Probably going to be downvoted into oblivion, but I think China is pushing and pushing to make such things "normal".
The rest of the world need to start sanctioning China whenever the government acts in bad faith or with recklessness, before others follow suit. Leaving these things unanswered is an open invitation.
It's not the first time this happens. Without response it won't be the last.
Please don't take HN threads into nationalistic flamewar. It's particularly bad to do it in such a generic way. Can you please not post like this to HN?
You'll need to scroll past the shorter routine comments to find the longer, in-depth ones, but they're there.
(Also, please omit downvote baiting in the future. That's also in the site guidelines.)
p.s. I looked at your recent comment history, expecting to find what I usually do (more flamewar) and was pleasantly surprised to see no pattern of this. That's good! please stick to using HN as intended.
> and was pleasantly surprised to see no pattern of this.
I generally keep out of such discussions, however, and with all due respect, my comment here had no nationalistic motivation and speaks about the Chinese government, not the Chinese race or even populace.
It's about a government who has a demonstrable history of acting in bad faith[0], nation-level bullying[1], human rights violations[2], etc.
So when that government approves a rocket designed so that it will not burn up but crash somewhere, a piece of information directly taken from the linked article, I can't help but notice it fits into a pattern.
Let's not mince definitions. It was a flamewar comment about a nation, hence nationalistic flamebait. Please don't do that here–it's not what this site is for.
You did even more of it in your reply to my moderation comment. That's usually a really bad sign.
What supports your belief that China are pushing this to become normal, as opposed to not being already the norm?
A closer look at some of the large objects which has re-entered[1] as well as a few cases of incidents[2] and their origins, suggests the USA together with USSR then Russia normalised this practice decades ago.
Edit: A natural consequence of them being the first and largest players in the game of slinging large objects into orbit.
The list of reentered large debris provides a list of 11 uncontrolled examples through 1964-2018. This list is both incomplete and doesn't take into account future known events, such as the one in OP article.
I would prefer more complete data on this but the examples suggest that the largest actors in the space industry have historically contributed the most to uncontrolled large objects reentry.
11 since 1964, but only only two of those since 1967 - scratch that is now THREE since China just did it.
In other words was hardly normal for the historical space powers for the last 50+ years.
But I'm not even sure what you are arguing anymore.
First you say:
> What supports your belief that China are pushing this to become normal, as opposed to not being already the norm? A closer look at some of the large objects which has re-entered as well as a few cases of incidents and their origins, suggests the USA together with USSR then Russia normalised this practice decades ago.
Then:
> This list is both incomplete and doesn't take into account future known events, such as the one in OP article...
Everyone stopped doing uncontrolled reentries ages ago, and now China has started doing it, which is the whole reason for the OP. But you seem to want to redirect criticism away from China and back onto the USA and USSR/Russia.
>Everyone stopped doing uncontrolled reentries ages ago
SpaceX Falcon 9 second stage dropped debris on Canada and Washington state in march 2021. There's nothing abnormal in uncontrolled reentries when using new equipment (in rocket time that is quite a long time). Faults happen. It's this or no rockets at all.
The US government set a standard for space launch risks. I believe it was "for each launch, the chance of killing an innocent bystander must be less than 1 in 10,000".
I suspect this Chinese launch met this standard.
If it crashes to the ground, the chance it hitting someone is still very small - most of the earth is water, and most of the land isn't densely populated.
If that's the case, we can't complain. They met the same rules we would have done.
> I believe it was "for each launch, the chance of killing an innocent bystander must be less than 1 in 10,000".
The earliest thing I can find that seems relevant is the Convention on the international liability for damage caused by space objects [0] which was published by the US and USSR in 1972. This doesn't list risk in terms of probabilities of deaths but instead makes it clear that signatories are "absolutely liable to pay compensation for damage caused". It is in turn based on the Outer Space Treaty of 1967.
Interestingly, gov.uk has detailed current guidance for entities applying for licenses to launch from the UK [1]. This states that "all licences issued must state a limit to the operator’s liability to indemnify UK Government for claims".
Off-topic but man, the gov.uk website doesn't cease to amaze.
There's a freaking page with everything laid out, explaining everything you need to know about launching a satellite. Background history, relevant law, documents needed, everything you need to know. It's all there, in a clear, concise, easy-to-follow format.
