China Space Official Confounded By SpaceX Price

hackingbear writes "Declining to speak for attribution, the Chinese officials from Great Wall Industry, a marketing arm of China Aerospace Science and Technology Corp. (CAST), say they find the published prices on the SpaceX website very low for the services offered, and concede they could not match them with the Long March series of launch vehicles even if it were possible for them to launch satellites with U.S. components in them. According to the SpaceX website, launch on a Falcon 9 — which has an advertised lift capacity of 10,450 kg. (23,000 lb.) — from Cape Canaveral costs $54 million — $59.5 million. If the SpaceX price is real and its quality is proven, both are big IFs, it is remarkable to see that US can beat China in term of price. Between August 1996 and August 2009, the Chinese rockets have achieved 75 consecutive successful launches were conducted, ending with a partial failure in the launch of Palapa-D on August 31, 2009. If we all learn from SpaceX, maybe soon China will outsource from the US."

Comments

Reverse outsourcing? No.

[macraig]

... maybe soon China will outsource from the US.

No, they won't. They'll do the same thing they've been doing for generations now: they'll study what we're doing (e.g. SpaceX), both legally and not-legally, copy it at first like a baby learning a new language, then learn how to integrate what they learn into their own way of doing things, and finally wind up doing it better or at least more cheaply than we can.

Comparitive Advantage

[Stormy Dragon]

China's big advantage is cheap unskilled labor.

Space rockets aren't produced in big enough batches to mass produce and generally require a lot of skilled labor. Exactly the sort of product where the US tends to have an advantage.

Re:Comparitive Advantage

[bmo]

>China's big advantage is cheap unskilled labor.

That's changing, though, in case you haven't noticed. They've targeted aerospace. Sure, they're not competitive *now* but do you seriously think that's going stay that way?

The US automakers thought the same thing in the 60s, 70s, and 80s.

--
BMO

Re:Comparitive Advantage

[Stormy Dragon]

That is, by and large, what the US does do. Contrary to general impression, US manufacturing continues to increase (in deed, according to the UN Industrial Development Org, the US accounts for 21% of the planet's manufacturing). In 2006, our country produced more than it ever had before. Since then it's fallen off a bit, but due to the recession, not outsourcing.

Now yes, manufacturing JOBS continue to decrease. But the reality is that it's not because jobs are going overseas; it's because they're disappering entirely. Much like agriculture at one time took a large part of society's labor and then shifted to something that only required a few percent, we are going through a similar shift where a few percent of the population is capable of manufacturing everything.

Re:Comparitive Advantage

[jd]

It's not enough to focus on skilled tasks. They need to be skilled tasks that the mindset is well-adapted for. Britain's penchant for risk-taking is why it is a key R&D center for not only Formula 1 but Indycar as well. America is risk-averse, which is why it has outsourced a lot of the low-profit, high-investment research (nuclear fusion, supercolliders, etc) to other nations. A lot of the R&D in America is high-profit (such as medical work, advanced microelectronics, etc) and requires relatively little investment once the research facility has been put together. Silicon Valley would never have survived otherwise, given the enormous cost of constructing some of those facilities.

Monocultures are a Bad Idea (Michigan can help explain that one rather better than it would like) but there's nothing wrong with optimizing to your strengths. Indeed, it seems very likely that if America stopped trying to compete where it is weak and started competing where it is strong, it would not run into so many problems. The same goes for the EU and everyone else. Diverting money to lost causes only achieves inferior progress everywhere else.

Of course, you have to be a bit careful with federating technologies. Although a federation is nominally superior to over-generalized societies, it is open to abuse. America doesn't produce its own Rare Earths, but depends utterly on China for them. Not because of any scaricity in America, more for convenience. That turned out to be an incorrect path. Politics now utterly controls the availability of critical elements, which is utterly wrong. You've got to have some balance in there.

Unfortunately, balanced thinking is something corporations (and people in general) are rather bad at.

