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China Starts Developing Hybrid Hypersonic Spaceplane (popsci.com)
hackingbear quotes a report from Popular Science: While SpaceX is making news with its recoverable rockets, China announced that it is working on the next big thing in spaceflight: a hypersonic spaceplane. The China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is beginning advanced research on a high tech, more efficient successor to the retired Space Shuttle, with hybrid combined cycle engines combining turbofan, ramjet, scramjet and rocket engines, that can takeoff from an airport's landing strip and fly straight into orbit. CASTC's rapid research timeline also suggests that the reports in 2015 of a Mach 4 test flight for a recoverable drone testbed for a combined cycle ramjet/turbofan engine were accurate. And China also has the world's largest hypersonic wind tunnel, the Mach 9 JF-12, which could be used to easily test hypersonic scramjets without costly and potentially dangerous flight testing at altitude. Its nearest competitor, the British Skylon in contrast uses pre-cooled jet engines built by Reaction Engines Limited to achieve hypersonic atmospheric flight, as opposed to scramjets. Both spacecraft will probably first fly around the mid 2020s.
Well I guess that's easy when you hack into and steal everyone else's hard work.
comment gets modded down into obscurity. ;-)
That didn't take long.
China hasn't stolen anything.
You commented on China obtaining secret ideas. I don't see a problem with that. After all, information wants to be free.
Also, the countries China has taken information from still have the information and ideas. By the typical definition of stealing used here, China didn't steal them. I keep reading that piracy isn't stealing because the content producer still has the content, but unauthorized comments have been made. China may have pirated ideas, but they sure didn't steal them.
I also keep reading that piracy is justified when the content owner doesn't distribute content in a particular region. If the secret information and ideas weren't shared with China, surely they were justified in pirating it. It really is no different than pirating a song or movie that the author or distributor doesn't make available in the country I live in. If that type of piracy is acceptable, so is what China did. It really isn't anything different.
China hasn't stolen any secrets. They pirated the secret information and ideas, and they were justified in committing the piracy. You're wrong to complain about China.
I'm not so sure you should dismiss the Chinese as mere copiers. That's a little facile. The Japanese used to be belittled as mere copiers, too, but that was always an unfair generalization. The Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighter was not a copy of anything. It was far superior to anything that any other Navy had. They developed a vastly superior aluminum alloy, 7075, in the middle of World War II. They had the only submarine Aircraft Carriers (I-400 class) in the world, and they were also the largest submarines in the world. They had by far the best torpedoes in the world. The MXY7 Ohka was a devastating rocket-powered, human-guided anti-ship missile.
Yes, China and Japan have in history (up to very recent history in the case of China) copied, and stolen, plenty of stuff from the US. But they also have made great native achievements.
Who already has the world's only anti-ship ballistic[*] missile? Gee ... China - the DF-21D. It can't be copied from the US, because we don't have anything like that.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.
You could have funded Skylon for more than the chicken feed you handed them, you could have led the world in SSTO systems and exported the technology globally like you did with nuclear power generation and passenger jets. Now the Chinese are going to knock something up in 4 years and you'll be left with a footnote in the history of human space exploration as an "also ran"
Hardly surprising since it was Troll from start to finish. ;-)
Only one sentence in the whole article mentioning hardening against reentry heating. It glosses right over how exposed combined-cycle engines could be expected to survive this.
Lessons from shuttle include:
Dont take control surfaces and engines you dont need in space to space.
Don't connect stuff to the side of a rocket put it on top instead.
Lessons from sr71 blackbird:
Dont make a plane with holes to fill in by expanding metal skin. Blackbird leaks a lot.
It's even simpler than that.
In my country reverse engineering for personal and educational use is legal.
I strongly suspect that reverse engineering for space program use is legal in China.
If you don't like it don't do business there.
If you what to exploit the cheap production there, don't come crying when they exploit you back.
Your view of China is 30 years old. Wake up!
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
And the west's space Program would still be non-existent if the Chinese hadn't created gunpowder, which then spread through the Middle East and finally into Europe.
"take off". "takeoff" is a noun.
