The US should create an Agency whose sole focus is feeding China misinformation and bogus tech.

China has 1.4 billion people and a whole hell of a lot more Chinese kids are getting engineering degrees than kids in the U.S. while our schools are teaching "woke" silliness in programs ending in "studies".

Sure they have intelligence people stealing U.S. military tech - just as the U.S. and Soviets did the same to each other during the Cold War. We need to be smarter and sniff them out, but our entire intelligence apparatus was focused on the Soviets during the Cold War, and since 9/11 focused on the Middle East. I don't think we have enough Chinese American operatives that speak Mandarin and can be planted back in China without it being painfully obvious. Americans don't go to China to study technology - usually just to study Chinese language and teach English.

But in general they don't have to steal as much commercial technology, because western companies are giving it away. How? Well, it started with putting factories in China so they learned how to make things, then it continued with setting up R&D centers to adapt older existing product to the Chinese market (simpler and cheaper) at a lower cost for the engineering. Now, Chinese R&D centers are developing new product, again at a lower engineering cost, which is then adapted to the U.S. and Europe afterwards. Why? Saves a lot of engineering cost for the base product. In order to learn how to develop new products, they were taught how and given access to all kinds of design standards. Now there is still I.P. in the base platform that is designed here that the Chinese are not taught how to do, but they do the detail work on that foundation.

Sure China is behind, they only started industrializing in 1950 under the communists, and didn't start getting signifiant foreign investment until 1980. But they are moving very fast and catching up. I've seen it myself in the past decade.

And the official currency is the RMB or Remninbi. Yuan is an older more colloquial term.

As for tangible benefits of the U.S. space program:

Just about everything in telecommunications and satellites, computer advancements, superalloys, titanium alloys, ceramics, composites, telemetry and guidance systems, fuel cells, you name it. The challenges of getting to the moon in the 60's and then operating the shuttles in the 80's and 90's were incredible and all kinds of new tech was invented to solve the various problems. A lot of that was concurrent with military aircraft development and there was a lot of technology transfer between the two because the same contractors were working on both.

Yes there obviously has been tech developed from the space programs. The question is that if the trillions spent were worth it. Could you have spent a shit ton of money on research, skipping the moon altogether, and still developed the tech at a fraction of the cost?

The answer of course is yes. Pick any scientific and technological widget and throw an entire GDP of cash at the problem and new tech will be developed. That’s not the point, it’s self evident while searching high and low for Mr Fusion you will develop cool and useful stuff. The question is could you develop cool and useful stuff while avoiding wasting money. Going to the moon has solved exactly zero of humanities problems. Have moon rocks improved life on the planet? That moon rocket tech increased the lethality of our missiles way more than it benefited any human being.

International space station. Lots of money. What practical useful stuff has been built or developed up there? Is it paying the freight? Doubtful.

quote:

Originally posted by bruthajess:
One has to wonder how much information they stole from the United States and others to achieve this amazing accomplishment.

^^^^^^
Corsair was thinking the same thing and beat me to it.

All of it. Why create anything new when you can steal it instead.

quote:

Originally posted by cas:
Setup has gone slower than expected, working with Harbor Freight tools and all.

And stopping for a snack every two hours.

The Chinese are bent on world domination. Space immediately around the planet is just the next step to assisting in that domination. What if they decide to start destroying or just damaging communications, weather, military satellites? What will anyone do about it? They've already shown that they can cripple the planet by intentionally releasing a bug and then profiting MASSIVELY from the response to it. With ZERO repercussions. Now that the most powerful military on the planet is basically compromised by a guy obviously in their pocket, China can pretty much do exactly what they please.

Of course they can. So can we. We have proven satellite killing tech that we demonstrated decades ago. If you want to destroy satellites I suspect the Russians, Chinese, the US, and possibly others could do that at will. Satellites move fast but predictably. They aren’t hard to kill. At all. That very speed makes them easy to disable. Space could easily be one a veritable wasteland of shit if the shooting starts.

This is the space version of MAD.