This is the Quality Contributions Roundup. It showcases interesting and well-written comments and posts from the period covered. If you want to get an idea of what this community is about or how we want you to participate, look no further (except the rules maybe--those might be important too).
As a reminder, you can nominate Quality Contributions by hitting the report button and selecting the "Actually A Quality Contribution!" option. Additionally, links to all of the roundups can be found in the wiki of /r/theThread which can be found here. For a list of other great community content, see here.
These are mostly chronologically ordered, but I have in some cases tried to cluster comments by topic so if there is something you are looking for (or trying to avoid), this might be helpful.
Particular thanks/congratulations this month to @Rov_Scam, who double-tapped two weeks and the Main Motte category this month, carrying nearly 20% of the total report. Some of you may recall that one of the ways I whittle down the list is, if you have multiple QC nominations in a single month, each comment included in the final report weighs against including an additional comment in the report. Nevertheless, the primary driver of the AAQC report is community feedback, and of the dozen or so comments @Rov_Scam had nominated, every comment included here was in the top ten posts of the month.
Quality Contributions to the Main Motte
Contributions for the week of October 27, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 3, 2025
@clo:
Contributions for the week of November 10, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 17, 2025
Contributions for the week of November 24, 2025
- "So I finally finished The Years of Rice and Salt by KSR by recommendation of @self_made_human and my 15-year-old self."
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Notes -
"If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter."
If I'd expected a nomination I'd have tried to be a little less rambly. That was supposed to be a "I've been a bit too pessimistic about Blue Origin, here's a correction, my bad", but I kept seeing more to add and I couldn't think of anything to cut.
So, screw it, here's more to add, for anyone who was interested in the prior post:
The first LandSpace Zhuque-3 launch just reached orbit, then failed its booster recovery. For them this is excellent news on the whole.
Great news: new rocket designs tend to fail their first flight as often as not, and it's always a relief to see "not", especially with a design that's trying to be cutting edge with stainless steel tankage and methane engines. For comparison, their Zhuque-2 failed on both its first launch and on the latest of its 5 launches since.
Bad news: they could have been the third institution ever to manage a powered orbital booster landing, mere weeks after Blue Origin became the second; now there's a decent chance of them being beaten to it.
Good news: they came really close to being second, with the returning booster crashing right next to the landing pad, despite Blue Origin having roughly a 150% head start. At this rate they'll almost certainly manage a landing faster (relative to company founding) than either Blue Origin or SpaceX did. Older Chinese launch vehicle designs were infamous for dropping expended boosters near populated villages with little control while spraying carcinogenic orange smoke; even if LandSpace takes a while to perfect their landings, a clean methane fire right over a dedicated landing zone is a perfectly reasonable outcome.
Bad news: the landing burn appears to have turned the entire booster into a fireball from one failed engine ignition. Half the point of clustering several engines on one booster is supposed to be that you can recover from a single failure, as happened to a SpaceX Dragon 1 cargo mission back in 2012.
Great news: even if they have a little work on robustness and landing to do, this rocket may be economical for them already; if they've hit their payload targets (hard to be sure yet; their first flight was a "mass simulator") then they've already doubled the payload of the Zhuque-2 and are up to roughly half that of Falcon 9, which they're expecting the Zhuque-3E to meet (at roughly the same price, too) after engine upgrades and a vehicle stretch.
One of the possible outcomes of the "new Space Race" has always been another Pyrrhic victory, this time for China: flags and footprints, Apollo style, followed by a series of cancellations of and creations of economically unsustainable programs, Apollo/Shuttle/Constellation/SLS style. That possibility is looking more and more remote. The next attempt at a new booster design landing, from a different Chinese launch vehicle, is expected later this month. Chinese institutions may take 3rd and 4th place in the reusable booster race.
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