NASA ODAR reports utilize the 1 in 10,000 language, although those are for debris in general, not launches and the probability is for any injuries, not just death.
It seems like this is a consequence of the Long March 5 using a variation on the "stage and a half" design where the main engine fires from liftoff to orbit, with side boosters being discarded in a suborbital trajectory. The Atlas Rocket family (prior to Atlas V), Energia/Buran, and the Space Shuttle had a similar design, with a bulky central stage left in low earth orbit, where its will probably deorbit in an unpredictable location. Fortunately, in the case of the shuttle, the engines were on the orbiter, so only the relatively light fuel tank had the problem, while the Atlas used a balloon tank[1] which relied on the pressure of its fuel and oxidizer for structural integrity that would presumably collapse and break up in an atmosphere.
> Fortunately, in the case of the shuttle, the engines were on the orbiter, so only the relatively light fuel tank had the problem
The Shuttle external tank never entered orbit. At separation, the perigee of the trajectory was still inside the atmosphere. While the Shuttle burned its OMS engines at apogee to complete orbital insertion, the external tank remained on a ballistic trajectory, and its impact point was controlled at all times.
The sentiment in most western sources on this is predictable. IIRC the US Skylab did an uncontrolled deorbiting, and was a much larger object than this booster.
Much of the articles on this have much second guessing/indirection, but ideally it would have been better to get a quote from the CNSA on this, but I haven't seen any news sources trying to get a direct comment.
My guess is that they require 3 launches in this configuration where the whole booster reaches the orbit for delivering the core modules of their space station, and they might have computed the odds that the uncontrolled deorbiting will cause major damage to be insignificant considering the 3 launches, expecting that whatever reaches the ground if any may be small dispersed fragments.
Of course a small fragment could be lethal, but then again a falling coconut could be lethal as well, but people
consider it an insignificant risk.
I'm not sure how to read that chart. Is it showing the object is expected to circle the earth 4 more times, then crash somewhere to the west of Australia?
Actually, it can also re-enter outside of the yellow or blue lines. They given an error margin of 24 hours on the predicted reentry time, and the drawn tracks are only 6 hours long.
That is the orbital prediction at the estimated time of reentry. They take where it is right now projected about 3 days out, and show us 6hrs before and after. LEO takes around 2 hrs or less to circle the earth.
This will change. If there is more drag then expected, or any one hundreds of different things happen, the reentry time will change, and then the predicted area will change.
If you've ever worked in Mainland China in virtually any field, you've undoubtedly heard workers or managers use the phrase "chabuduo" accompanied by a shoulder shrug. It translates to "close enough".
When you've purchased some cheap product that is Made in China and falls apart after a few months, or when you hear a building in China has collapsed due to cutting corners or cheaping out on materials, or when an accident occurs because safety measures at a factory were non-existent, or when rocket pieces come crashing out of the sky... you can be sure somebody involved mentioned this risk and there was a decision maker who shrugged it off with a "chabuduo".
To be clear it's an attitude very prevalent in Mainland China and not culturally specific to Chinese - I haven't encountered this in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, or even Hong Kong - and I think it's an attitude that is really holding China back from its full potential.
Sounds like a huge generalization. I worked in China for a few years and saw the full spectrum, from maximum half-assingness to autistic perfectionism. We have the same palette also here in Germany.
The big difference is the level of education and experience. While we Germans do stuff for 150 years with 0 disruption since the industrial revolution, the Chinese started at 0 somewhere in the 90s.
Ah, yes, and the corruption, this is another thing they have to improve in order to become true market leaders in the industries they want to lead in.
I would add that the lack of religion might also contributes to the chabuduo in China. As earning money overwrites everything over make things proper (or with pride). Also as the population is supersized the parazite behaviour can survive much better than in smaller places. This might can be compensated with the pointing system in the world of internet thou.
Anyway I don't think it's an overgeneralization.
It is probably not the case for space rocket, but chabuduo also means the taped-together-bikes, the messy meat shop, driving the other side of the road, even if invisible following the promises standards etc. You meat with this every day guaranteed.
If somewhere than in Germany people are following the rules, tidy their environment etc. very very far from China.
