using "Moon" or "Luna". We will be calling our satellite "Chang'e".

[Tyndmyr]

SpaceX is not the only other game in town.

Thus the "playing on this level." China and India are playing catch up with stuff we did many decades ago, the EU has a launch tempo that's pretty light(their historical launch data doesn't list anything after 2020), Blue Origin is a tourist thing.

There's a lot of programs out there, but SpaceX and the US gov are way ahead of the rest of these. The Starlink sats they've launched alone account for over a third of mankind's satellite cluster, and the US gov makes up most of the rest. They're the huge players in the market.

[halfeye]

While I'm all for linguistic descriptivism, proper names tend to be prescriptivist. "luna" (lowercase) is not a word I've encountered in English as another word for "moon" (lowercase). It is the word for "moon" in Spanish and Italian (and possibly a few other romantic languages), and "Luna" (capitalized) as a name is the name for "the Moon" (capitalized) in Spanish and Italian (and whatever other languages as general linguistic convention goes). The English name, however, is "the Moon", not "Luna", as outlined by the IAU.

The sun is named "the Sun" and the moon is named "the Moon", despite that our descriptors of them derive from the Latin and come to "solar" and "lunar" rather than "sunnar" and "moonar", but as already described upthread, English is basically a trashcan language that just gets things dumped in it all willy nilly. Works for words, not for proper names. Far be it from me to say that English isn't stupid.

In the English-speaking world (and globally if in a scientific paper meant for international spread, as English is the language of science), it's the Moon, not Luna.

It's a lot more complicated than that though. The (adjective?) is lunar. In English you would never say Moonar or Moonlar craters, it would be lunar craters or craters on or of the moon. Similarly with The Sun and solar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lunar_craters

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_flare

With some of the planets (and Pluto) it's simply the name and ~"ian"

Venusian, Martian, Saturnian? Uranian, Neptunian, Plutonian.

Others, not so much: Mercurial? Terrestrial, Jovain, and sometimes I've seen or heard Venerian for "relating to Venus". Solar for "of the sun" and Lunar for "of the moon" fit right in with these.

[Peelee]

It's a lot more complicated than that though. The (adjective?) is lunar. In English you would never say Moonar or Moonlar craters, it would be lunar craters or craters on or of the moon. Similarly with The Sun and solar.

While The sun is named "the Sun" and the moon is named "the Moon", despite that our descriptors of them derive from the Latin and come to "solar" and "lunar" rather than "sunnar" and "moonar".... Far be it from me to say that English isn't stupid.

Though it would be pretty fun to say sunnar and moonar, IMO.

[Trafalgar]

Thus the "playing on this level." China and India are playing catch up with stuff we did many decades ago, the EU has a launch tempo that's pretty light(their historical launch data doesn't list anything after 2020), Blue Origin is a tourist thing.

There's a lot of programs out there, but SpaceX and the US gov are way ahead of the rest of these. The Starlink sats they've launched alone account for over a third of mankind's satellite cluster, and the US gov makes up most of the rest. They're the huge players in the market.

How many probes has SpaceX sent to the moon and returned samples? How many probes to L1? Or to Mars? China is currently building a space station. The core module went up last year. Two more modules are going up this year. In 2021, China launched more rockets than the US, and that includes all US launch providers, not just SpaceX.

I am always surprised by how little western observers know about China's space program. I don't know if its a matter of national pride or people sticking their head in the sand but China is passing us, in particular when you look at Lunar Exploration.

[Mechalich]

How many probes has SpaceX sent to the moon and returned samples? How many probes to L1? Or to Mars? China is currently building a space station. The core module went up last year. Two more modules are going up this year. In 2021, China launched more rockets than the US, and that includes all US launch providers, not just SpaceX.

I am always surprised by how little western observers know about China's space program. I don't know if its a matter of national pride or people sticking their head in the sand but China is passing us, in particular when you look at Lunar Exploration.

The US has an active Space Station, the ISS. The US sent humans to the moon decades ago (and acquired a quite large collection of samples doing so, 382 kg of moon rocks were retrieved by the Apollo missions). The US currently has two probes active on Mars to China's one.

China's space program is advancing, fairly rapidly, and the government-backed United States' has been fairly stagnant for some time, for political reasons, but China's achievements in space should not be overstated. The fact that China has more Lunar-center activity right now is not particularly relevant to anything. Space exploration unfolds on a scale of decades.

[Tyndmyr]

How many probes has SpaceX sent to the moon and returned samples?

Zero, that's not their business model. That said, India has done two moon missions, so if that's your metric of success, it's oddly specific and will result in some strange results.

Though there is a passenger trip to the moon slated for next year on SpaceX's launch schedule. I believe it's already full, so if you want a ticket for a moon flyby, you'll have to wait for a future launch.

How many probes to L1?

SpaceX first launched a probe to L1 in 2015.

Or to Mars?

Remember the Roadster launch? That was a test of if they could put something into a Mars Transfer Orbit. So, capability achieved in 2018.

China is currently building a space station.

Cool goal, and hopefully they get there. Our first station went up in 1973. As I said, they're doing stuff we did decades ago.

