Chinese astronauts make rocket fuel and oxygen in space

This is from January, have there been any updates in the past 7 months?

There is exceptionally little material info in this article and so very much speculation

Apparently it has been in production since 2015. Why is this the first we are hearing about it?

Chinese scientific progress relatively rarely gets reported on because nearly all science reporting is a push-based system of institutions throwing press releases at publications. The publications don't have the chops to analyse or verify that information, or to go and find interesting research happening on their own, so they mostly stick with uncritically repackaging output from the places they trust.

Because English language news sources aren't particularly interested in developing the relationships necessary to report on Chinese scientific breakthroughs. It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater.

Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally, so news doesn't really report on it much.

Especially considering the ruling class does not like when people are reminded that China has its own space station and has never allowed a single non-Chinese person on it, while we failed in several ways over months to return the astronauts from the ISS, and President Trump just decreed that he’s going to give 600,000 (more?) Chinese students visas to study at American universities and invariably displacing their indigenous.

I personally have nothing against the Chinese and respect them being oddly far more interested in the wellbeing of their own people than remotely anything in any western country, but it sure is odd behavior by people who consider China a threat.

“China’s an enemy” … “let’s bring in 600,000 Chinese every single year to learn from us and take the knowledge back to China and the ones that remain will be embedded spies like the people of other foreign nations who have burrowed into America and its power structure”.

> It undermines the prevailing media narrative that China is behind and backwater.

The prevailing narrative, particularly around hacker news, is that China is a dangerous foe and it's technological progress is a sign that we need to give our own government more money and less oversight so that we don't lose our "technological advantage."

> Americans don't like the idea that maybe China is actually rocketing past them technologically and infrastructurally

I don't buy this explanation given it's value to American propagandists. American society is naturally competitive. There's only two likely reasons why it doesn't get reported.

It's either not as true as the Chinese would like you to believe or American industry is already profiting off of it.

I'm not sure that a government that goes out of its way to try to silence political dissent and enforce social order through fear should be considered interested in the wellbeing of its people. [0][1][2]

[0]: https://www.icij.org/investigations/china-targets/china-tran...

[1]: https://www.airuniversity.af.edu/JIPA/Display/Article/358765...

[2]: https://www.cfr.org/in-brief/peng-shuai-china-disappeared-ho...

The Chinese also aren't the most transparent when it comes to their own technological advances. Certainly much less transparent than NASA.

You talk about US or China? For outsiders, the lines are getting blurrier every day, in quite a few aspects US is currently the bigger/worse offender and a proper bully. China just wants to sell their cars here.

I wouldnt take my family to a trip to US these days for example, no such issue with China. One sample aspect, a very practical one too, but there are many others.

China is also nutoriuous for paper mill publishing houses and overblown scientific claims.

Its also needlessly complicated to send the experiment to space. It would be equally valid science if made on earth. So there is a clear performance in the experiment not justifiable by any scientific reason.

Not to say china isn't ahead in space development right now. Artemis is going quite badly and china could certainly be faster to building usable moon outpost.

Its also very cool science, if its claims are true.

What makes you think they didn't test it on Earth first? The Chinese report on this [1] makes this clear with more accurate verbiage: "China's space station has recently conducted experiments on extraterrestrial artificial photosynthesis technology, completing the in-orbit verification of efficient carbon dioxide conversion and oxygen regeneration processes." I think the reason you want to validate your findings in the domain that they'll be used are somewhat self evident.

> "Artemis is going..."

That's quite optimistic.

[1] - https://english.news.cn/20250120/375a0de3a7fc416096799714eaf...

I quite like how link [2] he provided leads with something like "The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has many ways of administratively disappearing those it distrusts. It has punished tens of millions of people through its formal, but crude and opaque, criminal justice system."

US Incarceration Rate: 541 per 100k

Chinese Incarceration Rate: 119 per 100k

It leads to the amusing outcome that the US has more people incarcerated than China, in spite of China having 4x the population of the US. It's entirely possible to criticize the Chinese system without resorting to disinformation, but as you allude to, those critiques probably hit a bit too close to home. It's akin to how the Wiki page on authoritarianism [1] has been radically shifted over time to the point that "modern" definition and the definition of 20 years ago [2] are completely different. Yet the old definition is the one that literally everybody uses, but it, again, hits a bit too close to home.

[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authoritarianism

[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Authoritarianism&...

I only want to point out that showing scepticism to chineese scientific claims when so few details are given is well grounded.

Microgravity is not the target environment for the technology , and it verifying its operation in microgravity feels like a very minor breakthrough compared to the tech itself.

So sending it to space is performance to show off and make headlines.