Just take one example of the blind guide tiles. In Beijing and Shanghai I've already lost counts how many times it leads to an obstacle like cable post. In Germany, there would be not even one case even in country side...
I appreciate that your comment is based on personal experience but, just as a heads-up, bringing up religion in this context is highly likely to lead to a religious flamewar. Large internet forums simply can't handle discussing it, especially when the root topic is already controversial.
I'm sure you didn't mean to include flamebait in your comment!
Back when I was a student employee of a state university I had to sit through a mandatory training part of which was where they told us we were not allowed to be overt racists, sexually harass each other, embezzle money (i.e. the usual stuff) or say things not befitting a the government's self image (I'm paraphrasing but that's what it was) including specifically the phrase "good enough for government" and suggested alternatives. Based on the training it was pretty clear that this was a generic training that anyone receiving a paycheck from a state entity had to sit through.
Having a specific phrase to refer to known half-assery isn't specific to China. I suspect it's a pretty universal thing across cultures
The term "差不多 (chabuduo)" could but is often NOT used with a shoulder shrug in day-to-day communication. The actual meaning, just like any other language, depends a lot on the context.
For questions asking for a mount of something ("How much ... would you like?"), it is common to answer that with 差不多兩匙 (about two spoons) or 差不多那樣 (that's about right). In this context it should translate to "about" or "about right".
When someone is being annoying, people in the northern part of China would often say 差不多得了, which means "that's enough, stop it".
Of course, there would be mediocre people use this phrase with a shoulder shrug. The problem is the attitude, which as you said, is not culturally specific to Chinese.
> It's an attitude very prevalent in Mainland China
Mainland China has a huge population. Even if just 10% of them having this attitude, that is still a lot of people. There is a good chance you have met some of them, as I did myself, unfortunately.
There is also bias. Cheap products, regardless where it is made, has a higher probability to fall apart after a few months. You will only hear it from the news if a building collapsed or there was a terrible incident; if everything works -- as it should -- it won't make the headlines.
There is also a term for poorly-built projects, 豆腐渣工程（ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu-dreg_project) and people are furious when they read about it. People cut corners because they have the incentive to do so and they know they might be able to get way with it by paying a relatively small penalty to the potential gain.
It is not a "chabuduo", it is actually about taking a precisely calculated risk. The flawed system is giving the people the wrong incentive, that's what holding China back from its full potential.
> I haven't encountered this in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, or even Hong Kong.
That's probably just because you haven't stayed in those place long enough. A quick search in Spotify gives you:
This article explores the concept in greater detail. The most common interpretation in a professional context is "half-assed job."
Black mold in a room? Just paint over it. Cha bu duo.
A pinch of this instead of a teaspoon of that? Cha bu duo.
Is the stitching around the seams crooked? Cha bu duo.
I'm speculating, but I wonder if this is the result of inflexible top-down management practices, courtesy of the historical legacy of the CCP.
Australian's have a term, "She'll be right", which is used in much the same way (it's also used in some other ways). But I think the difference is in how much bite regulators and consumer protection bodies have, and in Australia, it's a lot.
"She'll be right" usually only applies until it won't be alright, it's more about pragmatism than laziness.
This is all obviously generalizing, everyone is different. But you can't really discuss colloquialisms without generalizing.
Neither of these is applied in the same way or with the same ubiquity or frequency. "Good enough for government work" is also frequently used mockingly or in anger/disgust at poor quality workmanship.
I never heard it in anger, but yes, it is a joke. Where I am (western washington state) it's used to imply that something works to spec but could have been done a lot better if there was the motivation.
I suspect the closest American mindset is something like “They’re not paying me enough to worry about that” or “that’s outta my pay grade”. When we choose Chinese companies that optimize for price above all else, fixing problems that crop up completely destroys their profit margin, so it’s unsurprising that they often don’t bother.
the reddit article links two substantial history texts. evidently it was the 1960's where "close enough for government work" started being a subversive reaction, to governments which didn't have the savvy or understanding to write or validate their specifications.
The perceived bad quality of Chinese products is partly a deliberate marketing strategy to make products that prioritize low price over quality, and partly due to lax standards relative to countries like the US.
