China has a space station — it’s called Tiangong, the first module was launched in 2021, and it’s all going quite swimmingly, thank you very much. That’s essentially what we know about the orbital complex here in the West, as China tends to be fairly secretive when it comes to their activities in space.
But thanks to a recently released video by the state-funded CCTV Video News Agency, we now have an unprecedented look inside of humanity’s newest orbital laboratory. Shenzhou-18 crew members [Ye Guangfu], [Li Cong], and [Li Guangsu] provide viewers with a full-blown tour of the station, and there’s even baked-in English subtitles so you won’t miss a beat.
The few looks the public has gotten inside of Tiangong in the past have been low-resolution and generally of the “shaky cam” variety. In comparison, this flashy presentation was clearly made to impress an international audience. But let’s be fair, if you managed to build your own crewed station in low Earth orbit, wouldn’t you want to show it off a bit?
So what did we learn about Tiangong from this tour? Well, admittedly not more than we could have guessed. The layout of the three-module station isn’t entirely unlike the International Space Station or even its Soviet predecessor, Mir.
One module contains a common area where the crew meets and eats their meals, as well as the sleeping berths for crew members. (The small portholes in each berth are a nice touch.) Then there are the multi-purpose laboratory modules with their rows of rack mounted experiments, an exercise area, and finally an airlock that can be used to either bring cargo onboard or expose experiments to space.
Even though it’s much smaller than the ISS, one can’t help but notice that the inside of the Tiangong appears a bit less cramped. The modules of the Chinese station have a slightly sleeker internal look, and overall, everything seems less cluttered, or at least, better organized. Some online commenters have equated it to the comparison between the SpaceX Dragon and Russia’s Soyuz capsule, which given the relative ages of the two stations, isn’t wholly inaccurate.
China’s space program has been making great strides over the last several years, but from an outsider’s perspective, it’s been difficult to follow. It’s been doubly frustrating for us here at Hackaday. We’d love to provide the same sort of in-depth coverage we do for American and European missions, but often it’s a challenge to find the technical data that requires. Here’s hoping this video means China is looking to be more transparent about their off-world activities going forward.
Just think of the amzing things that humanity could acheive if we could just get past this ideological, power driven competion between different parts of the world. True, competion does help push inovation, but as a species we need to get better at working together otherwise the Great Filter is very much in our future.
But who gets to be in charge ?
In every program, someone is going to be the program manager. Like in any job. It’s not an adversarial role, it’s a role of someone who is trying to pull the pieces together and enable the work that needs to be done to achieve a larger goal.
The question implies the expectation of territorial conflict but I believe that’s not necessary. For centuries, science really tried its very best to leave out any politics and religion. Space exploration was also part of that mindset for a long time, too. Unfortunately, that has changed recently and we should put every effort into combining our all enthusiasm and ingenuity again instead, to enable deep space exploration rather than only working hard to stay ahead.
Have you met any humans?
Project managers are inhuman
+1000
Nobody, ideally.
Well, China wanted to cooperate and contribute to ISS, but the US were against it.
Or more precisely, that US Congress. They created their biggest competitor out of fear, essentially.
https://time.com/3901419/space-station-no-chinese/
The whole video is ideological. I love the space station and I appreciate the Chinese efforts for independence, but I see it is also a display of power and isolationism. The ISS is in a bad spot with tensions between RUS and USA.
I could see myself as an ESA astronaut though working with the Chinese taikonauts, but I’d not pass a single fitness test. ESA is in the best spot being “guests” on stations largely funded by superpowers.
The ISS is the US space station; the international character is almost entirely PR. At least that was the case, until NASA decided to give up making man-rated spacecraft and become irrelevant. That’s the only reason why we were reliant on Russia (or Elon, which rankles them even more for some reason)
About the PR thing.. I must say, sometimes it really feels like it.
Whenever I think of old MIR station, I can’t help but feel as if it was more, uhm, “honest”.
Sure it was a rust bucket, but also more human. Somehow. Not sure how to describe.
In the last years of the MIR, in the 90s, the old space station did outgrow itself.
It became more. International visitors came, the shuttle docked.
It nolonger was that communistic object of prestige it used to be, but became akin to an old worn ocean liner with character.
The people who gathered “up” there weren’t super stars, but fairly unknown astronauts and cosmonauts. That’s how it seemed, at least.
The ISS, by comparion, seemed like a polished piece of prestige.
It wouldn’t take much to imagine a stars and stripes flag on it.
The fact (speaking under correction) that NASA “forced” the de-orbit of MIR in favor of ISS made things extra unsympathic.
Emotionally, it was as if the Americans had killed “our” European MIR so that the US-owned ISS would takes its place.
My grandma and me were very sad back in 2001, watching de-orbit on TV.
We didn’t hate the Americans, though. It just felt very unceremonial.
