The team responsible for China's Long March 7 launch has an average age of 25 y.o

Dont follow your dreams. And if they are put them on hold and become a teacher.

>if I recall correctly they have manned capability while NASA no longer does.

>primary operator of ISS
>regular pressurized resupply flights to it
>astronauts in space pretty much constantly
>no manned capability

What NASA has is far higher standards for crew safety and a decades-old political mess where the manned program became a boondoggle, so it was simpler to use a partner's crew vehicle for a few years while domestic shuttle alternatives were developed.

You could stick guys in flight suits in a cargo Dragon, and it would be about as safe as what China's doing. Even the Falcon/Dragon that blew up wouldn't have been a crew loss: the Dragon capsule was intact, and they just had the parachutes turned off for regulatory reasons.

However, using Soyuz while they develop really good, really safe new capsules makes more sense by NASA's standards than accepting any additional risk to human life by insisting on domestic crew launch.

It doesn't really "make sense" its just that for political reasons NASA is incapable of making their own launch vehicles

NASA landed a robotic probe on the moon in 1966, years before landing men. It was launched on an Atlas-Centaur.

Later, they landed a manned mission right next to a Surveyor probe, to show off the accuracy of their landing capability and the potential for landing assets together to build a base.

>You guys just can't accept it whenever a non-white race achieves something can you? I posted on /g/ the other day that China built the world's most powerful supercomputer and got the same butthurt response
This isn't about dismissing "a non-white race". Hell, one of the posts you're replying to points out how part of the problem is that talented Chinese tend to move out of China. This is about being honest about the limitations and deceptions of a post-communist kleptocracy desperate to present itself as a world leader to its benighted subjects.

China's advancing economically quickly, but they started from a truly miserable condition and they're getting ahead mostly by hiring out cheap labor performing basic tasks. They're basically catching up to Russia, another large-yet-backwards post-communist kleptocracy, which still has a per-capita PPP GDP 60% higher than China.

As for China "building the world's most powerful supercomputer", these days, that's like having the world's biggest pile of sand: nobody's really competing at it, and it's just a matter of spending the most money. It's not like China's designing and fabricating the most advanced main components, they just purchased them from abroad and assembled them into networks.

>NASA is incapable of making their own launch vehicles
NASA has always, and I mean always, had private contractors make their launch vehicles and manned spacecraft.

Falcon 9 / Dragon was only contracted by a little different rules than in the past. They were absolutely products of a NASA development contract. NASA waved a big wad of cash and said, "Who wants to build this thing?" and SpaceX said, "We do!" and when NASA chose them, they got the cash and a bunch of technical help from NASA. Even the Falcon 1 was based on the FASTRAC engine, developed by NASA.

The main difference from, for instance, the shuttle program or Saturn V, is that SpaceX runs the launch pad.

See also: Antares / Cygnus, and the Crew Dragon and CST-100 manned capsules.

Rockets built to fulfill an open to anyone contract, designed & build entirely by a private entity
Is a lot different from some defense contractor building a rocket designed by NASA using a cost plus contract.

>Rockets built to fulfill an open to anyone contract
When NASA wanted a manned reusable launch system, they put out a call for proposals, and NASA picked the one they liked, and the result was the space shuttle.

It didn't come out off a NASA drawing board, it came off a North American Rockwell drawing board.

When NASA wanted commercial cargo options with potential for development into crew vehicles, they put out a call for proposals, and NASA picked the ones they liked, and the results were Falcon 9 / Dragon and Antares / Cygnus.

>designed & build entirely by a private entity
Not really... there was a lot of NASA information, advice, and design review. NASA let SpaceX fly Dragon to the ISS because they had NASA employees who were intimately familiar with the workings of Dragon and Falcon 9, and were therefore confident that neither the Dragon nor the F9 upper stage would end up crashing into the ISS, and that the Dragon would function properly while attached to the ISS, etc.

>cost plus contract
This is one of the main differences... and yet, being *ostensibly* non-cost-plus doesn't mean it can't turn into cost-plus in practice. That's what happened with the EELV program, which was very similar to the deal between NASA and SpaceX/Orbital, except it was between the US military and Boeing/LM.

When Boeing and LM couldn't recover their costs under the terms of the EELV program, they basically told the government to give them more money or they'd stop launching the rockets they got government money to develop. The result was ULA and its "capability maintenance" payments from the government, negotiated and renegotiated on the basis of... cost.

So what happens with SpaceX if the development funds plus the firm fixed-price launch contract isn't enough to cover their costs, and they stop selling commercial launches? If they stop launching, NASA loses upwards of a billion dollars invested with no capability to show for it... so they renegotiate.

Seeing my "inferior" product got you running away like a little bitch from this:

>Falcon 9 is smaller and can deliver a larger payload into LEO while carrying a landing system that adds considerably more weight to the rocket.

to this sheepish retraction with SpaceX implicit and explicitly missing:

>LM7 is still a weak rocket compared to Atlas V or H-IIB.

I'm sure you understand that can hardly be bothered to whip out my superior product.
Seeing my "inferior" product got you running away like a little bitch from this:

>Falcon 9 is smaller and can deliver a larger payload into LEO while carrying a landing system that adds considerably more weight to the rocket.

to this sheepish retraction with SpaceX implicit and explicitly missing:

>LM7 is still a weak rocket compared to Atlas V or H-IIB.

I'm sure you understand that can hardly be bothered to whip out my superior product.i
Seeing my "inferior" product got you running away like a little bitch from this:

>Falcon 9 is smaller and can deliver a larger payload into LEO while carrying a landing system that adds considerably more weight to the rocket.

to this sheepish retraction with SpaceX implicit and explicitly missing:

>LM7 is still a weak rocket compared to Atlas V or H-IIB.

I'm sure you understand that can hardly be bothered to whip out my superior product.

tl:dr Elon Musk is a lying sack of shit.

sorry about the 3X chief

Not even sure what side of the argument you're on.

This is seriously incoherent.