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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   26880 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 25, 2025

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Reading an article on why Britain should settle Antarctica from Palladium got me thinking: are there any major, visionary projects happening at the moment that have a plausible chance of success?

I'm still hopeful for SpaceX to at least make operations on the moon more feasible, though I'm skeptical of making a real go at Mars colonization, especially as Elon's star has fallen so far recently.

China seems a likely contender, but I don't know what they have going on. I know that AGI is the thing on everyone's mind, but I'm thinking more about a physical, non-software based major visionary project that's happening in the physical world.

To quote some from the article:

These apparently radical measures will look less radical by the year, but would nevertheless represent a dramatic break from the Westminster status quo. Declining nations can resort to many sensible technocratic reforms that are easy to explain, but they find it hard to come up with compelling political or bureaucratic motives for those reforms. That can only be done with national visions—visions that are not only suited to the capabilities a country could realistically develop, but also a congruent continuation of its history, or at least the best of its history. We can see that these two conditions have been fulfilled with nearly every successful national founding or refounding. Britain’s overlooked Antarctic legacy, and the vast frozen territory it still retains, then, offer us the opportunity for such a vision.

If such a project is pursued with enough vigor, it will make Britain’s claim to Antarctica inarguable. It is easy to draw peremptory lines on an empty map, but it is much harder and more admirable to people that map and to rescue its land from barrenness. For a stagnant or declining nation, it is easy to find this or that technocratic intervention that can solve this or that economic, social, or political issue. What is more difficult is finding a vision that gives the nation reason to carry out such reforms. These visions must be inspiring, but they must also be within reach. Most importantly, they must match the legacy and history of the country.

This is culture war because, well, the decline of nations is extremely political, and from my view the Trumpian Right, for all it's many and varied flaws, is the only party at least nominally pursuing a future vision of greatness, instead of simply ignoring or managing a decline.

Also, this is a very sassy quote from the article I loved:

This unworldly modern Britain is hardly the “perfidious Albion” depicted in the propaganda of its 19th century geopolitical rivals. Not wholly unflatteringly, contemporary Russian state media still portrays the country as the shadowy orchestrator of coups and death squads. A truer depiction, though, is that of the “cash-poor, asset-rich elderly woman who has somehow inherited a portfolio of scattered, high-value properties she doesn’t know what to do with.”

I think megalomaniacal projects are inherently collectivist, a National Pride thing. You can do that when you have some particular mixes of populism and optimistic technocracy, perhaps; or when you're an authoritarian quasi-fascist (by modern standards) state that doesn't feel the need to pander to felt mundane needs of the electorate and is able to sell random infrastructure as a cause for celebration. Britain these days sounds more like it might do a mega-housing project for immigrants, or a renovation of state surveillance grid. That can be sold as visionary, too.

So speaking of China, yeah they've got that in droves. What @roystgnr said about rocketry (I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9 and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years). They have started to assemble a distributed orbital supercomputer (again, bottlenecked by lift capacity). There's preliminary research into using Lunar lava tubes for habitats, with the goal of eventual settlement of the Moon once they have the means to deliver nontrivial mass. What @RandomRanger said about the big dam; for datacenters, I like that they have a project of national «public compute» grid to basically commoditize GPU cycles like electricity and tap water . They have this Great Green Wall project, planting a Germany-sized forest to arrest the spread of Gobi desert. They've done another one in Xinjiang already. Mostly it's trivial things at vast scale – like installing thousands of high-current EV chargers, solar everywhere etc. There's a lot going on.

I think Britain would be very much improved by something mundane like that instead of flashy awe-inspiring megaprojects. It impressed me today to find that this July, China has increased residential power consumption by 18% versus July of previous year. «Between 2019 and 2025, residential power consumption in the month of July rose by 138%». I can't readily find the equivalent stats for Britain, but energy use per capita has declined by 14% in the same period; incidentally China has overtaken the UK on per capita total energy use in 2019-2020 (you can click your way to apples-to-apples comparison). The decline in energy use is a very clear sign of British involution, and it wouldn't take that much, logistically speaking, to reverse – Brits are still rich enough, and they're small enough, to procure gas (Trump rejoices), and maybe some Rolls-Royce reactors, and reduce costs and raise quality of life. AC in the summer and ample heating in the winter would do wonders to make the island less dreadful.

