The Problems with China's Space Program 

2:17 Holy sh*t. Imagine you're just minding your own business, farming and stuff, and then a goddamn _space rocket_ hits your village out of nowhere.

Whenever you see fuming oxidiser, just run

"Please adjust your location quickly" got me

See any coloured gas? Run.

My 9th grade Physics teacher used to work in the NASA office that would track near earth orbit debris and once in 2008, China launched a satellite, and the proceeded to launch a missile and blew up their own satellite. This greatly annoyed everyone in his office because one object with a transponder had become thousands of smaller objects without transponders

Did I miss a mention of the Long March 6A, the rocket where the upper stages like to explode in orbit? Pretty worrying, for a number of reasons.

13:01 Chinese worker: “Boss, we’ve lost the static test” Boss: “It’s ok, misfires happen. We will try again tomorrow”. Chinese worker, points to the sky: “No, we have literally LOST the rocket off the launch pad” Boss: “Oh. Where’s it going?” Chinese worker: “We’ve no idea where it’ll end up?” Chines worker #2: “Hey I’ve found these chains laying around, anyone any idea what they were supposed to be used for?”

The Space Shuttle is a useful comparison to the Long March 5B in that it also had no upper (second) stage, but unlike the Long March, the Shuttle did NOT drop rocket stages on unsuspecting villages in Africa. The Shuttle accomplished this by very intentionally shutting its main engines just short of actually reaching orbit. It would jettison its multi-ton orange external tank which, because it was still in a suborbital trajectory, would fall back down, into a KNOWN & PRE-PLANNED location in the ocean. The tank-less Shuttle would now use the small, built-in orbital maneuvering thrusters (OMS) to add that last bit of energy to achieve orbital velocity. The Shuttle's first flight was in 1981. It was built in the 70s. Design began in the 60s. This has been a well understood problem with a known solution for half a century: shut down first stage engines prior to orbit, then use small thrusters or a kickstage for final orbital insertion. China does what it does because it just doesn't give a f*ck. I even heard them at one news conference trying to gaslight the world by referring to the giant first stage as an UPPER (second) stage (meaning only the side boosters were the first stage) and claiming that it's "standard practice" around the world to leave upper stages to deorbit on their own, in an uncontrolled manner. Technically both the Long March 5B and the Space Shuttle orbiter are what some people call a first stage sustainer.. Nobody calls it a second (upper) stage.

China Space Program might be the true sequel to Kerbal Space Program

5:28 lol, if you see a rocket coming at you, run!

Can you imagine if SPaceX announced a launch and informed people of Texas to “adjust your location if a rocket falls?”

that's a rather long segue into ground news

You didn't mention a important info regarding the Beidou positioning system/network: the current version is fully usable with passive receivers, just like GPS, Galileo or GLONASS. In fact modern chips in most phones support all these systems and are pure receivers. While it has the feature for two way communication this is not not relevant for consumer devices, the senders are more expensive, have bigger antennas and consume too much power. So the are only viable for vehicles, especially military. Tracking of individuals happens via cell phone towers on the ground and software on our phones that shares the location via internet connection...

The other thing to touch on, particularly in regard to the test where china destroyed one of its own satellites, is the cavalier attitude of their space program towards the creation of space junk. It’s a serious potential issue. Even a tiny 1cm^2 piece of debris moving at orbital velocity has a TON of energy. Easily enough to destroy other satellites. If we’re not careful with managing and tracking this space junk it could be disastrous for human space flight, and lead to a cascade of destruction and debris which locks everyone out of orbit forever.

"Adjust your location quickly" lmao.

The "2-way" communication section on Beidou is borderline misinformation. The positioning functionality of Beidou works the same way as GPS/GLONASS/Galileo where the position is calculated from the signals of 4 satellites. This process only requires one-way communication from the satellite to the ground station. The communication in the other direction is used for additional services such as short messaging that requires specialized hardware to do since sending a signal to MEO is quite difficult. Normal GNSS receivers in phones and other consumer electronics physically can't transmit to a satellite that far away. The satellite can't know your location unless you elect to send it to the satellite.