Its very important tech. If their claims are true its amazing... but doing it in orbit is not the amazing part.

China is doing alot of great research, and the idea that china is behind is laughable in many sectors. But sorting through the real science is so much harder in the noise of empty papers and puffy articles.

> That's quite optimistic.

Urgh. One can dream i guess

Or it is mostly updated in Mandarin and in mostly Chinese-exclusive media ecosystem like WeChat which is not easily indexed and probed.

How is that any different than anything happening in the West? It’s not! At least the Chinese government does not seem to be importing tens of millions of foreigners to displace, disown, dispossess, plunder, dismember, and commit crimes and terrorize its own people.

Say what you want, but a government that is swapping out and replacing its own people (as von der Leyden basically admitted two days ago), all while claiming to be “democratic” (while not allowing anyone to vote on their own replacement) is exponentially more diabolical and evil than what you are highlighting. The western governments don’t “silence political dissent”? “Enforce social order through fear”?

Are you just lying to yourself of how can you not be aware of what is going on outside of what is likely an ideological bubble? What was the Palestine protests situation on college campuses in the U.S., if not “silencing political dissent” and “enforcing social order through fear”?? Now the Zionists are demanding America basically cancel the first amendment.

Can you raise public objections about tens of millions of Africans and Asians flooding into your communities that used to be safe in Europe, or will you be terrorized with judicial persecution and be downvoted online and censored simply because you have reasonable objections to being abused and harmed?

An American was just stabbed in the face by an “asylum seeker” in Germany, because he was trying to intervene in him attempting sexual assault on a woman. Did you hear about that? Do you know that rape in Europe had sky rocketed everywhere because of all the “asylum seekers”? Do you feel pangs of anxiety at hearing that and urges to make excuses for it or the fact that people who do excise it are accessories to those violent crimes that are being perpetrated all across Europe?

And that’s without even all the many other examples one could list to day’s end. You seem to be fooling yourself for some reason. This is not a sportsball game where “my team good, their team bad”. Let’s be principled here, regardless of team.

I don’t actually blame China for what you accuse them of, because there are long standing hostile, strategic plans that go well beyond what most people have any kind of understanding for, whose objective is basically destroying/taking over China just as they want to take over Russia in order to achieve total world domination. And no, you don’t have to believe me, you can read any of the many “think tank” and niche journal articles where they not only lay out their objectives, but also their strategic and tactical plans they’ve been executing for decades. I have even worked with them and discussed these types of plans with them. They’re insane and a certain kind of stupid, a kind of fools stupidity.

Frankly, what the Chinese themselves also probably do not understand is that those 600,000 Chinese students Trump wants to let in, are part of a strategy to prevent a two-front war with China and Russia and to separate and dominate them both, regardless of how successful that will be. (It won’t)

Let’s be honest here. America has the extremely high incarceration rate because of two primary factors; many of Americas regions are effectively uncivilized (if you don’t know that, you simply cannot understand this issue), and there is also a high problem of violence by Africans and if justice and law enforcement were actually conducted to keep society safe and peaceful as should be, the per capita incarceration rate and the real number of Africans incarcerated in the USA would be even far higher.

The “amusing outcome” is actually that when you look at the crime rates of East Asians, you see similar rates as in east Asia, and if you look at all other ethnicities’ crime rates anywhere they are, you also see similar patterns, not matter how removed they are from each other.

These are not complicated or challenging things, the problem is just that a new kind of delusional religion has been constructed around believing nonsense as a base assumption.

That's part of it too, but CNSA really does play its cards much closer to its chest than NASA. It's more in line with the Soviet approach of sharing the minimum information necessary to support a narrative. For example, try to find video of any Long March rocket failure, and literally the only one released is from the 90s and was only released a few years ago.

Quite bold to say the quiet part out loud. I think for what good intention there was at some point, it was to prevent a repeat of America circa 1900 which worked as an inspiration to Germany circa 1930, but it ended up getting taken to a no less destructive extreme. Nonetheless, it makes pointing out issues with legal systems in other countries overt misinformation, as it's plainly false.

I read mandarin and I use WeChat. It's still less transparent. There are many self-congratulatory press releases without enough technical information. The Chinese haven't realized yet that transparency here is a form of soft power.

> many of Americas regions are effectively uncivilized

I suppose America does have a lot of undeveloped land and national parks that are left wild, but I don't see how that could ...

> ... the real number of Africans incarcerated in the USA would be even far higher

... Ohhhh you are just racist. Got it. Take that somewhere else.

> transparency here is a form of soft power.

I severely doubt that and the ability to form and control narrative is much more important