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Comment by notabee

4 hours ago

Anyone wanting to be involved in the future of scientific research should probably start learning Mandarin. We're going the way of the Soviets, where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology. https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/09/trump-planning-to-ha...

I think the defining moment is that IF China gets man back to the moon before the US, that will be the moment when it becomes too hard to ignore. That is the new political high ground.

The Chang’e missions plan for this in 2030 and they have hit every target to date. While the US is currently targeting 2028, it isn't inconceivable that it can slip by two years.

A few hours ago I was looking for some food safety information, found a US gov website posted on reddit and

The website wasn't available anymore

where political officers will quash any science that doesn't fit their ideology

China also does this. We just don't hear about it because they also quash the reporting.

  • China is labeled an authoritarian regime while the US is labeled a liberal democracy, are you saying the behavioural standard for a liberal democracy is the behaviour of an authoritarian regime?

  • Is there any reason to think that their "ideology" is contradictory to scientific findings or is this just the traditional instinct to see all foreigners as mustache-twirling villains?

    • They have suppressed reporting of the deaths and missing from Kyirong Valley and Gyirong Port landslide. Surviving relatives living outside the area would appreciate information but the Chinese Government would prefer that everyone just move along.

    • I'd suggest looking into the story of Naomi Wu, who many here would know for her videos on the Chinese maker and electronics scene.

      They absolutely enforce ideological positions in opposition to science, and very aggressively so.

      There is no waffle room on this.

  • Yeah there are MAJOR reasons that a huge amount of Chinese scientists immigrate to the US every year, but almost no US scientists immigrate to China.

    These are smart people, they’re not going to make major life decisions based on simplistic takes from political opportunists.

    • US has/had the best schools in the world. US provides/provided remarkable academic independence (tenure, etc). US provides/provided the best expected economic return to foreign scientists.

      As we dismantle those components via xenophobia, anti-intellectualism, funding cuts, and so on, trends will change. Already I see a substantial uptick in my PhD/Academic friends moving to Europe as we cede our historic advantages.

      If, in say 15 years, China provides better schools, or better economic returns, or (perhaps unlikely) better independence, or all 3, then scientists will go there.

    • The reason is money. The US has the world reserve currency which basically means infinite money. This will soon end and China will have the world reserve currency.

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Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline? Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

It’s fine to talk about a “race” if jingoism is the thing that gets most people on board with funding Nasa. But we ought to know better.

  • > Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline?

    They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.

    So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.

    • This doesn’t actually represent an American decline in space exploration, though.

      The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.

      China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.

      And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.

      The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.

      The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.

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  • tbf, jingoism is literally what funded NASA.

    And ironically the US very much considers itself to be in a race with China including in space, it's just run by such thundering morons that most of the moves they make advance China's interests more than theirs. Now the cancellation of Mars Sample Return isn't that big an issue in terms of strategic benefit or decline narratives, nor is it a particularly massive surprise (the program's issues are longer term than just current administration cuts). But there is a certain irony in some of the people most interested in scorekeeping with China (and for that matter Mars!) being the ones likely to ensure China pulls off the sample return first.

  • It's the other way around. He's framing America's decline in terms of Chinese success.

    The Chinese rise is also remarkable in its own terms, but it's not the subject of discussion here. The subject here is how the US is under cutting its former preeminence in science.

  • It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration, how far ahead of everyone else it would be, but also how far along everyone else would be. America was the catalyst for the impossible in that era, and then we decided to abandon it for... basically nothing. Enriching corporations, I guess?

    People took issue with the cost of space exploration in context of "the good the money could do here on Earth", but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

    • The US is still significantly ahead of everyone else in space. It’s just that NASA has become a shadow of its past self.

      Maybe it’s better this way. There is a tendency of every organization, private or public, to rot and stagnate over time. But in the private sectors they die more quickly and give way to new entrants, which would help space exploration long term.

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    • > It's hard to imagine, since the moonlandings, if America kept its pace in space exploration ...

      The collapse of the USSR was the worst thing to happen to NASA.

      I would suggest a watch of "We Stopped Dreaming" https://youtu.be/CbIZU8cQWXc

      A less angry version (video and transcript of Neil DeGrasse Tyson testifying before the Senate's Science Committee on 7 March 2012) https://ifsa.my/articles/we-stopped-dreaming-by-neil-degrass...

          Let’s be honest with one anther.  We went to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union. To think otherwise is delusion, leading some to suppose the only reason we’re not on Mars already is the absence of visionary leaders, or of political will, or of money. No. When you perceive your security to be at risk, money flows like rivers to protect us.
      
