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Chinese Astronauts Complete First Spacewalk
As_I_Please writes "At 8:40AM (GMT) this morning, Chinese astronaut Zhai Zhigang successfully spent 18 minutes in a tethered spacewalk outside the spacecraft Shenzhou 7. This is an important step in China's goal of building an orbiting space station and sending astronauts to the moon."
This is an important step in China's goal of building an orbiting space station and sending astronauts to the moon
Yeah, right. You've got a couple more steps before you can move into the Moon Base, speedy.
The same way the fireworks at the opening ceremonies of the Olympics were broadcast "live" ?
Laws affecting technology will always be bad until enough techies become lawyers.
When they do something like this, they aren't thinking of the next quarter's profits or even the next year's.
Instead, they are thinking about the propaganda benefits. It's something they must do to remain in power, so in a way they are also thinking short-term. Their primary motivation is not the advancement of humanity but maintaining the iron grip on the peoples' minds. Soviets have been there before.
PS: I think this was not faked, because propaganda has not to lie at least sometimes to work.
Those who would give up liberty to obtain working drivers, deserve neither liberty nor working drivers.
The Chinese deserve due credit for their achievements, in space. However, their government lacks any kind of credibility and that diminishes what has been accomplished.
It took them 40 years to catch up with the other superpowers in accomplishing this spacewalk, which should serve to amplify the effects of their oppressive regime and communist philosophy overall.
The Chinese news agency will fabricate whatever suits them, so any narrative going along with this accomplishment should be ignored. Their Olympics wowed us with their faked opening ceremony, underage athletes supported with government-supplied cover stories, biased judging and who knows what else that went undetected.
How much slave labor is used in their space program is unknown. How much stolen and misappropriated technology they've used is unknown. How many people that were sickened, injured or killed by the hazardous materials and working conditions prevalent in their space program is unknown. But we already know that the authoritarian state of China would forbid dissemination of this information, and we know that there's no reason to believe that these kinds of sufferings of their people have not ceased. This is what tempers our enthusiasm for their achievement.