roystgnr
2d ago
Oh, hell, I forgot about the Masculine Mongoose! Yeah, those were wonderful, and more accessibly so than "Kindness to Kin"; still short stories, but I shouldn't have forgotten to mention them.
The "conspiracy world" stories were interesting but not great as stories.
I hadn't read "but hurting people is wrong"; thanks for the recommendation!
roystgnr
2d ago
deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference
Nitpick, since I don't think it matters for your philosophical point, but the difference can be huge. I know the "butterfly farting in the Mezozoic" thing sounds like a silly metaphor ... but it's not silly, and it's not even a metaphor. Microscopic perturbations changing macroscopic weather (in weeks of time, not just eons) is a straightforward consequence of "chaotic dynamical systems exist" (not in a two dimensional state space or lower, but easy to prove with three dimensions) and "the weather is a chaotic dynamical system" (not actually proven, but Lorenz's first three-dimensional system demonstrating chaos was something of a simplification of the real sextillion-Avogadro's-number-dimensional system, and we're pretty confident the more complicated one actually is more complicated). A butterfly changing the course of a tornado was literally an example Lorenz used in his talks. Chaotic systems can be deterministic (except in the sense that we can never accurately determine their output because the cost of doing so increases exponentially with simulation time), but if you combine a deterministic chaotic system with a stochastic initial perturbation, that perturbation grows exponentially until it's the size of the attractor and the whole macro state depends on it.
roystgnr
2d ago
He doesn't have any other fiction on the level of HPMoR, though, does he? "Three Worlds Collide" was interesting but not great. I really like "Kindness to Kin" but it's just one short story. I'm working my way through "planecrash" right now, and so far it's a pretty good first draft of something that could have become a good novel series after it got a ton of editing that it didn't get.
On the other hand, HPMoR is roughly four long novels put together, and I watched it get produced in real time and saw how little editing it got, and although I find that intensely annoying (I'm trying to avoid getting too spoilery, but at at least one point there's an explicit moral that the protagonist has been an idiot by neglecting to consider advice from others, and the irony just hurts), it's quite amazing for someone to make it from beginning to end of that much writing, juggling a coherent arc-plot through multiple major tonal shifts, without ever seriously dropping the ball. In "planecrash" he's at least capable of co-writing and adapting to others' ideas, so he could have handled working with an editor if he'd ever actually made a career of writing and gotten one.
roystgnr
7d ago
Microsoft have embraced H1-B visas and Infinity Indians with open arms... and look at what's happened to their products.
Windows 95 and Windows 98, a product line with over a hundred million users, had a bug that caused them to invariably crash after 49.7 days, when a 32-bit millisecond uptime counter would roll over.
This bug went undiscovered for nearly 4 years, because so few of those hundreds of millions of computers made it 7 weeks without crashing that nobody noticed the final hard cutoff of any survivors.
roystgnr
7d ago
Technically the FCC rejection of Starlink's rural broadband subsidy application was after Musk made the offer to buy Twitter, but before the transaction took place.
And the Biden grudge against Musk was at least a year older still. Biden holding his "Electric Vehicle Summit" but then not inviting the manufacturer of a supermajority of US EVs because they weren't unionized was ... well, the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" does get overused, but that NY Post article helpfully includes the photos of Biden literally test-driving an electric Rubicon, so who am I to argue with dramatic irony?
"Hopefully their future will see a little less gradatim and a little more ferociter."
A few weeks ago, the topics of SpaceX and their competition came up, and although I was "non-ironically excited for the possibility that Blue Origin's upcoming second attempt to accomplish a booster landing is about to succeed", I might have primed myself to fear disappointment by talking about Boeing's Starliner first. A year and a half ago Boeing were poised to be the ones to break SpaceX's current monopoly on United States crew launch ... and then they launched crew on a vehicle that still hadn't fixed all the Reaction Control System thruster problems from three years earlier, and they needed SpaceX to get them safely back down again.