          But there exists another driver of great ambitions, almost as potent as war. That’s the promise of wealth. Fully funded missions to Mars and beyond, commanded by astronauts who, today, are in middle school, would reboot America’s capacity to innovate as no other force in society can. What matters here are not spin-offs (although I could list a few: Accurate affordable Lasik surgery, Scratch resistant lenses, Cordless power tools, Tempurfoam, Cochlear implants, the drive to miniaturize of electronics…) but cultural shifts in how the electorate views the role of science and technology in our daily lives.
      
          As the 1970s drew to a close, we stopped advancing a space frontier. The “tomorrow” articles faded. And we spent the next several decades coasting on the innovations conceived by earlier dreamers. They knew that seemingly impossible things were possible—the older among them had enabled, and the younger among them had witnessed the Apollo voyages to the Moon—the greatest adventure there ever was. If all you do is coast, eventually you slow down, while others catch up and pass you by.

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    • > but then when we shifted resources that way, the money did absolutely no good here on Earth.

      So things like curing AIDS don't count?

  • > Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline?

    What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.? Is America ascending or declining?

    The success China is having isn’t something that’s occurring in isolation. There is a void and they are filling it.

    • >What view do you have on the trajectory of the U.S.?

      What view do you have of what programs have been cut from Chinese government budgets? Can you link to some of the HN discussions around them so I can also see people commenting on the internal policy decisions that the Chinese government has made available for people to openly comment on?

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  • > Do you think everyone outside the US views the moonlanding as a black page in history?

    Former Soviet people might...

    • As someone from the former USSR, I find that hard to imagine. Downright denial that the moon landings even happened, sure, but seeing them as a bad event? Not really likely.

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    • The Soviets launched the first satellite, put the first animal into space, launched the first lunar probe, got the first photographs of the dark side of the moon, put the first human in space, put the first woman in space, put the first craft with more than one crew member into space, did the first spacewalk, sent the first probe to Venus, got the first pictures of another planet, and launched the first space station.

      The moon landing was fine and all, a moment of global historic import (and propaganda value, with the US putting their flag on it like they owned the damned thing) but that's still just one victory in a race that was otherwise entirely dominated by the Soviets, and on balance what the Soviets did was of greater scientific merit than anything the US would achieve for years. Americans didn't even care about space until Russia flew Sputnik over their heads.

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Oh do you mean like shunning scientists wanting to investigate if covid leaked from the nearby covid virus lab that was researching gain of function?

And kicking people off of twitter and facebook for similar banned thoughts?

Go check out the grants which were cancelled:

https://grantwitness.org/nsf

Download the CSV and search for things like "Latinx" or "Black" or "equity" or "URM" (URM = non-white)

>CHS: Large: Collaborative Research: Gender-Inclusive Open Source through Gender-Inclusive Tools

>This work will harness foundational gender research to provide theory-based yet practical solutions, towards addressing the underrepresentation of women in OSS communities.

>The AGEP Florida Alliance Model: Improving Minority Women Success in STEM Faculty Careers

>The research team is also investigating ways that URM women in STEM build skills, knowledge and competencies to successfully enter and persist in faculty careers.

>STEM Leadership, Equity, and Advancement for Faculty

>The NSF ADVANCE program is designed to foster gender equity through a focus on the identification and elimination of organizational barriers

Most of these are pure racism and absolutely deserved to be revoked.

  • >Collaborative Research: Bounding global ice volumes over the last glacial cycle using reconstructions of Bering Strait flooding

    Yeah classic woke stuff that

    > TRTech-PGR: NSF BSF - Recombining Allelic Diversity via Genome Editing for Dissecting Complex Plant Traits

    This would be funny if it wasn't happening in real life. Clearly they did "ctrl-f diversity" and didn't actually read what they were cancelling.

  • [flagged]

    • Taxpayer money being used for race-based and gender-based "research".

      "fostering gender equity" is not even science, trying to equate these grants with something like researching fundamental physics or chemistry is disingenuous.

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Jan 3rd is coming soon to an impeachment near you.

Steady as she goes, Mr. Sulu.

  • There is no possible scenario where the senate, even post-midterms, votes to convict. And if they did, which they will not, the vice-president stands waiting to give us more or the same, or maybe worse.

    • Well, at the very least they can pump the brakes on the stupid by giving power back to congress.

      Stop rubber stamping stupidity like RFK, pass a war powers resolution, and reign in the vengeance based tariffs.

What’s the relevance of your point to this article? The program is extremely over budget and taking money from other projects. The previous administration sent NASA back to the drawing board on the project as well: https://www.courthousenews.com/nasa-goes-back-to-drawing-boa...

> NASA needs to rethink its goal of returning samples from the Martian surface to Earth, the agency’s administrator Bill Nelson said in a press call on Monday.