It's a lousy argument to suggest that Chinese products are bad because Chinese culture does not promote attention to detail because some people sometimes say "chabuduo". One can equally make the same bad argument about American workers, because some Americans use the expression "just eyeball it" at work.
When held to a high standard, Chinese people are capable of producing high quality products, evident in the prevalence of Chinese SWEs in FANG and the fact that Apple and Tesla both have major manufacturing facilities in China.
> It's a lousy argument to suggest that Chinese products are bad because Chinese culture does not promote attention to detail because some people sometimes say "chabuduo".
With respect, you have not spent much time in mainland China. "Chabuduo" is pervasive in a way that you are downplaying - either because you have some agenda or you are not knowledgeable. There is absolutely no comparison between the average Chinese manufacturing process and the average US one. Are their outliers in all cases? Of course. But generally speaking the GP is correct.
With regards to Apple and Tesla (and I would also add Volvo) - high quality/high tolerance manufacturing CAN be done in China of course. But it's only because the Western companies who pull it off have imposed their culture, standards and rules, on the process.
I think the parent author is emphasizing that this culture of "Chabuduo" is not inherent to Chinese culture, rather it is may be something came out of getting rich fast scheme that is inherent to an emergent economic and industrial power.
How about: not an inherent trait, but rather an endemic and “parasitic” meme? (Like the popular belief in eugenics in many countries in the 1930s; or the belief of several colonial powers—but mainly Britain—in the inferiority of aboriginal tribes’ values and beliefs during the Age of Exploration; or the belief in Varna [caste] as a popular interpretation of dharma within Hinduism; or the belief within Islam that a “jihad of the sword” can permit civilian targets.)
These sort of memes come along and “infect” a culture, saturating it — or at least the more vulnerable-to-manipulation populations within it — with these views; and they can stick around for decades or centuries. But, they aren’t intrinsic to the culture; eventually the culture stops believing these memes, because believing them offers no real benefit (thus the “parasitic” part.) If/when they do get over them, the culture as a whole tends to feel ashamed that they ever did believe them.
I don't; I meant to talk about Varna. But how do you localize "Varna" to English for someone who not-very-familiar with Hinduism? Most English-speaking people don't even know what caste is.
Caste based discrimination is not a meme. It’s deeply rooted in more than half of the Indian population and has taken root in the United States along with migrants who brought it along with them and teach their children these “values”
https://www.npr.org/2020/09/21/915299467/how-to-be-an-anti-c...
Yeah, I got that part - and I understand why people would want to believe that because no one wants to believe a culture can have sub-optimal traits. But from where I stand, it is a cultural thing. It may be expedient, it may have sprung from a time when it was more advantageous than it is now, but there's no denying it exists.
I think low quality is only a result of desire to sell cheap, but Chinese producers are capable of meeting high quality standards and out-innovating other countries
The bad habits from communism era will disappear eventually
Of course they are. Like everyone else, they do what they're being paid for. It's the companies that outsource manufacturing to China that create the designs and set the quality standards.
I think 'cheap' comes from outsourcing. There are so many producers in China that have been only doing outsourced production, but now they want to sell their own products. But for the moment they dont have brands, dont know the market, dont know how to approach customers in the wild. So they produce cheap and hope to at least compete by price in a crowd of anonymous alike companies.
In my experience with buying from china, it can be described in a saying that is making rounds especially in marketing gadgets market:
You can pay more, and get 100% of your order QA checked and certain to work. Or you can pay less, and at best you will get 130% of your order because that will statistically ensure there's enough of your order done right in the package, but you sort it yourself.
Yeah, right. If you are building a rocket, you have to have that attitude, otherwise, how can you launch it successfully.
Yes, insert "virtually any field" in your conclusion, sum up 1.4 billion people nicely.
chabudou is about accept tradeoffs economically, this is especially true when China was very very very poor. If you work in service industry, you know Chinese customers are very flexible. It is neither good or bad. You are not handcrafting a handbag for a rich upper class Englishman.
Chabudo _IS_ why China is able to rapidly progress towards full potential.
Fast, cheap, good. Pick two. Deng wanted poor China to develop fast. So ChaBuDuo. The original Life of Mr. Cha Buduo was an essay on the inability to adapt to modernization. Good enough + Chinese scale / population means = enough occasional, actually good outcomes to reach global competitiveness in ways that matter, fast.