It's a good thing I didn't quite finish this post yesterday like I'd planned, because today it's been announced that Starliner won't even try to fly humans again until after another cargo flight, and NASA's brought their contract down to 4 missions instead of 6. I don't think either side of that contract wants any part of it anymore; it's all trying to recover a fraction of sunk costs at this point.
Blue Origin, on the other hand, appears to indeed be moving from "gradatim" mode to "ferociter" mode!
After a number of minor delays, the NG-2 mission successfully launched New Glenn's first mission out of Earth orbit: two ESCAPADE spacecraft (buses by Rocket Lab, instruments by NASA and a few University labs) are now on their way to the Earth-Sun L2 point; after an Earth flyby late next year they'll be headed to Mars next. Despite the long-term SpaceX focus on Mars colonization, the Blue Origin + Rocket Lab combination will likely beat them to putting spacecraft in Mars orbit; even the SpaceX launch of Europa Clipper only included a Mars flyby, on the way to Jupiter.
The first New Glenn launch lost its booster due to engine relight failure; in NG-2 a little of the live video was lost, but the booster itself stuck the landing perfectly, as seen more clearly from more distant footage, making Blue Origin the second institution to accomplish a powered landing of an orbital rocket booster, with the second-most powerful rocket to ever be recovered, and the most powerful to be recovered on its own landing gear.
The landing was very inefficient, aiming far from the target initially (as SpaceX does too, to ensure that if engine restart for landing fails the rocket will instead impact at a point where it can't do any damage), but then taking a very slow, almost "hovering" horizontal slide over to the precise center of the landing pad, burning much more landing fuel than SpaceX's "hover slam" landings. Unintuitively, this is probably all a good thing for Blue Origin. First, it's a demonstration of the ability to hover, which although inefficient as a nominal trajectory, adds robustness when things go wrong. SpaceX is well over 500 successful landings now, but this is after burning through a test vehicle and multiple "splashdown" landings before they felt ready to risk a barge, followed by four or five failed landing attempts, all due in great part to the difficulty they had landing a booster whose Merlin engines couldn't throttle down enough to hover if necessary. Second, this is a good bit of context for the rumors (anonymous, but via a trustworthy reporter) that the first New Glenn vehicle capabilities were well under the design's target payload numbers. It's common for a new spacecraft to gain unwanted mass and so lose performance during the design and testing process, but this can sometimes be fixed with subsequent iteration, and that big plume of burning mass ought to be a relatively easy target for them to quickly fix. They've also announced a 15% improvement to each of BE-3 and BE-4 engine thrust, to be deployed on future missions, so they'll be getting performance back from reduced gravity losses on both the way down and the way up.
Adding metaphorical weight to the performance problem rumors was the removal of literal weight from their first launch, whose "Blue Ring Pathfinder" looked like a toy compared to the full "Blue Ring" spacecraft bus+vehicle they'd been working on. There's still no semi-firm launch date for the full Blue Ring, but they've released photos of their first flight vehicle, in production now and at least intended for launch early next year.
We've also now got pictures of a more impressive flight vehicle: the Blue Moon Mk1 cargo lander, to be launched to the lunar surface early next year. It's half the height and only a fraction of the cargo capacity of their planned Mk2 crew-and-cargo lander, which is itself tiny compared to Starship HLS, but until those are launched this will be the largest craft ever to land on the Moon, roughly a third bigger than the Apollo Lunar Module.
We've even been shown a glimpse of test hardware hinting at long term design work: a deployable hypersonic aerobrake, "saving significant mass and cost and enabling heavy cargo delivery from the Moon, to Mars, and point-to-point missions on Earth."