SpaceX has run 31 missions to the ISS.

In 2021, China launched more rockets than the US, and that includes all US launch providers, not just SpaceX.

China's number includes suborbital missile tests, which cannot be considered space exploration by any reasonable metric.

Well, I guess you can count the failed launches, if you want. That adds several to their numbers, but SpaceX didn't have any of those.

That isn't really a point in China's favor, though. And you're measuring the wrong thing.

SpaceX is actually doing industrial work with their launches. These are functional launches, not mere tests. Stuff like the Long March 8 is cool, but it's only a second flight, and without side boosters at that, greatly limiting capacity. Most of the Chinese launches are Long March 2/3s.

LM 2s get less than 10k lbs to LEO, while the Falcon 9 that SpaceX uses as it's standard platform puts over 50k lbs to the same orbit. SpaceX launched 31 of those in 2021 alone. If we start looking at SpaceX's bigger stuff, like the Falcon Heavy, we're looking at over 140k to LEO in one trip, and Starship can pull off 220k.

One Falcon 9 can put a cluster of fifty sats into different orbits and does so every couple of weeks, whereas China straight up lacks that capacity at all, and is doing like three at a time. It's like saying a Civic is as good as a semi at hauling cargo because you've driven more trips. It's...just not.

[halfeye]

Zero, that's not their business model. That said, India has done two moon missions, so if that's your metric of success, it's oddly specific and will result in some strange results.

Though there is a passenger trip to the moon slated for next year on SpaceX's launch schedule. I believe it's already full, so if you want a ticket for a moon flyby, you'll have to wait for a future launch.



SpaceX first launched a probe to L1 in 2015.



Remember the Roadster launch? That was a test of if they could put something into a Mars Transfer Orbit. So, capability achieved in 2018.



Cool goal, and hopefully they get there. Our first station went up in 1973. As I said, they're doing stuff we did decades ago.

SpaceX has run 31 missions to the ISS.



China's number includes suborbital missile tests, which cannot be considered space exploration by any reasonable metric.

Well, I guess you can count the failed launches, if you want. That adds several to their numbers, but SpaceX didn't have any of those.

That isn't really a point in China's favor, though. And you're measuring the wrong thing.

SpaceX is actually doing industrial work with their launches. These are functional launches, not mere tests. Stuff like the Long March 8 is cool, but it's only a second flight, and without side boosters at that, greatly limiting capacity. Most of the Chinese launches are Long March 2/3s.

LM 2s get less than 10k lbs to LEO, while the Falcon 9 that SpaceX uses as it's standard platform puts over 50k lbs to the same orbit. SpaceX launched 31 of those in 2021 alone. If we start looking at SpaceX's bigger stuff, like the Falcon Heavy, we're looking at over 140k to LEO in one trip, and Starship can pull off 220k.

One Falcon 9 can put a cluster of fifty sats into different orbits and does so every couple of weeks, whereas China straight up lacks that capacity at all, and is doing like three at a time. It's like saying a Civic is as good as a semi at hauling cargo because you've driven more trips. It's...just not.

I don't care who sent it, I care about what and more importantly who gets to space (to orbit at minimum, I'm not counting tourists who might as well be under weather balloons).

[Peelee]

I don't care who sent it, I care about what and more importantly who gets to space (to orbit at minimum, I'm not counting tourists who might as well be under weather balloons).

Then you should care about the vast, vast majority of what Tyndmyr said there, because he's spot on. Two out of every three satellites in LOE belong to the United States. We easily have the most space launches globally, the ISS is primarily American and open to the numerous countries. Hell, the only reason the Chinese are making their own space station is because we won't let them play in ours.

Space is currently dominated by the United States. NASA, ESA, and the Russian Federal Space Agency are all major players in the game who also like to play well with each other.

[Justanotherhero]

I am always surprised by how little western observers know about China's space program. I don't know if its a matter of national pride or people sticking their head in the sand but China is passing us, in particular when you look at Lunar Exploration.

I think language plays a big role. I can only comment on the Space Policy side of that. If the Chinese government has a English or German
substantial description of it's Space Policy online available I simply have not been able to find it. English sources for western space programs are easier to come by.

[pendell]

Point of order, the international space station is not "our" space station. It is a joint venture between the US, Canada, the EU, Japan, and the Russian Federation. I know there are specifically Russian modules, built and launched by them, just as there are modules and astronauts from the other players. I know that recent world events have called the arrangement into question, with the Russians threatening to stop resupplying or transferring western astronauts to/from orbit with their Progress rockets, forcing us to rely solely on the SpaceX missions. That threat seems to have died away for the moment, perhaps because all players realize they have more to lose by such an action than to gain.

At any rate, we can't describe the ISS as a foundational achievement of the US as showing superior space capability vis-a-vis other nations such as China. The US doesn't have its own space station and hasn't since Skylab in the 1970s. If the US is the leading power in space, it is due to our ability to put things into orbit, which at this point appears to be predominantly in the hands of private organizations such as Spacex, working alongside NASA but NASA seems to be stepping back into a supervisory role, as the FAA does for air travel.

Respectfully,

Brian P.