The U.S. GPS is one-way, and China’s BeiDou has an optional two-way feature. However, standard smartphones only receive signals from GPS, BeiDou, etc. They don’t have the power or antennas needed to transmit back to satellites. Communicating with satellites requires high-power, specialized equipment, far beyond what a smartphone can do. The BeiDou two-way feature is for specific industries, not phones. So, tracking concerns via satellites are overblown-tracking is done through apps, networks, and cell towers, not satellites.

"I decided my audience is smart enough to make their own conclusions, that's why I didn't mention it" Proceeds to mention it.

Ah yes China, where everything is magically "better" for some reason.

5:41 um that animation seems to show the missile firing from a very wrong place

I recently read the wikipedia article regarding the long-march rockets. At some point, the rocket was working, but deemed to be to expensive. Therefore they did cut corners in production to lower the price and even anticipated a certain increase in launch failures while doing so.

Wolf amendment is probably the best example of a law making things go the exact opposite as it was intended

scott manley is my source of china's space program news, and he is quite good at it

-9,000 social credit! (I don't care if you think it's lazy. I'm the target audience for my jokes and we're all helping the algorithm.)

Kerbal Space Program over there.

11:40 China was the first Nation to successfully land a rover on Mars on the first attempt? Didn't the US do it first attempt with Pathfinder/Sojourner?

The Chinese space companies are quasi-private. They use government resources, and have to share their technology with each other.

TLDR: the Jiuquan launch centre was originally an ICBM base. That's why it's inland and that's why everything lands in China. The new launch centre is on the Hainan island, so things can fall harmlessly into the ocean. It's not bad engineering or anything, it was purely political.

2:37 the Chinese reporting wrong numbers, Never!!! Scandalous!

The Long March 6A might be even worse than the 5B, because with the 6A, the second stage keeps breaking apart while in orbit and just makes the mess there even bigger.

GPS is not the only way the government can track you, which brings us to today's sponsor Nord VPN

That orange trail reminded me of the Agent Orange

The two-way communication of BeiDou (Chinese gnss system) is only in a high precision mode that leverages additional ground stations. Its primary functionality is virtually identical to the GPS (US), Galileo (European) and the newer revisions of GLONASS (Russian) systems, and is one-way. A distrust of the Chinese state's desire for more surveillance is not unreasonable, but I personally would be more concerned with the wealth of information available to many nations on anyone who carries a mobile phone anywhere in the world based on which towers are pinged.

9:55 WTF is that gigantic Flat spot of … Dirt ? Is this a desert ?

At least those ones weren't filled with water

Please adjust your location quickly whenever you see harm to your life. Pretty good advice

😅Chinese GPS/Beidou cannot locate you if you only use it to locate yourself in a GPS fashion. The uplink is only for military and paid customs for short text messages. If it can locate all users, then DDoS attack is a clear threat to this system😂.

Orange fumes = hypergolic = turbo cancer juice

It's interesting that yiur sponsor is Ground News because you did a misinformation about BeiDou. Either get better sources or do proper research. They cannot track devices, the communication is one way to devices. You have to have specialised hardware to have two way communication.

Fun fact of the day: NASA-funded researchers have been granted permission from congress to apply for access to China’s Chang’e-5 lunar samples in an exception to a prohibition on bilateral activities. Politics ruins progress and cooperations who knew.

Question? Do a video on HOW CHINA shot down their own SATELLITE?

Reminds me a lot of the blinders used back in the Soviet space glory days. The Lunakod and Venera missions (sp?) were amazing, and more or less completely ignored in the US. Pre-internet made it easy.

1:08 I think its called "innovating fast and breaking things" some peopel are really into it I hear

11:44 take a photo - like I'm on Mars 👽 🤣

You have a great voice and a great production to boot 🤙🏼

A recurring theme with the modern Chinese state is that while the ethics might be questionable from an Occidental perspective, the result most certainly are not. China is making it clear that they have every intention of playing at the same level as the incumbent world powers, and they demonstrably have the industry, economy, and most importantly, the political will to execute that intent.