And finally, as part of that thrust improvement announcement, we got a look at their longer-term plans: a scaled up "New Glenn 9x4", with 9 first-stage and 4 second-stage engines (as opposed to the existing newly-renamed "New Glenn 7x2"), stretched to be taller than Saturn V thanks to the additional thrust, expected to give them roughly 50% more capacity to Low Earth Orbit and nearly triple their payload to Trans-Lunar Injection. The 9x4 still won't have as much TLI payload as even the Block 1 version of the Space Launch System, but this is still likely to be a little more beyond-LEO payload than a fully-expended Falcon Heavy, but with a much roomier fairing like Starship, from a rocket in a (partially-) reusable configuration - and unlike with SLS, Blue Origin has been designing with multi-launch mission plans and orbital refueling in mind. That payload to LEO (two thirds of the Starship V3 target, and twice what V2 was reportedly capable of) may end up being more important than the TLI numbers in the long run.
None of these future numbers from either company are guaranteed, of course. The first Starship V3 booster just got wrecked in a failed pressure test, pushing the next Starship flight back from "January" to "Q1". New Glenn was originally supposed to launch those Mars probes a year ago, but juggled their schedule a bit after they lost two New Glenn stages, one also to a test failure and another to worker mishandling, last year.
The obvious thing Blue Origin really still has to work on is cadence. In Fall 2024, Blue Origin was expecting to do 8-10 New Glenn launches in 2025; they ended up managing one in January and a second in November. Rocket Lab likes to brag that their Electron was the only commercial rocket to ramp up faster than Falcon, and that's a fair brag, because cadence is much easier said than done. The Space Shuttle fleet was supposed to fly at least 24 missions per year, ideally more like 50; they ended up at 4-6 with a peak of 9, and cut some tragic corners just trying to reach that. I think Blue Origin has the right design to start with, at least. The difference post-landing between their gleaming methane-powered New Glenn booster and the soot covered kerosene-powered Falcon 9 boosters is like day and night, and hopefully that lack of coking is going to make inspection and maintenance of the rocket internals easier as well. Blue Origin is still talking about doing one or two dozen launches in 2026. I'll be very surprised if they even come near the low end of that, but I'm hoping to be eating crow in a year.
Still, seeing two successful New Glenn flights in a row, including their first successful landing, is heartening. Blue Origin not only managed to land an orbital rocket under the wire of SpaceX's landing 10-year-anniversary, this year they've already managed a couple entries on my checklist of what SpaceX has been up to since:
- Added downrange booster recovery options
- Added booster recovery from and (coming soon, in Blue Origin's case) reflight after missions beyond LEO
- Begun launching national security payloads
And they're working on more, both in the next year:
- Launching payload to the Moon
and in the longer term:
- Adding fairing recovery
- Adding extended fairing options
- Launching a multi-thousand-satellite constellation (hopefully starting with the first launch next year)
They're still behind, but for the first time in decades it feels like they're not falling further behind. Space launch in the USA may soon actually have options other than "keep praying Elon Musk doesn't go full Howard Hughes" or "just go back to paying far more money to Boeing or Lockheed for a fraction of the results".
roystgnr
11d ago
Hasn't enrollment in English programs actually dropped in the last few decades?
Apparently so! From a peak of 55K Bachelors' degrees per year in the late 2000s down to 40K in 2017-2018 (the latest data I could quickly find).
Sadly, that doesn't mean the employment prospects for English majors are actually much better.
This was sadly less surprising to double-check. Among new graduates, they were looking at 4.9% unemployment, 48.6% underemployment in 2023.
roystgnr
11d ago
If you look at the stats, English majors aren't half bad. Their average SAT score of 1143 (in the 2023 data, latest I could find quickly) doesn't beat Engineering majors (1174) or Mathematics-and-statistics majors (1269, which includes beating the English majors' average on the English subtest) ... but it's nearly tied with Philosophy-and-religious-studies, it's consistently ahead of general History, and it's a step above many of the "or something" options. The "you're going to be working with your hands" majors tend to fall below the "you're going to be manipulating symbols" majors on the "how good are you at manipulating symbols" test, unsurprisingly, but among the symbol-manipulation majors there's also some sad showings from: Area, ethnic, cultural, and gender studies (991, and seemingly dropping fast over the preceding years!?), Family and consumer sciences/human sciences (971), and everyone's (least) favorite ironically low average score, Education (1023).
roystgnr
12d ago
to remove trump
There is a huge gap between the "refuse to obey illegal orders" talk I saw and this. Could you link (and ideally transcribe) what you're paraphrasing here?
roystgnr
13d ago
I wouldn't say I had any sexual attraction pre-puberty, but my first crush/infatuation was in elementary school. There were at least 2 or 3 of those before I hit puberty, all to the opposite sex, which probably wasn't coincidental.
roystgnr
13d ago
Oh, wow, that's a good idea. ～ is actually a better "pay attention, this is not a blurry minus sign, this is approximation" character, at least on my screen.