We're been dreaming about this ever since the 70ies. I remember as a Kid - both my father and grandpa worked for and with Nasa - seeing the SÃnger concepts.
We'd leapfrog SpaceX if this would finally happen, but I'm not holding my breath. This is difficult. Really difficult. But cool if the chinks can make it happen. Two thumbs up for the attempt.
My 2 Eurocents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
How about switching to unicode, dear Slashdot Team. It's 2016, for chrissakes. Or is this just mobile? 'Sänger' is the Name. (Let's hope HTML Umlaut renders correctly .... It's like 10 years ago that I last had to use these)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I was wondering if you were being sarcastic or not, but based on the wording , e.g. "I also keep reading that piracy is justified", I'm saying yes. (Maybe it's not as much sarcasm as reductio ad absurdum)
Gaining access to trade secrets has little to do with copyright infringement (or "piracy" if you will). They are perhaps breaking copyright a few times when copying the data verbatim, but for a small number of copies, the legal sanctions aren't that big. Your point about the use of "stealing" is valid. The Chinese "stole" something no more than pirates "steal" (though IMO not worth arguing over in both cases).
I don't think anybody is suggesting that
[...] piracy is justified when the content owner doesn't distribute content in a particular region
should apply to trade secrets, national secrets, private porn movies, passwords or anything. There's a different situation when someone is making something available, but asserting their copyright. An example of the opposite is when a corporation shares its design documents for a chip, or similar. They make the recipient sign an NDA, they don't rely on copyright to protect them.
When it comes to natioal / military secrets, it seems more like a game and less like a civilized society. Everybody spies. It's every nation's responsibility to keep their information safe, and "pirates" aren't clearly morally wrong.
Of course, Britain cannot possibly have a monopoly over the skylon idea. Even *if* they had made a working skylon spaceplane first (which would imply the idea is realisable) the Chinese would have made a similar thing in short time.
Legally obtaining information or content is copying content that has been compensated for through money and a legal binding contract.
Pirating information or content is copying content that can also be obtained using money by many people and making it accessible without charge for a huge amount of people.
Stealing information or content is copying content with strict access restrictions that cannot also be obtained using money (or by many people doing so) and also containing that data within a very limited access.
Freeing information or content is copying content with strict access restrictions that cannot also be obtained using money (or by many people doing so) and releasing that data for public access.
China has Legally obtained information for example by buying Kuka.
China is not interested in Freeing information because this secret information is not shared, also secret information was not publically availiable so China does not do pirating the information.
So except from legally obtained information, China is really stealing information. Also China has shown no interest in freeing information (example: number of peoples executed is considered a state secret).
China is different, but you are correct on one point information should be free and without control and censorship, especially in China.
It's not hard; "take off" is a verb, "takeoff" is a noun.
Try using the past tense, you'll see: Did you see that takeoff? That plane took off like a bat from Hell?
I think they are cheating here, as it is quite easy to beat the speed of sound in space...
If you're not employing megnetoplasmadynamic engines with potassium seeded helium propellant, I'm not interested.
You must be a product of American education system; You can't read and fail at comprehension, since GP has already answered your objection in his comment.
Wonder why American companies employ non Americans? People like you! Who who fail at even basic skills, demand high pay for incompetent work, while others do a great deal more better for far less.
Your kind are going learn to live under the oversight of lots of Asian bosses, start learning to be the underclass, whiteboy.
The particular line is often attributed to Stewart Brand.
On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it's so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the cost of getting it out is getting lower and lower all the time. So you have these two fighting against each other.
This is however paraphrased from much earlier sources. In particular the criticism that arose then the patent system was first introduced.
During the movement from the natural state where distribution of information weren't limited by the government a lot of people felt that it went against how things should be.
The argument for patents was that a lot of knowledge was kept away from society by people wanting to capitalize on it.
By allowing them a monopoly in the particular field they wanted to capitalize on the information could be made publicly available so that every other field could benefit from it.
If someone invented a new material for light bulbs they would make the knowledge of it available for everyone else to use as long as no-one else made light bulbs with it.