Modern Chinese ChaBuDuo culture is the maximal embrace of it for specific development goals. ChaBuDuo culture can be reigned in if the government really wanted to i.e. Chinese aviation safety used to be dismal, now it's one of the safest in the world. Same with high speed rail safety after the very public Wenzhou train crash. The question is whether PRC space program is guided more by "ChaBuDuo" vs world class quality due to political costs like aviation safety, or HSR, or rocket force etc etc. In terms of meeting results / goals I'd wager the latter.
I have heard “chabuduo” in both Taiwan and Malaysia.
You are definitely into something, though. Let me elaborate a little more: I think the thing that makes this more prevalent in China, besides the larger population, are the incentives put in place for the winds of exaggeration to blow. These failures occur when you mix that micro level idgaf with a macro level one.
"chabuduo" is a common expression in Chinese used in everyday language. Not just "close enough" in English but also "more or less", "-ish", etc in every language so yes it will be heard everywhere people speak mandarin.
What may be specific is to use it to brush off substandard work.
Edit: In this case, I don't think mentioning "chabuduo" (as a brush off of substandard work) is apt, though. I think it's more about their can-do and "move fast, break things" attitude.
The argument here is completely illogical and frankly pretty racist.
You assert the Chinese have a broad cultural trend of laziness or poor work ethic, and your only supporting argument is that a word exists in the language? A word that roughly translates to “meh”, or “who cares” in English?
If only it were that easy to instil cultural values. Want to get rid of rape culture? Just get rid of the word “rape”.
While I agree what can be asserted without evidence can also be dismissed without evidence, it seems the comment was describing an attitude and not behavior that was enabled based on the existence of certain vocabulary.
Your comment was correctly downvoted and flagged because it took the thread on a generic ideological tangent and further into flamewar. This is not the correct way to respond when other comments are already doing flamewar. The correct way to respond is not to post more flamewar comments. You can do that in one of two ways: (1) post something thoughtful and substantive, that isn't generic and doesn't repeat flamewar tropes; or, (2) not post anything.
Edit: considering that I had to reply to you in a very similar way only yesterday (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27043779), and on multiple occasions before that, would you please review the site guidelines and stick to using HN as intended? We end up banning accounts that keep violating the rules this way.
It's interesting that for me the first association that comes to mind is the USSR factory culture, which did indeed result in such attitudes towards quality.
Plenty of capitalists have been guilty of playing fast and loose with safety and quality in order to increase profits... as long as revenue (and the share price) is heading upwards, who cares? shrug
Please don't cross into personal attack or call names in HN comments, regardless of how ignorant someone else is or you feel they are. It only makes things worse.
This is quite different. In communism, in theory - everything belongs to everyone, so nobody cares about anything. There is no so-called "minimum" that you have to do - you just have to been seen as "working".
It's only when your job is in the spotlight and doing something incorrectly could place your family in the camp, then they somewhat care.
Here the falling rocket may serve as an objective to test countries air defence mechanisms, so that could have been done on purpose and communist incompetence may be a smoke screen.
There is also a concept that only close friends and family matters. People outside of this circle do not really count as people. Putting poison in milk is not "good enough" but malicious action.
This sort of things was not uncommon in Victorian times in the UK (and I'm sure everywhere else). This is partly what led to all the health and safety regulations we have.
Many things in China are similar to Victorian Britain: Industrialisation and economic boom, infrastructure boom, can-do attitude even if it breaks a few things along the way, selling whatever to make a profit (In the UK it was not uncommon to cut flour with plaster to make cheaper bread and cause malnutrition in poor children, for example)
If you've ever worked in the United States in virtually any field, you've undoubtedly heard workers or managers use the phrase "good enough for government work" accompanied by a shoulder shrug. It translates to "close enough".
When you've purchased some expensive product that is made in the United States and it falls apart after a few months, or when you hear a building in the US has collapsed due to cutting corners or cheaping out on materials, or when an accident occurs because safety measures at a factory were non-existent, or when rocket pieces come crashing out of the sky... you can be sure somebody involved mentioned this risk and there was a decision maker who shrugged it off with a "good enough for government work".