Obviously, HTML named character references are a lot easier to remember than hexadecimal representations
I'm a big X Compose Key fan, especially with custom sequences. Need the real numbers? Win, m, b, R (mnemonic "math bold R") gives me ℝ. Defining the square function x↦x² with "bar arrow" notation? My "Bar arrow" is Win, |, >, and "squared" is Win, ^, 2. I'm already using Win, for ≈ ... but , Win, b, ~ should work for a "bold" tilde, if I could ever remember to use it.
roystgnr
13d ago
Andor had a somewhat slow start, which for a TV series probably hurt a lot. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Rogue One, you weren't going to walk out of the theater, so you'd end up making it to the good parts. If you found yourself yawning 45 minutes into Andor you'd just never watch the second episode, and I wasn't ready to agree with the good reviews until the third.
But yeah, I think you're right and I'm only getting into the weeds of why you're right. They can't just ask us to trust them for more than an hour anymore. I don't watch anything Star Wars now unless I see a variety of good reviews by trusted reviewers first, so unless they advertise enough to get me or my kids interested enough that I'll seek out the reviews, we don't bother, and that means we'll never be part of any viral hype ourselves. I'm hoping the next movie will be good but I'm definitely not going to see it on opening night.
roystgnr
14d ago
Prune juice always worked well for my kids, and coffee for me, but if you're having a morning espresso every day for weeks and not seeing much effect, I'm not sure how strong you want to go with stimulant laxatives.
Water absorbers like fiber and miralax are good for softening stools and avoiding developing constipation, but if you're already blocked up it's too late to try to soften the culprit with additional solids. Getting yourself very well hydrated and using a chemical stool softener medicine can help even after you're already blocked up.
Are you still blocked up, though? "small and soft", as long as it's still frequent, sounds like a subtle diet change, not a still-unsolved blockage. If you're not bloated then maybe you really do just need more fiber.
If you are still blocked up, for weeks? Lifestyle changes can be subtle (travel can be a trigger for me too, though never nearly this bad), but if you're having awful constipation with no diet/lifestyle changes and you're male and you're paranoid/hypochondriac then it wouldn't be completely crazy to get a PSA (Prostate-Specific Antigen) self-test kit and then go in for a real exam if it comes up positive. Increasingly bad constipation was the first symptom of my father's cancer, and not getting it looked at until it sent him to the hospital gave the tumor time to metastasize.
roystgnr
14d ago
That one's bitten me too many times before, but these days using Unicode for x·y·z when I want an explicit symbol works well and is almost second nature, when I'm thinking in "math mode". If I'm thinking in "programming mode" then I default to x*y*z but the whole expression is inside backticks and markdown doesn't ruin it.
What markdown still wrecks for me is the use of "~40" to indicate that the number is a loose approximation, which then sometimes turns into a big strikethrough if I use it a second time. Unicode gives us ≈, but that doesn't feel right to me when there's nothing to the left of it.
I like your preferred method of analysis, BTW. It reminds me of the old argument that the US should be expressing vehicle efficiency in gallons per mile (or per 1000 miles, whatever) rather than in miles per gallon, because the latter leads us to overestimate how large the additional savings are when we further improve already-high-efficiency vehicles and to underestimate how important improvements are for the remaining gas guzzlers.
roystgnr
14d ago
That's a good point.