Don't worry

[Kjella]

If SpaceX truly is better they'll just use the Chinese 3 step program:

The first ones, you build them and we launch them (teach us to use it)
The next ones, we build under your supervision (teach us to build it)
The final ones, we build ourselves on license (assuring completeness)

After that a remarkably similar Chinese rocket will replace the US one, naturally not paying any foreign royalties. Most everybody involved will care about their own quarterly bonus and will jump ship by then. Did I miss anything? There's no ??? step in this, but tben again it's not a slashdot plan...

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[MrEricSir]

China: if Microsoft was a country.

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[jd]

Pfffft. As if America hadn't done the same. America, prior to signing onto international treaties on copyright and patents, was notorious for reverse-engineering European products and then using mass-production (as opposed to specialist workshops) to undercut the Europeans and sell back to them. Indeed, most major nations throughout history have been... loose on morals and ethics in their formative years. The Romans stole all their technologies - and usually stole the countries that invented them too. The only "we" in this equation is humanity, since every nation on Earth that made it big did so on the back of other nations, robbing them at first, then exploiting them later. The usual end result is an addiction to those other nations, resulting in the inevitable death from that addiction.

(This is why I would like to see a nation actually acheve something honestly for a change. If there isn't that addictive quality, if using others isn't the drug of choice, then you might actually get stable, sustainable achievement. Might. Without any actual case studies to examine, this is a difficult theory to test.)

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[rAiNsT0rm]

I'm in solid agreement with you mostly, but there is a difference. Greed. Not just greed but artificial constructs such as the current stock market. Many European companies have endured and lasted perfectly fine on stability and flat/zero growth or very low percentages. And there is nothing wrong with that, but many US companies force massive, unsustainable, double digit growth in the name of stock prices and lining executive pockets and once they are run into the ground or fail spectacularly those execs simply move on to another company to rape. This has left many American businesses extremely weak and badly broken which is something that is a much deeper and serious. I think the US can and could innovate again, but first the infrastructure would need to be rebuilt and the desire to do so which we currently lack.

I actually don't care about patents and "secrets" as they are of marginal value anyhow in the grand scheme of things, it ultimately comes down to sustainability and the product. Every culture has gotten too big for it's britches at some point and most go supernova as a result, innovation be damned.

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[paiute]

Except that Microsoft spends more on R&D than most other companies combined and often enters markets long before anyone else. (See Smart Phone, MP3 Players, Tablets etc...)

Black powder, printing, noodles.

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[SplashMyBandit]

China had a technological lead a long time ago, in the technologies you mention. With the Age of Enlightenment (decreased religious and political control of learning and thought), the printing press, and personal freedoms the West/Russia/Middle East leapt ahead. So, while you mention black powder, (block) printing, noodles, which are all great inventions you are choosing to selectively ignore the mammoth changes the West developed since. For example: free speech, modern printing press, mass literacy, railways, steam/coal/hydro/wind/nuclear power, true understanding of electricity and electromagnetism, true understanding of chemistry, true understanding of much of physics, electromagnetic communication, flight, blah blah blah blah blah. Sure the Chinese were by no means primitive, but you are also missing the elephant in the room when you mention their historic contributions. Hopefully they'll also contribute again meaningfully in the future, instead of just copying and refining ideas as they are doing know. That said, I still personally would not like to be a Chinese citizen living in China, hopefully individuals will have more meaningful existences there too.

Re:Reverse outsourcing? No.

[thetagger]

They'll do the same thing they've been doing for generations now: they'll study what we're doing (e.g. SpaceX), both legally and not-legally

Still beats giving American citizenship to nazis who otherwise should have been hung in Nuremberg like you people did.

Re:Chinese lying?

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, iceland has deposit insurance, so the government guarantees you get (part of) your money back when a bank goes bankrupt. What's more, the icelandic government nationalized Landsbanki, and it went bankrupt after that.

So, there were guarantees, and it wasn't a private bank anymore.

From wikipedia: the government also guaranteed "that deposits in domestic commercial and savings banks and their branches in Iceland will be fully covered"