To be clear it's an attitude very prevalent in the United Staes and not culturally specific to the United States - I haven't encountered this in Taiwan, Malaysia, Singapore, or even Hong Kong - and I think it's an attitude that is really holding the US back from its full potential.
Ppl are talking how we need regulation. We can't even spot China from putting ppl in concentration camps how are we going to regulate their rocket program.
They also have a habit of letting early booster stages fall in mainland China. There are videos of remote villagers walking around crashed boosters with lovely red NOx smoke coming out.
On 15 February 1996, the Long March 3B launch vehicle failed during launch, veering off course immediately after liftoff and crashing into a village near the launch site (probably Mayelin Village).[1] An enormous explosion destroyed most of the rocket and killed an unknown number of inhabitants.[3]
The nature and extent of the damage remain a subject of dispute. The Chinese government, through its official Xinhua news agency, reported that six people were killed and 57 injured. However, American estimates suggest that anywhere between 200 and 500 people might have been killed in the crash; "dozens, if not hundreds", of people were seen to gather outside the centre's main gate near the crash site the night before launch.[4] When reporters were being taken away from the site, they found that most buildings had sustained serious damage or had been flattened completely.[4] Some eyewitnesses were noted as having seen dozens of ambulances and many flatbed trucks, loaded with what could have been human remains, being taken to the local hospital.[4]
Doesn't the fact that you're commenting on a story about their rocket program with a comment about them putting people in concentration camps show that we can spot both, at least from a high level?
Regulation is something a government does within its own jurisdiction. The only country that can regulate China is China. This does not imply a lack of ability to impose effective regulation on the part of any other sovereign nation. Regulation is not something you do to a geopolitical adversary.
> We can't even spot China from putting ppl in concentration camps how are we going to regulate their rocket program.
We can, we’re just not going to do anything about it because decades of outsourcing American (and others) industry to China has made us a bit dependent on keeping them happy.
The rocket in question just successfully hoisted the Chinese space station core module into orbit. By the end of next year, they expect it to be functionally complete and China will start maintaining a permanent human presence in space.
Citing Wikipedia aside, the WHO exists in large part to get large, competing nations to cooperate on matters of public health. This often involves placating these nations.
You should take some time to read up on the many respected and qualified institutions who've done a much deeper dive on this "conspiracy theory" than the WHO ever intended to.
I think there’s a difference between questioning if this was an accidental lab leak based of legitimate scientific research, as compared to conspiracy theories that blame China for intentionally creating and releasing a bio-weapon. There’s a large spectrum between rational inquiry and conspiracy theories. Until the source of the virus has become more clear, it seems fair game to speculate about a lab leak without being subject to criticism as a conspiracy theory.
Having said that, I agree that there should be pushback against assigning blame for Covid. Determining cause and assigning blame are done most accurately when decoupled. Even if the cause was a lab leak, the blame may belong to poor lab management rather than the Chinese government. Or maybe it was one individual’s fault. Or maybe it is just one of things that happen in dangerous lab work. Or maybe the blame really goes to world leaders who didn’t shut down air travel sooner. Blame is much harder to figure out than cause, and it’s a lot easier to point fingers at others instead of at ourselves.
I tend to agree that "lab leak" hypotheses are worth exploring (without wading into "bioweapon conspiracy theory"). They're worth exploring on the grounds that it could help change policies and practices to reduces the odds of such leaks in the future.
It's important to note that we're not operating in a total vacuum of (circumstantial) evidence about the lab leak scenario, though. US diplomats back in 2017/18 noted their shock and concern that the Wuhan lab was operating unsafely, and was working on SARS-like bat coronavirus that could infect humans, and sent home warnings about it, but nobody listened back home:
But if it was a lab leak from a poorly managed lab, it does reflect poorly on the Chinese government that it allowed such a lab to be poorly managed. If some pathogen leaked out of a US CDC facility, and killed hundreds of thousands of people, I'm sure the assignment of blame would not stop with the facility's management.
What I don't understand is how we still don't know where the damn thing is going to land. We know where it's at, we know its velocity, and we know its altitude. And yet nobody seems to be able to calculate the math for the its de-orbital trajectory? Is our rocket science after all these years really that much of a joke?