I think one difference just obscures the similarities for me, though: with Anakin, everybody explicitly criticized the execution; with Daenerys there were a lot of fans criticizing the very idea that she would do such evil things as (Googling for some top comments) "character assassination", in addition to those who criticized the execution.
The more I think about it, the more I think that difference is just dramatic irony rather than gender. Even if the execution with Anakin was mostly bungled, at least every bit of proper foreshadowing did hit home, because we saw it in the context of what we knew was going to happen in the end. With Daenerys, limited foreshadowing and inadequate setup might as well have been no setup, because people could always make a few excuses and miss a few more hints, especially in the context of a story where some major plot twists had been given much more setup.
roystgnr
14d ago
Anecdotes aren't data, but all I can really argue with is the hyperbole here: "killed", "obliterated", and "overnight". Data-wise: box office totals went from $2.1B for TFA to $1.3B for TLJ to $1.1 for RoS among the trilogy movies, and from $1.1B for Rogue One (pre-TLJ) to $0.4B for Solo (post-TLJ) side movies. On the one hand, 1.1 billion dollars is still decent money for a zombie, years after TLJ! On the other hand, it sure looks like a ton of people heard the bad reviews and skipped TLJ, a fraction of the ones who wouldn't skip it sight-unseen were like you and didn't bother to see RoS afterward, and most of the ones who did see RoS were probably just looking for some closure and aren't interested in or aren't trusting of Star Wars movies in general anymore.
It'll be interesting to see what happens with "The Mandalorian and Grogu" next year. Box office receipts are just so much cleaner than estimates of streaming viewership. I'd put that in the "side movie" category, naturally, but will it be a $1.1B side movie or a $0.4B side movie? On the one hand, it's coming off of the most popular Star Wars TV show. On the other hand, the show already lost popularity and acclaim in its third season (not to mention with its spinoff show), and the attitude of "Look, Grogu! We still have Grogu! No plot closure for Grogu yet!" is a pretty blatant cash grab attempt, centering a character who was expected to be little more than an amusing MacGuffin until "Baby Yoda" toys started selling by the zillions.
roystgnr
14d ago
LaTeX also doesn't interpret repeated * symbols as a request to hide them both and italicize the text between them. ;-)
roystgnr
14d ago
Ah, I get it - it's that combination of both tropes for that gender you've never seen before? That does get much harder! Two out of three, sure, but...
Personally I wouldn't even count Magneto, since IMHO a key part of the Mary Sue / Marty Stu concept is that they're a viewpoint character that audiences are expected to become invested in, not just a side character. Maybe I'm just ignorant of the comics, but at least in the movies Magneto always seemed to be a deuteragonist foil for Xavier at best. That "can't just be a side character" rule also rules out a couple female examples I've seen in video games, and maybe one from TV.
I think Daenrys Targaryen might be the only example I can come up with! And ... maybe that's the exception that proves the rule? I think the real underlying reason for everyone's disappointment with the Game of Thrones final season was the low quality of the execution once the showrunners no longer had books to work from, but one of the biggest explicit complaints was the way the story turned so many people's favorite Savior character into another villain. Is that a gendered thing, or would people have been equally pissed about Anakin if they hadn't known it was coming?
roystgnr
14d ago
the change sounds... positive to me?
A regional governor isn't a guy you elect locally to represent his home region, it's a guy hand-picked by the central ruler to control his assigned region. Think Lord Cornbury, not George Washington. It's a form of centralization.
Ultimately, the way things shake out in the prequel trilogy, I find myself rooting against the republic. Fighting separatists? Separatists are people who don't WANT to be in your republic, crushing them puts you on the side of meddling interventionist empires, not freedom fighters.