❤

So fun fact, if you launch a super toxic hypergolic rocket stage over the ocean, it's going to drop back into the ocean and poison the entire coastline.

They actually mainly placed those launch’s inland to keep them secret and also far away from attack.

BeiDou system CAN be used in two way but to send messages. This is not needed for location: any GPS receiver that has no transmitting capacity whatsoever can use them in a complete passive way. Even not being sympathetic to CCP I must point that your information is misleading.

Thank you for covering this topic. It was a blind spot for me and I think, it's very interesting.

I need Dongfanghour to cover on this topic

I genuinely can't believe China is still doing this shit. Every time it happens, I think surely they have learned their lesson this time. They have an impressive space program, there's absolutely no excuse for these incidents to continue into the 2020s

4:00 mins: Who thought it was a good idea to leave General Zod in charge of explosive fuel?

The alphabet boys are happy with this one 😂

dont forget that the US is really good at recovering items in the ocean... so also a reason why they dont want their fancy new rockets going in the ocean. we did this to the USSR back in the day.

Your own critical thinking shoulda told you that you spent too much time on your sponsor

Does BeiDou actually require two-way communicaiton...and isn't the return signal to a ground station rather than back to the satellite. Also isn't it BeiDou1 that is two-way whereas BeiDou2 is more like one-way GPS?

"The Chinese government reported 6 casualties." Yea, and only 5,200 people in China died from the pandemic... 🤣🤣

The Nebula version of this video still has "Helium" on the Long March 5 diagram.

I must admit, whenever a story about the Chinese space program (rarely) appears, i think " i must look into what they're doing". Then forget 🤣

not all days you see 3blue1brown, veritasium and real engineering upload a video the same day

Space hooliganism.

I think the title missing something, a more suitable one is like this "The Problems with China's Space Program, BUT WHAT IS the COST?"

From your drawing, anyone can tell that launching towards the Pacific Ocean will unavoidably enter the airspace of South Korea, Japan, Philippines, or Taiwan (ROC). Clearing ships on the rocket flight path will also become an international effort. (Want some foreign entities directly under the flight path of your super-secret military satellite?) Not every country out there enjoys the privilege of being able to launch directly into the high seas without any obstacle. (*cough Cape Canaveral cough*) The Wenchang Space Launch Site, as anyone can clearly see, is on an island, which will cause obvious problems I don't need to elaborate further.

In my high school AP Chemistry class my teacher had two orange sized rusty steel balls, we'd cover one of them with aluminum foil and then smack them together (wearing proper hand, eye, and ear protection of course) to initiate a tiny thermite reaction with a loud bang and a spark. It was part of a lesson to demonstrate the requirements for chemical reactions, namely activation energy and orientation, results would differ slightly based on how rusty the spot of contact was, or how hard or fast the collision was, or even between direct and glancing blows. Eventually we also did a larger experiment outdoors using Magnesium ribbon to ignite the powder mixture, I still vividly remember how bright the Magnesium was! I absolutely love that videos like this can share scientific knowledge to a vast audience in such an entertaining way. Thanks!

0:00 I will tell my kids this is how agent orange was spread in Nam.

Chiba doing more science than America in ten years than America in 50

The reason early Chinese launch facilities were built inland instead of on China's coast is for security reasons. On the coast, these facilities would be vulnerable to US preemptive attacks, and China didn't trust US to not attack them considering the US has military bases all around China. However, China has grown stronger and more confident in their ability to defend themselves, so they are building extensive space launch facilities on Hainan Island to prevent having to evacuate residential areas around their inland launch facilities. All superpowers have made poor choices for their citizens in the face of national security. How many nuclear test sites were built in the US southwest, before the US realized they could just outsource their nuclear testing to their colonial pacific islands? Ever heard of Bikini Atoll?

Somebody forgot to salute during launch.

5:20 "Dear comrades, we are launching a rocket. Look out and be ready to dodge."

Thanks again Real Engineering! You're totally cool in my book! DON'T FORGET TO SHARE EVERYONE!