That is what this website [1] does. Simulating global weather from the surface up to the Thermosphere [2] a week in advance with the required fidelity to notify even continents would be an enormous undertaking. It would require detailed models of solar activity including how it reaches Earth.
As we get closer to reentry time the estimates will improve because there are fewer variables.
This particular case is notable because it is a deliberate uncontrolled reentry. Typically reentry is controlled, allowing for fine adjustments. Launch profiles typically also have some safety margin built in where even if a controlled launch becomes uncontrolled the spacecraft will still end up somewhere safe. None of that is the case here so the impact point is at the mercy of the wind.
It’s too late to edit but I attempted to reference my own comment and realized this link has already rotted. It now redirects to a useless Twitter thread.
To those saying it's cultural, or China is pushing this to be normal, or China needs to be sanctioned. Do you respond the same when SpaceX drops space junk to earth?
SpaceX usually deorbits their second stage rockets over the ocean in a controlled manner. The article you linked is about a one-off case where the rocket engine failed to re-light and ended up reentering in an uncontrolled manner.
There's a big difference between something like this happening due to an accident, and it being done on purpose as a matter of course.
Isn't the difference here that one was a deliberate design decision and one was a de-orbit burn failure? While the risks posed by both are significant (though the chinese rocket is much, much larger) there was no intent by SpaceX that this outcome was "good enough". That does not seem to be true here. They should probably both face sanctions, but the sanction for deliberate design choices should be much more severe than those for failures.
There seems to be a difference on how space junk is described based on who the source of the space junk is. e.g. see these headlines: https://imgur.com/a/FwzuMVK
In expectation the damage this will do is miniscule. Yes, China ought to compensate for damage/clean-up to whoever this falls on, but overall this is a non-issue. If they were able to reduce launch costs by 1% by not including the fuel/equipment to de-orbit in a controlled way, then it's a good trade off.
Every time you drive with your windows down you run the risk of something getting blown out of your window and causing a wreck behind you, but as long as you don't keep a bag of nails perched precariously on your window this is so rare it's not worth any hand-wringing.
First of all this is not the first, but second stage (because rocket has a parallel layout and second stage engine starts at same time with the first, it can be called "core" stage, but not "first"). First stage are the boosters on the sides. For example, Soyuz also has same layout (plus an upper stage, LM5 also has it, just not for LEO launches), and it's core is never called "first stage".
Also, this isn't a sign of anything going wrong. Upper stages very commonly enter orbit and sometimes stay there for long. It happened to SpaceX Falcon 9 too, it's just their rockets are smaller.
No, this is unusual because it is a first stage booster (it is lit on the ground, making it "first" stage in most people's common usage of the term (in reality, there's no hard and fast definition)). It is definitely not the "second stage" (the second stage of the Long March 5 is the CZ-5-HO).
This would be like the center booster of a Delta IV Heavy making it to orbit.
Second stages pretty much invariably make it to orbit. To say "it happened" to SpaceX makes it sound like something went wrong... it's just how rockets work. The central booster of a Long March 5 making it to orbit is unusual (though it has happened before).
I haven't done the math, but I would be surprised if a Delta IV-H couldn't fly a similar profile, resulting in the first stage being in a low orbit. DIVH and LM5 have similar LEO payload capacities, and the mass of everything above the first stage (dry second stage, propellant, and payload) is ~90t for both. So, quick napkin math looks like it works (obviously there are a lot of other complexities I'm ignoring here, for the sake of simplicity).
It can get to orbit technically of course! For that matter, just simply a single Delta core almost can do it, falling just short of LEO. All i wanted to say is that there are no possible payloads for this scenario (payload will be so small, a much smaller and cheaper vehicle could deliver it). It's not an operational configuration of DIVH because it makes no sense.
That's actually what's important here. We don't really care much about re-entry of things that burn up. We care if a giant hunk of metal lands on Earth. The Long March core stage is about ~7 times as massive as the Falcon 9 second stage.
The rest of the world need to start sanctioning China whenever the government acts in bad faith or with recklessness, before others follow suit. Leaving these things unanswered is an open invitation.
It's not the first time this happens. Without response it won't be the last.