This, on the other hand, is part of my headcanon too. The separatists are clearly assholes, but they're also just the second-to-last of the series of puppets that Palpatine has been using to manufacture crises and accrue power, and at this stage of his plan the way to avoid such a trap would simply be to not walk into it. I'm honestly not sure whether this was a brilliant decision by Lucas (showing that the physical downfall of the Jedi was a consequence of their moral downfall, that they were all as prone to paranoid attachment and jealousy as Anakin, but for power and control and stability rather than for love) or a lucky-but-ignorant decision by Lucas (thoughtlessly internalizing a false lesson of the US Civil War, the idea that because separatism for an evil cause is evil, separatism can simply be assumed to be inherently evil), but it worked.
roystgnr
14d ago
That just means we get to argue about whether it's funnier to call him a "Marty Stu" or a "Gary Stu".
Assuming we argue here, that is. I guessed that TVTropes would have something about how "Mary Sue Tropes are too contentious to provide specific examples", but AllTheTropes was supposed to be the "We're not interested in Censorship", "Debate is Encouraged" fork and even there it's "No examples, please; Mary Sue Tropes are by their nature YMMV Tropes, and we don't need the flamewars."
roystgnr
15d ago
The prequel trilogy had the Jedi becoming reluctant leaders in a massive war, though, and then had that backfiring on them horribly in multiple ways. This was one of the good things about the prequel plot: it retconned Obi Wan's and Yoda's reclusion and pacifism as being a desperate reactionary attempt to return to the old pre-war ways, an overreaction which makes more sense from that psychological point of view than on its own merits, as the original trilogy itself showed their attitudes to be quite lacking. Fortunately the original trilogy also shuffled the last of the old guard Jedi out of the way in the end, clearing the stage for Luke's more tempered, more reluctant, more battle-tested inclinations toward pacifism and forgiveness, ready to try to build something anew.
How do you balance a unwavering love of peace with the varying need for violence? It's an interesting question, and it was all nicely set up for them to add new thematic answers to! They had a formerly main character who'd aged to fit the "old wise mentor whose advice might not be listened to" role himself (and whose wisdom therefore wouldn't necessarily disrupt the narrative tension of protagonists making their own mistakes), who'd seen the consequences of both extremes, and who definitely could come up with advice better than "I should try to murder my nephew in his sleep and then abandon the galaxy". All the sequel trilogy needed to do was complete the last third of the "thesis, antithesis, synthesis" dialectic, instead of going with "thesis, antithesis, potato".
I do like the idea of exploring your interpretation of the Force, but I also like interpretations just the opposite of yours, even if they draw as heavily on the prequel as on the original trilogy.
So that's what I'd do: interpretationS, plural.
Much of the genius of early Star Wars was that it hinted at a much larger universe than it had time to show on screen. Lucas started unnecessarily spoiling this pretty quickly ("I am your father", okay, but "sister" too? How small is this "galaxy", anyway?), and after everyone had time to reflect in between trilogies and then continue the spoilage anyway, it just became more clear that those hints of grand scope were only a lucky accident (C3-PO and Chewbacca had to get memberberry parts too? seriously?) ... but we could try to recapture some of that scope, on purpose, by establishing a universe that's at least ideologically large. Show more places where Han's "hokey religion" attitude was just common sense, because there were only ever ten thousand Jedi among millions of planets. Show more of the core Sith point of view that makes it so dangerously tempting. Show the various contradictory lies that the Sith spread until they took on lives and followings of their own. Show which Jedi beliefs might only be true "from a certain point of view" and at least leave room for a little doubt with the rest.
On the other hand, TFA actually loved hinting at mysteries, which was wasted when that prep work just got thrown out by TLJ, leaving little more than a paint-by-numbers rework of ANH behind. The prequel trilogy did more hinting at grand scope (if only by accident, in between the spoilage), but it got buried by wooden dialogue and cartoonish set pieces. It's easy to pick out one thing at a time that we could have done better, but I'm sure I'd have done a dozen different things worse as a director.
Now, as a producer, if the whole sequel trilogy had been mine to make, the major changes would have been easy: insist on having three scripts in advance (even if the second and third might be heavily changed later), insist on either more closure for the first two movies' endings or giving all three movies to the same director or both, and don't let that director be either a "mystery box!" guy or a "subvert expectations!" guy.