It would have been a good move if astronauts on ISS would have been given the MIR a last goodbye with a salute, at least.
But back to ISS and about things being so “sterile”, unhuman up there.
I mean, okay, you basically had tightly scheduled plans that left little time to astronauts to have a casual little chat with radio amateurs (as it was with MIR).
Now, with the ISS, it now was all about ARISS and school stations.
That’s all good and understandable, but also has citizens left feeling
a bit disconnected compared to the days of MIR.
MIR had people like you and me, wearing wool sweaters and working in a shabby environment,
whereas ISS had what essentially seemed like high class actors in a villa.
To someone who was into space and astronomy in the 80s and 90s, who was reading magazines about anything space related,
this felt so unreal.
It’s as if space exploration, science and research and international friendship nolonger was important.
As an American, seeing Buran rot in neglect was sad.
For Ren, thanks for the idea to go read a little! Definitely sad to see what happened with the Russian craft.
https://www.cnn.com/style/article/baikonur-buran-soviet-space-shuttle/index.html
Funny how I always feel this odd shift in my face, when I see things about humans making steps into the expanse.
And then I realize that it’s a faint smile ..
The idea that competition is restricting progress instead of driving it is one of the most hilarious own-goals people like you will ever inflict upon themselves
Maybe because the US version of “competition” seems to rest of world like a car race,
in which the contestants that are left behind would die on track in flames of fire,
while the leading contestants would accelerate even more and laugh like maniacs? 🤷♂️
The type of competition I would imagine is different.
Here in Europe, I think, competition is more like a swimming contest.
If one of the contestants is drowning, the others would abbort the turnament and come to help.
Competition is just another word for wasted effort and lack of communication.
“Just think of the amzing things that humanity could acheive if we could just get past this ideological, power driven competion between different parts of the world.”
So jus think of the amazing things humanity could achieve if we could just get past being human?
Please put a direkt DL link here.
Getting the DL link alone from chinese website requires creating an user account, I’m not ineterested in.
If they would do like NASA their webistes it should be accessible to anyone with no hurdles.
I was looking at them always doing a two hand wave, with hands always going in opposite directions. And then it clicked a one handed wave would be unbalanced in low gravity (every action has an equal and opposite reaction). So mental note to self, if I ever make it into low gravity during my lifetime, always wave with two hands.
Zero g requires jazz hands. Cool. :D
‘orbital complex’. I’m getting MIR vibes now. ^^
What I wonder, though, is whether or not CSS is getting ham radio equipment eventually.
MIR and its capitalistic successor had it on-board.
Btw, why says the article ‘Tiangong’ ? I thought that’s the name of the series of defunct space labs.
The Chinese space station is named CSS, with the core module being ‘Tianhe’.
Tian Gong = sky work?
According to Wikipedia, Tiangong means “Sky Palace”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_space_station
A really interesting video, but by $deity, that music was distracting. I don’t know why some people insist on loud, cheesy music in the background of their videos.
As to the remarks about the background noise, I wouldn’t be surprised if they had earplugs for sleeping!
That’s according to English Wikipedia.
German Wikipedia says “Pinyin Zhōngguó Kōngjiānzhàn”.
And 中國空 間站 / 中国空间站 , which means China Space Station (CSS).
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinesische_Raumstation
Not sure which one is more correct, though.
It’s also questionable whether or not English/American Wikipedia can be fully trusted with such political topics. 😟
Just think of Lunik vs Luna name for USSR moon probes.
In western media, these probes had been misnamed Lunik.
Probably in reference to Sputnik and socalled Sputnik shock.
As far as I can tell, CSS is simply an acronym for Chinese Space Station that the western media uses, probably because they are too lazy to look up the proper spelling of Tiangong each time.
You’re right though that Tiangong is the name of the overall program of modular space stations, this one simply being the latest (so technically Tiangong-3).
It’s belived that a ham radio is already sent to CSS, but still don’t have power on schedules
SPAM in a CAN doing things that aren’t even remotely worth the cost of putting and keeping them there, just like the ISS. SO 1960s… A propaganda return only. Book – The End of Astronauts: Why Robots are the Future of Exploration (2022)
Maybe, but it inspires people world wide and not all people live for money ?
By contrast, the US historically do nothing until it comes to a competition.
American astronauts would never have had set a foot on moon, if it wasn’t for the Soviet Union.
I’ve heard said about Americans that if you give them two of anything, they’ll race them. That seems accurate enough. And explains (or originates from?) power tool drag racing.
“If it involves 2 men and a ball, my husband will watch it on television.”