As we know this is not how it turned out and it can be argued that the patent system have led to less information being available for the public to use.
Looks like CIA doesn't agree with you.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=233639
Please just try to read something outside your bubble.
The Zero fighter was quickly countered by the Thach Weave. They had submarine carriers because the all of the real carriers had been sunk.
You know why the USA doesn't have the DF-21D missile? Because there aren't any enemy carriers to use it on. Seriously, do you even think before you write this stuff? How's the US going to use a carrier-killer missile? If the US did develop one you'd be front and center screaming about the waste and lack of a mission for this highly wasteful project.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
Yes, China and Japan have in history (up to very recent history in the case of China) copied, and stolen, plenty of stuff from the US.
Who, by the way, also "stole" quite a few things from Europe, back in the day. It's just what countries do, until they then take the lead and forget all that messy business. Annoying and probably wrong in some moral sense, but when has moral really been given a place in politics?
Cultures learn from each other all the time. The politically correct terms for this process are:
Colonialism - a poor society learns from a wealthy society.
Appropriation - a wealthy society learns from a poorer society.
Stealing - a wealthy society learns from another wealthy society that has not deigned to apply its own inventions.
I say, Go China! Mankind needs to see this craft fly.
Recall that, in the early years of our Great Country, Americans freely and openly copied British and French (mostly) industrial designs with impunity since there were not the international agreements that sort of prohibited this behavior.
The US figured that German rocketry tech was free for the taking as spoils of war.
This sort of thing has gone on since Og figured out cylinders are a neat idea when trying to move heavy objects. It is a constant game of cat and mouse, Spy vs. Spy and Sturm Und Drang. Since 'we' are arguably ahead of the Chinese in this theatre once expects the Chinese to be trying to copy us rather than the other way around. Rest assured if that ever changes, we will be glad to reverse roles.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
No, west's space Program was developed on liquid fueled rockets.
Learn to spell.
I guess China has finally stolen enough ideas, tech and infrastructure that they feel confident enough to try something like this.
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
And didn't the US steal a lot of German rocket and other technology after WW2? Did Wernher Von Braun have his government's permission to share the material he had (all right, don't answer that!)
Information in China may want to be free, but good luck staying out of jail.
There is no reason to be happy China stole ideas.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
the west's space program would have been non-existent, if the Westerners didn't copy China's bureaucratic systems. That added with democracies actually allow the west to achieve much more than they ever could previously.
Stealing IP doesn't preclude having significant capability of your own.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
To be precise French has submarine aircraft carrier Surcouf, armed with two 8" cannons in 1934.
Yes, developed by the nazi Germans.
And didn't the US steal a lot of German rocket and other technology after WW2? Did Wernher Von Braun have his government's permission to share the material he had (all right, don't answer that!)
Wernher Von Braun didn't have his government's permission to live either, that is why he brought his engineers and plans to the allies. Don't forget he also stole rocket tech from Robert Goddard, the US citizen who is the father of modern rocketry.
I hope they are right, I really do. Its just that I'm old enough to have seen dozens of these ideas appear, get hyped, the disappear. Anyone remember NASP? So far though, the only things that works to get to orbit are conventional rockets. SpaceX is making a lot of progress there.
Chinese government already has the blueprints of all most every plane in USAF service today (You can find proof of this in old news from Slashdot), where as the Japanese in World War II did not.
I hope the US government could realize that the Chinese government is just as bad as the Empire of Japan in WWII. I wonder how many Americans know that the party in total control of China right now had killed tens of millions of Chinese people, and supported communist revolution all over south east Asia. Do you know that the Chinese government is arresting hundreds of human right lawyers and journalists and making them denouncing themselves on TV? Do you know that the Chinese official news agency owned by the Chinese government is actively blaming all the problems in China to US and Japan, just to make Chinese people hate Americans and Japaneses?
US need to spend more on science and education to main it's dominance before it is too late.
No they did stole from US:
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/08/02/11/239202/space-shuttle-secrets-stolen-for-china
The US government and Lockheed need to start to audit their servers right now, may be they still have access to the blueprint of SR-72 today...
