Considering Putin is playing politics with space, namely limiting critical RD-180 sales after the west criticized his illegal annexation of parts of Ukraine, as well as funding and arming rebels who are purposely targeting civilians, well, what exactly do you want us to say here? Engage in more mindless political correctness? Sing kumbaya around the campfire as to not offend Russiophile HN'ers?
Putin's Russia is bad. They're dishonest partners and the US should keep its space policy under its national borders for sanity reasons. Look at the early retirement of the ISS. Russia is taking its modules and leaving the project in a few years, again as punishing the west for criticizing their illegal annexations. Previous to this the ISS was thought to be a project with a decade or two of service left.
Also, Putin's mismanagement of his economy means he just cut the Russian space program by a third and what's left is good at flying Soviet-era Soyuz and building Soviet era RD-180's but can't keep post-Soviet Proton-M's from exploding. From a practical stand-point, ignoring everything else, we simply don't need or want their tech now that the RD-180 based rockets are being made redundant/replaced and Orion/Dragon flying astronauts in the next 3 or so years.
We are bringing back the world into the 20st century, this will be a big problem.
Putin's Russia is bad.
They need a replacement for the Russian rocket engines and SpaceX is the only good alternative.
There has been a lot of commentary in the news as to why SpaceX may not have been chosen. They don't have the track record that the current "monopoly" has. Even though SpaceX can deliver cheaper, these loads aren't nearly as price sensitive as commercial loads. SpaceX hasn't yet shown they can deal with increased load of launches.
I don't mind one or two articles - and I don't mind articles from mainstream news publications - but there are a lot of articles being published from the BBC. Here's the past 24 hours:
https://hn.algolia.com/?query=bbc&sort=byPopularity&prefix=f...
All of that said, they keep getting upvotes - so enough people clearly want them on Hacker News.
8 (bbc.co.uk)
9 (techcrunch.com)
10 (arstechnica.com)
14 (nytimes.com)
14 (theguardian.com)
16 (washingtonpost.com)
16 (youtube.com)
18 (wsj.com)
32 (medium.com)
46 (github.com)
40 (kickstarter.com)
40 (reddit.com)
40 (theatlantic.com)
44 (forbes.com)
46 (bloomberg.com)
46 (securityaffairs.co)
47 (theverge.com)
56 (bbc.co.uk)
62 (washingtonpost.com)
68 (arstechnica.com)
69 (bbc.com)
70 (businessinsider.com)
74 (wired.com)
82 (wikipedia.org)
102 (wsj.com)
105 (theguardian.com)
157 (nytimes.com)
159 (techcrunch.com)
163 (youtube.com)
339 (medium.com)
485 (github.com)
$ tail -n 10000 records \
| gawk '{print $NF}' \
| sort \
| uniq -c \
| sort -n \
| grep -n . \
| tac \
| head -21If we merge bbc.com and bbc.co.uk, we end up with 125 / 10,000. I suppose that isn't that many compared to others, but it's still higher than I think it should be. ArsTechnica (which often runs the same articles, such as this SpaceX one) only has 68 / 10,000 and the articles are written with a lot more technical detail.
Nevertheless, I'm not really sure what can be done about it. We can't ban the BBC from HN, as with BuzzFeed, because that's over the top - there's some good content. A nice solution might be to remind people, on the submission page, that it's better to go to the source - or at least a good, technical write-up - rather than a news post that is written for the general public.
Clearly the BBC isn't being spammed to generate upvotes
That said, here's the original report from the Air Force: http://www.af.mil/News/ArticleDisplay/tabid/223/Article/5897...
It's not wise to trust Russian-built anything, especially with diplomatic relations in their current state. Just like how foreign intelligence services shouldn't trust American-built computers.
What could go wrong? I'm not sure. But why make your attack surface larger than it has to be?
Even if they were to only support "national security" there is absolutely zero chance they can know whether they are actually supporting national security or global surveillance and oppression of human rights.
What people don't realize is that we, SpaceX and Musk, are really no different whatsoever than any of the companies that have been chided for "working with the Nazis" or "supplying the Nazis". The US Government and military are nothing remotely even close to "a force for good". A force for good does not support totalitarian dictators, overthrow governments, spy and surveil their "friends", assassinate scientists, support racist regimes, invade and collapse societies leading to the formation of ISIS, use government powers to support corporate private interests, shield, hide, and protect tax evaders, etc. The dirty laundry list is looooong.
Yes, the US government does lots of bad things. It also does lots of good things. It's a vast collection of sometimes loosely affiliated organizations with lots of competing interests and there's no reason to expect consistency. But there's no sensible comparison to the Nazis.
You should try peering beyond what you have been told to know. Because as NSA whistle-blowers have stated the expressed goal of the NSA is total global surveillance and population control dominance. It seems like the only and singular example of real global domination that humanity has ever even come close to. Do we really have to wait for a robot army to exterminate the masses of humans that serve no purpose once AI and robotics takes hold before you will start understanding the dire circumstances you are facing at far too late of a point in time?
EDIT: down votes? Can't argue the truth so better to bury it.
The largest and most optional cloud of space junk was a propagandist military display by the Chinese Communist Party in 2007 to show the world where their missile tech is going.
http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisom...
>The satellite's destruction is now being viewed as the most prolific and severe fragmentation in the course of five decades of space operations.
SpaceX works for the CCP now? Oh, right, mindless anti-US hyperbole that is upvote bait for anti-US HN'ers.