Oh, and I would absolutely excise the schtick where they have to practically retcon the rebels' huge victory to try to make them the Loveable Underdog again, but that's another obvious big-picture improvement that could be very easy to screw up entirely when we get down into all the critical little details.
roystgnr
18d ago
Some medicines have different levels of effectiveness and different levels of side effect severity for different people even. I used Flonase on and off for a couple years, and never had any issues with eye pressure as far as my optometrist could measure. Allergists were thrilled by the stuff, because "maybe it'll give you glaucoma if you're susceptible and use it for years on end and don't check for warning signs" from nasal steroid sprays was still a big step up from "you can clear up your congestion for a few days, after which you have to stop or the rebound effect will just give you double-strength congestion for much longer" from nasal decongestant sprays.
Anyway, you don't want to use anything for years for sinus relief, regardless of side effects. If you've got congestion problems that last longer than the few weeks at a time of bad pollen seasons, get yourself taking allergy shots. They're very inconvenient (for me it was three shots a week, tapering down to one a week as they increased in dosage, for months and months) but very effective (I went for about two years unable to breathe through my nose after moving to a new neighborhood with more and different pollen; a decade or more after my shots I get congested maybe a few days a year during a bad year).
roystgnr
20d ago
That's a bit of a motte-and-bailey, though, isn't it? He said "files and folders"; you say "autoexec.bat or config.sys". Even in a perfectly working system there's value to be had in being able to sort your own data (independently of application) and in being able to look through others' sorted data. You're talking about people who can't change spark plugs and he's worrying about people who can't steer. (although that metaphor works both ways, in the world of "car, drive me to my brother's house" and "computer, show all the meme images I edited that have a cat in them")
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
If I'd expected a nomination I'd have tried to be a little less rambly. That was supposed to be a "I've been a bit too pessimistic about Blue Origin, here's a correction, my bad", but I kept seeing more to add and I couldn't think of anything to cut.
So, screw it, here's more to add, for anyone who was interested in the prior post:
The first LandSpace Zhuque-3 launch just reached orbit, then failed its booster recovery. For them this is excellent news on the whole.
Great news: new rocket designs tend to fail their first flight as often as not, and it's always a relief to see "not", especially with a design that's trying to be cutting edge with stainless steel tankage and methane engines. For comparison, their Zhuque-2 failed on both its first launch and on the latest of its 5 launches since.
Bad news: they could have been the third institution ever to manage a powered orbital booster landing, mere weeks after Blue Origin became the second; now there's a decent chance of them being beaten to it.
Good news: they came really close to being second, with the returning booster crashing right next to the landing pad, despite Blue Origin having roughly a 150% head start. At this rate they'll almost certainly manage a landing faster (relative to company founding) than either Blue Origin or SpaceX did. Older Chinese launch vehicle designs were infamous for dropping expended boosters near populated villages with little control while spraying carcinogenic orange smoke; even if LandSpace takes a while to perfect their landings, a clean methane fire right over a dedicated landing zone is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
Bad news: the landing burn appears to have turned the entire booster into a fireball from one failed engine ignition. Half the point of clustering several engines on one booster is supposed to be that you can recover from a single failure, as happened to a SpaceX Dragon 1 cargo mission back in 2012.
Great news: even if they have a little work on robustness and landing to do, this rocket may be economical for them already; if they've hit their payload targets (hard to be sure yet; their first flight was a "mass simulator") then they've already doubled the payload of the Zhuque-2 and are up to roughly half that of Falcon 9, which they're expecting the Zhuque-3E to meet (at roughly the same price, too) after engine upgrades and a vehicle stretch.
One of the possible outcomes of the "new Space Race" has always been another Pyrrhic victory, this time for China: flags and footprints, Apollo style, followed by a series of cancellations of and creations of economically unsustainable programs, Apollo/Shuttle/Constellation/SLS style. That possibility is looking more and more remote. The next attempt at a new booster design landing, from a different Chinese launch vehicle, is expected later this month. Chinese institutions may take 3rd and 4th place in the reusable booster race.
More options
Context Copy link