"You commented on China obtaining secret ideas. I don't see a problem with that. After all, information wants to be free."
You are a naive moron. Hey! I have an idea, let me publish your medical records. They just want to be free. How about your financial information? That should be free too.
You're an asshole. Grow the fuck up. Idiot snowflake.
Did you even read the article from Popular Science? Even their news article and the video is copied!
Their image shown for the engine is directly from declassified SR-71 manual (SR-71 is the world's first hybrid power plane designed by US in the 60s, and it is also the world's fastest maned vehicle with air breathing engine.)
Their video which showed a cg of a black prototype plane is copied from UK's Reaction Engines prototype.
They should pack a lot of dogs to eat.
After all, information wants to be free.
Tell that to the journalists and human right lawyers that your dearest leader have arrested.
What do you think the TPP is for? If you don't want to play by the law, don't complain later when the US and its allies fight back!
Yes, China and Japan have in history (up to very recent history in the case of China) copied, and stolen, plenty of stuff from the US. But they also have made great native achievements.
So you should not expel a student who cheats and plagiarizes every day just because he did one project on his own?
So China has "innovated" something that the rest of the 1st world seems worthless?and already have countermeasures against?
The credulous piece by Popular Mechanics just relays the Chinese government's propaganda.
Nobody can get SCRAM-jot to work for than a few minutes. RAM-jets are hard enough. You need to be up to at least Mach 3 for a RAM-jet to even ignite.
TFA describes a multi-type jet + RAM-jet + SCRAM-jet engine that adjusts the intake cowling to "transition" from jet-powered supersonic flight to RAM-jet powered supersonic flight, and so on.
The biggest point that the article missed is that a SCRAM-jet relies on oxygen in the atmosphere to supply to the oxidant. So how in the hell is that thing going to use a SCRAM-jet to get into LEO, where there is basically no air?
The article is almost as bad as that Iranian press release showing 15+ missiles all launching at the same time, that people on the internet immediately noticed was a bad Photoshop of a single launch, just cloned several times in the image.
Dear /. editors: Please stop being so credulous.
I'm confused. Do we have a white man's advantage or should we start white man's affirmative action ?
A new space race would be awesome.
But before that, the upstart USofA massively ripped-off Jolly-Old English IP without a second thought.
Yeah the first CG is from the Reaction Engines Skylon and the second CG is a Blue Origin VTVL rocket.
Have you ever looked at Goddard's rocket? He was a pioneer but the configuration used in modern rockets looks nothing like that.
I'm not so sure you should dismiss the Chinese as mere copiers. That's a little facile. The Japanese used to be belittled as mere copiers, too, but that was always an unfair generalization. The Mitsubishi A6M "Zero" fighter was not a copy of anything. It was far superior to anything that any other Navy had. They developed a vastly superior aluminum alloy, 7075, in the middle of World War II. They had the only submarine Aircraft Carriers (I-400 class) in the world, and they were also the largest submarines in the world. They had by far the best torpedoes in the world. The MXY7 Ohka was a devastating rocket-powered, human-guided anti-ship missile.
Yes, China and Japan have in history (up to very recent history in the case of China) copied, and stolen, plenty of stuff from the US. But they also have made great native achievements.
Who already has the world's only anti-ship ballistic[*] missile? Gee ... China - the DF-21D. It can't be copied from the US, because we don't have anything like that.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.
There is nothing new about this missile. It's a nuclear warhead on a missile with a guidance system.
Are you saying that is a new concept? If so, please explain how in detail.
$0.02 Yuan have been deposited in your account.
They also utterly failed to successfully move past the Zero, as the aircraft was not a remarkable innovation, but a steep gamble; trading durability for performance. The underdeveloped nature of domestic Japanese aero engines forced their hand on this - and it's also why they failed to produce anything better than the Zero in numbers that might have mattered. They produced several good airframes, and all of them came to naught for want of a decent powerplant. As the 1:1 kill ratio between the Zero and the Wildcat demonstrates, they had to make this compromise just to achieve rough parity - and once the US threw its industrial might and genius into the war, they surpassed them rapidly.