– an exasperated housewife of the 1960s
B^)
What if it’s cock and balls, would you watch it too?
https://agri.bg/media/2023/06/23/927510/780×440.jpg
“The End of Astronauts: Why Robots are the Future of Exploration (2022)”
Is there a sequel, The End of Humanity: Why Robots are the Future of Planet Earth ? ;)
Utility maximizers literally wouldn’t care, which is why people like him have a hard time showing up for the future. It’s like they’re missing a module
Good point! 🙂👍
Here at HaD one commenter a while ago made this point re: The argument “waste of money” or “money could be used for something else..”
The money stayed on earth. It employed many high tech workers, fed families, created technology. If you look at the goal not of creating propaganda but of creating and maintaining a high tech industry as the goal itself, space exploration, I’d argue, is definitely “worth the cost.”
That makes sense, I think. One of the reasons for the NASA/Roskosmos partnership with the ISS was to
prevent former USSR rocket scientists and engineers leaving to other countries,
were they might have ended up hiring for development of missiles.
Or so I heard. Speaking under correction here.
Also, a lot of components of MIR-2 had been designed and/or built already before ISS was being planned. They got re-used later on.
there are other costs than economic. the enormous expenditure of kerosene comes to mind. soon you come into the big question, what’s the point of anything? why does life chew up every resource frontier and then struggle to live with the result?
Well, because it’s fun, I think.
The money will be used to shove more deep-fried corn meal into more mouths so they can multiply into more mouths and still be just as hungry. At the same time, it will provide heroic life-saving care of the most expensive variety to those mouths who are close to the end of their lifespans, to keep them around eating the corn meal longer. That is all money is for in the minds of these creatures
Sir, this is a Wendy’s.
Or, to put it another way, are you OK?
Or, to put it yet another way, going from a video of a Chinese space station to “these creatures” and fried corn meal seems a tad, uhm, confusing(?)
IMHO, writing this reply on the computer that was the direct result of the Apollo program (which at some point consumed 4% of the US GDP), I counter that with the point made that investing in NASA programs (however expensive) invents new technologies/industries.
Compare that with the mostly pointless $426.4 billion TARP “investment” that “returned” $15.3 billion in profit and was wasted propping up unsustainable business models – and didn’t result in any new technologies/industries. TARP saved jobs in the short term, yes, but compared with the NASA budget for the same year 2014 ($17,647 million) it makes pale comparison.
Point being, I would very much rather see my tax money “squandered” on ISS, which required trained engineers/scientists, than waste these propping up failed banksters’ investment plans that mostly milk us for profit and return nada.
As much as I dislike Elon Musk (as a person) he did create a healthy competitor with his SpaceX – and it is sorry to say that we no longer have proper competition (Apollo program had multitudes of companies, not just Boeing and Lockheed – gazillions of vendors, large and small).
Something like that. Feel free to ignore.
The utility and economy of modern computational appliances sprang from ICBM and other missile development. Which was used, both in parallel and serially, by NASA engineers.
Significant advances by humanity tend to a resultant of competition, directly or indirectly by serfdom and waging war. We are a an evil and corrupt species.
Ironically, the German Zuse Z series computers of the 1940s weren’t war related, though.
They had been in civil use until they had been hit by bombs – thrown onto them by the allies.
They were victims of war, so to say. Destroyed by the good side.
Your attempt at irony is either extremely misaligned or thinly veiled revisionism. Just to be clear, yes, it very much was “the good side.”
Also, when you invariably reply with indignation, try to lead off with something more creative than “I don’t know what to say …” it’s become tedious.
»Just to be clear, yes, it very much was “the good side.”«
Sure it was good side, I did not use quotation marks on purpose here.
If I was trying poking fun at it, I would have used it.
Even though would have been kinda lame and unoriginal.
But why should I? Our schools here in Germany go through WW2 and the horrors that came with multiple times.
There’s no sugar coating, I tell you.
That’s why some teachers even said sentences like “students, today we’re going to loose war again”.
But that’s another topic.
My response here happened because of..
“Significant advances by humanity tend to a resultant of competition, directly or indirectly by serfdom and waging war. We are a an evil and corrupt species.”
And that didn’t apply to German computer development, I think.
The early Zuse computers were not the result of warefare.
Their creator was a civilist, an student/university graduate that didn’t work with gov or military.
By comparion, ENIAC and Colossus were military computers.
They’re the result of warfare.
And that’s the irony, more or less.
Of all places, some of the earliest programmable computers meant for civil or commercial use were made in an country that did set out for world-domination.
Here’s the Wikipedia article about one of the Z computers, the Z3.
“The Z3 was a German electromechanical computer designed by Konrad Zuse in 1938, and completed in 1941.
It was the world’s first working programmable, fully automatic digital computer.”
[..]
“The original Z3 was destroyed on 21 December 1943 during an Allied bombardment of Berlin. ”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Z3_(computer)
“Your attempt at irony is either extremely misaligned or thinly veiled revisionism.”