I am more optimistic, their currently tested designs are innately better than Falcon 9

Citation needed? I would say "currently in testing", but "tested" suggests they've made it to orbit, and AFAIK there are no non-expendable Chinese designs that have reached orbit so far. And even if you consider hop tests and engine tests to be "tested", everything seriously in the works there is basically working off the Falcon 9 playbook.

"Gravity-2 aims to operate at a similar price per kilogram as the SpaceX Falcon 9", which is about what you'd expect from a lineup that looks like someone was frantically cribbing from SpaceX. (which is mostly the right thing for them to do, to be clear; it beats the hell out of Europe's response to SpaceX)

The Hyperbola-3 hasn't had any prices announced yet but it also looks more like "cribbing from Falcon" than "innately better", except for the choice of a methalox rather than kerolox engine.

Deep Blue Aerospace is at the advanced cribbing stage, surpassing its competitors' infographics of not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy rockets by putting a not-Starship rocket at the end.

Pallas-1 gets us back to not-Falcon-9 and not-Falcon-Heavy territory.

The obsession with Falcon Heavy clones is IMHO a bad sign for some of these companies. Even SpaceX admits that Falcon Heavy wasn't worth the trouble in hindsight, and there was a point where if they hadn't already accepted Air Force contracts for it (or if Gwynne Shotwell hadn't talked Musk into staying on the feds' good side) they'd have probably canceled it entirely. The original rationale behind it was that they didn't think Falcon 9 would be nearly as powerful as it was, but after some engine improvements and tank stretching and propellant subcooling the F9 got pushed into the FH weight class, and FH got pushed out into a weight class where (with its small fairing) it will never have enough payloads to pay back the investment.

I don't know much about Tianlong-3. I'd give the company points for being the first Chinese startup to put a liquid-fueled rocket in orbit, but then take away a quarter of those points for being the first to launch a rocket stage unintentionally, to fly for miles out of control before impact, when a test fire stand broke.

Maybe LandSpace is the best bet here? 4 successful Zhuque-2 launches with 2 failures, VTVL and relight tests with Zhuque-3, using methalox now and working on full-flow methalox upgrades. There's no hint of Starship-scale plans in their future, but they're at least setting up to have Starship-quality institutional experience.

But I think what's impressive about the Chinese effort isn't any single rocket design, it's the sheer volume of these efforts. All but one of those companies has already reached orbit, albeit with smaller and less-ambitious designs than what they're working on now. Two of them have reached orbit with liquid-fueled stages. Even if most of them fail or come up with something mediocre, they're actually trying and achieving impressive things quicky. In the US, after SpaceX, our best efforts are probably Blue Origin (made it to orbit after only 25 years!), RocketLab (the Electron would have been impressive if they'd got reusability working, and I'm hopeful for Neutron), Stoke (still just doing hop tests, but actually trying out a potentially better-than-Falcon-9 idea), and maybe Firefly (with no impressive launch vehicle plans, but they made orbit).

and may allow rapid scaling beyond Starships, though this might take 5+ years

Even in the "I made a PowerPoint!" dreams of (the 4th redesign of) the Long March 9, a rocket scaling to Starship is supposed to be not flying before the 2040s.

I do mostly mean LandSpace with Zhuque-2/3, and Space Epoch's Yuanxingzhe-1. Yes, I assume that these designs will be almost fully preserved in product version. They are better than Falcon-9 in that F9 is pretty old, and they're copying Starship as well. Methalox, steel body, more robust build (F9 diameter was limited by stupid American railroad/highway standard). This has the potential for rapid reusability and mass production. And you don't need to scale to Starship if you can scale to dozens of vehicles instead. I've heard that LandSpace may get facilities currently involved in metalworking for military aviation.

Long March 9,

I am completely jaded about the Long March program and it isn't factoring into my estimates. Robin Li was wise to insist on liberalizing the space market to enable those private efforts, they will determine Chinese ceiling.

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