Most Japanese small arms worth a damn were copies of French weapons, usually of Hotchkiss manufacture. The same for their anti-aircraft guns; this is one reason their woefully insufficient 25mm gun was never improved upon or augmented (the closest they got was a copy of a Bofors 40mm captured off a British ship at Singapore; a prototype was found postwar. It never reached full production.) They failed to produce a decent submachine gun in any significant quantity, their best attempt at an autoloading rifle was a copy of the M1 Garand they could not make work (The Type 4,) and their domestically manufactured service pistols ranged from poor and flawed (the Nambus and Type 26 revolver) to outright dangerous to the user (the Type 94 Nambu.) Their ships weren't much better. Their submarine aircraft carriers were moronic; incredibly expensive, easily detected, slow-maneuvering submarines that could deliver a pitiful amount of ordinance. Their naval guns were upgraded copies of British guns on ships the British had been paid to build for them pre-war, and their much-vaunted cruisers only achieved their performance by being floating treaty violations half again as heavy as was allowed. The oxygen-based torpedo was a truly remarkable achievement, but its technical brilliance has been overblown by the comparative idiocy of the US Navy's Ordinance Bureau, which produced a brilliant weapon (the magnetic detonator) and then sabotaged it by negligence worthy of a firing squad (they conducted exactly two test firings of the torpedo pre-war, one of which failed - and then ordered full-rate production of a weapon that their laughably insufficient test had given a 50% failure rate.) It is rarely mentioned that the oxygen torpedo itself was a deliberate trade-off avoided by other navies due to its danger; more than a few Japanese ships fighting battle damage were sunk by their own torpedoes, and at least one was sunk outright by a lucky hit from an escort carrier's fan-tail peashooter (at the Battle off Samar.) Add to this that the Long Lance's power was most keenly felt in the early war by dint of its surprise factor; ships were nailed by them at ranges far in excess of normal torpedo range (the Dutch suffered a particularly crippling defeat due to this.) Once the advantage of surprise was gone and the Allies knew to maneuver in response to possible torpedo attack their effectiveness dropped sharply.
[*] The "ballistic" part is a misnomer, because the missile has terminal maneuvering. But that is always how it is referred to as.
Complete bullshit. Being able to nudge its trajectory a bit in the final terminal moments of flight is enough for it to hit a ship moving at 30 knots - not enough to re-target an entirely different batch of ocean. The weapon is ballistic in every sense of the term that matters. There's been several stories - a few on slashdot, even - about Chinese efforts to develop "hypersonic glide vehicles" which could make much more significant course changes at much higher altitudes specifically because of this. Much like the Japanese Long Lance before it, the DF-21 is a modification of an old concept - they took a ho-hum SRBM and put a radar sensor on it to track a moving target. Whuppity fucking doo. Holding it up as an example of Chinese brilliance is silly.
Like Japan before it, China i
Considering that the V-2 ripped of John Goddard's gyroscope design without paying a cent in royalties, you could call it a simple matter of debt collection.
...when they've built the "first" of anything that hasn't been researched, developed, and likely designed by someone else such that they simply stole the plans, connected a few lines, and built it domestically.
They can't really even build a decent jet engine themselves.
-Styopa
Hmm. They have the top 2 super computers. Due to a US embargo these use there own cpus. Among the top 500 they have right there 25 percent of the flops.
They also have the most slots in the 500. The total flops on the list is about half an exobyte. They have a concrete road map to the first exoflop machine. We want one of those too but we do not seem to have a plan.
I remember when they built that nice wind tunnel. We bad mouthed it as stupid publically. Probably needed clean underware.
Damn commies. Grin.
"..Who already has the world's only anti-ship ballistic[*] missile? Gee ... China - the DF-21D. It can't be copied from the US, because we don't have anything like that."
Bullshit. China copied the much ballyhooed DF-21D "carrier killer" from the US Army Pershing II IRBM. The Pershing 2 warhead was packaged in a maneuverable reentry vehicle (MARV) with active radar guidance. The same concept that the DF-21D is supposed to have..
Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pershing_II