Speaking about revisionism, the allies claimed that their computers were the first after they had literally bombed the Z3 out of existance, leaving no prove that it ever had existed.
Ok, they probably didn’t even know about the computer at the time, but still – who’s actually doing revisionism here I may ask?
I know this question is a bit snarky, but yeah.
If the Z3 hadn’t been succesfully rebuilt years later, the books of history might have forgotten about it.
There’s some truth in the sentence “history is written by the winners”, I’m afraid.
Which sadly (or ironically) is a sentence being used too often by revisionists and the right-wing people.
History has a bad sense of humor, I think. 😞
I forgot something. There is a legitimate objection that the construction of the Z3 was sponsored by the government or the military – in some way.
Officially, the military had no interest in the Z3 and there was no support, though. See Wikipedia.
That being said, the customer or financial supporter, “The German Research Institute for Aviation,” was indeed under the control of the Nazi government during World War II.
Like almost all German institutions at the time, by the way.
And that’s no lame exuse, even. It simply was like that.
It used to be a civil aviation facility, which it became again after the war.
To put this into perspective:
“The German Research Institute for Aviation” was something like a predecessor of the “German Aerospace Center” (DLR).
Germany’s national counterpart to ESA and NASA.
So yes, there’s a valid objection to have some doubts. I do understand this.
On the other hand, what were early computers actually good for?
Applications that required a lot of mathematics at the time were..
Evaluation of the Doppler effect
Calculation of liquids
Aerodynamics
Wave research
Ballistics
Weather forecast
..
Therefore, it was not surprising if Zuse had collaborated with an aviation research center. It had money.
And applications like wind tunnels that may had a use for computers, I suppose.
Aviation was popular back then, no matter if civil or military.
At that time we also had airships that were not suitable for use in war.
In theory, the Zuse computers might have been useful to calculate fuel consumption of, say, Zeppelins in different weather conditions and so on.
But that’s pure speculation, of course. I wasn’t born yet back then and can’t really make a statement, thus.
Anyway, I just wanted to quickly add this.
The Wikipedia articles always contain more detailed information than I have.
Actually, the first computer programmer was Ada Lovelace, not Z3.
You’re a bug
Yeah, gotta build a time machine and go back to tell Columbus that his dream voyage around the globe isn’t worth the risk: they won’t find India and flat-earthers will happen anyway, eventually.
Oy, that noise level is intolerable. I’d be heading out an airlock within a day…
Audio level was good not the weak stuff on YouTube, usually ALC rides level up to full of ambient noise and cuts the gain down when speech is close to the mic. In zero G heat stays around a hot processor and builds a hot bubble of air around it. It gets hotter and hotter, it don’t rise! Fans Fans Fans everywhere things heat up no matter how small. It couldn’t be any louder than an office full of beige boxes with high RPM fans and zingy hard drives running XP back in the day.
So, how much gear up there was sourced from AliExpress…?
I’d rather like to know how much gear from up there is on AliExpress ^^
I am seeing a good amount of that classic yellow tape you get on China packages and nowhere else.
It holds the space station together!
B^)
So glad the our species hasn’t given up on Space Travel, if only to give our ever growing population on Earth different options… :o)
“Ever growing”, the Earth’s population is approaching a dangerous population collapse. The year 2100 may find this planet overloaded with people too old to work with the few people of childbearing years too busy trying to support the elderly and themselves to bother having children. It’s already happening in Japan, Korea, China, and some Western European countries.
Interesting that they mostly arrange themselves to be standing upright for the video, except for moving through the station, or near the end when the one guy’s showing the exercise bike. I wonder if there are loops or whatever on the floor to help them maintain orientation, and how much they do that when not on camera. Compare to IIS where you see a lot more of them not sticking to one orientation.
winXP toolbar on PC at 0:44, interesting they use this over anything else
Who’s going to hack it?
It’s not XP
good looking space station! odd that it looks like they really want to enforce an up and a down. so many things are arranged as if it was a building on the ground, and they keep aligning as if they were standing on the floor. I wonder if they act like that when off camera?
It’s really a puzzling choice. Avoiding any of the more fanciful or inspiring scenes of strangeness that comes from microgravity in favor of keeping things familiar and businesslike.. I wonder if this kind of attitude carries over into other regions
Interesting. They’re trying so hard to not look weightless or floating, very grounded. Is it a breach of etiquette to float upside down or sideways. “I’m ‘standing’ next to my colleague”… not embracing the “Look dude!!! We are in space!!!!”
China isnt exactly known for being a fun allowed country
No, it’s compulsory!
Love the microwave
That was awesome! Imo the more space exploration, the better.
What about bugs flying around from the plants?
Do they also use thinkpads?
Since everything is in chinese they are not planning to colab with any other countries.
What if we have a Gravity situation?