At 12:13 you mention the discovery of Ice Water on Mars by the Chinese as if they would be the first to make such a discovery. Yet we already know that Ice Water exists on Mars, especially at the poles.

Love it. I would like to see more of a content like this, uncovering areas which are not that well covered.

Hate to be so cynical but given this channels history about certain subjects, this would have been much more favorable take if China had paid something for this. So this is probably fairly objective take.

I like smell hydrazine in the morning…. I remember labs during graduation and how toxic that shit is

the PRC will probably fix these issues once it is more important to do so, but they have bigger problems such as energy production The issue is they are trying to catch up with the US which had countless years of nearly uninterrupted growth in significantly less time, leading to many problems arising in the pursuit of rapid development

China is awesome the USA racism towards china is horrific

I appreciate you mentioning journalism bias and how you had to check yourself multiple times while writing this video. Even tho it was used as a segway for the sponsor, its still important

10:58 wait how can this even function? GPS works like a constellation, the satellites are like stars, your receiver only observes them, because after all they are up in GEO. how can something like a phone establish in any way a communication channel reliably with something in GEO sounds absurd, and even if you have a big ass receiver....can you just not contact the satellite? Again they are beacon, you can observe their signal and then reference your database map to know which satellites you are observing. If any two way communication mode exists I bet its optional and potentially aided by ground stations. Frankly it makes me distrust any other info in this video, even if I suspect they are true, since it's easy and always has been easy for military projects to ignore safety everywhere in the world and especially in china where safety culture is still not developed.

Great breakdown of the challenges facing China's space program! It's fascinating to see how geopolitical factors, technology limitations, and resource allocation all play crucial roles in shaping their ambitions. Looking forward to seeing how these issues evolve

Things started sounding bright when you began talking about the Long March 5 and LOX based fuels, only for the 5B to return the safety issues back to square one....

Most people in the West have no idea what's going on in the West ...

How about an episode on Indian budget friendly space program?

Toxic fuel and first stage reaching orbit is nothing new - US (Titan's, Delta upper stage) and EU (Arian 5) did that. First stage to orbit is there to ensure reliability - as you don't have second stage ignition risk. Standard BeiDou receivers definitely do not have 2-way capability, this is some propaganda bullshit. There is no possibility to track BeiDou receivers as they do not emit any signals. How could engineer say that it is possible? BeiDou emergency messaging capability is an option which physically cannot track non-transmitting receivers.

Yay for the Ground News sponsorship! This is the first time I'm excited about a sponsor :D

I see real engineering I click

Some more context probably had been helpful. When one calculates probability of harm, the absolute size of the debris is not the only factor. There is also frequency. There are very few LM-5B launches there are many more non LEO F9 launches where the upper stage does an uncontrolled re-entry. What is the cumulative probability of harm for these tho systems compare?

Space race 2? electric boogaloo

Crazy how they use the move fast and break thing approach to every thing 😮

Oh, good video. Didn't know that.

TLDR: no actual problems

7:41 Rest of the video aside, that is NOT how Long March 5 is staged. The second stage starts much further up. Fact-checking failure there.

I'm glad to see other countries space programs advance rapidly. But there is a right way (the safe way) to do it and China just isn't there yet. They have no regard for the people in the surrounding areas, or even other nations in space.

"Beating the U.S. to the lunar south pole." Funny😂 Get updated bro, India has already done that.

Seems like these started happening a lot more often recently. Its almost like they were trying to launch a bunch of stuff all of a sudden but somebody really didn't want them to get it done too quickly...

If you talk positively about China, you are not including the 1157 act.... 1.6 billion dollars US is a big number as a percentage 😂😂

Because they are not innovating but imitating... They dont understand what they are imitating... Cutting costs and cutting corners while trying to imitate a design that tries to be "efficient" will lead to this tyoe of outcome... Dont get me even started on the bribery and corruption...

Ukrainian farmer: gets free russian tank Chinese farmer: gets free rocket Tell me which is better.

Real engineering, 3blue1brown, veritasium all woke up together