YNM

As with in every other field...

Not too bad for a yearly almanac. Sole problem is the number system on the bottom, which practically doesn't have a fixed base. (weird since what they're based on actually does have a fixed base.)

Well it is the thing they came up with from ages ago, and it is the way they pronounce/read it as well (so no disconnect from the spoken version). Any shorter dates must be only month/date. For computer stuff (ie. files etc) they go even further and usually eliminate the separators altogether... (of which they usually use point for separator rather than slashes) But yeah as with more people in this thread I think the real atrocity is MM/DD/YYYY or anything of the sort. Even English have little to no reason to do that (July 3, 2012 could easily be 3rd of July 2012). Metric vs. imperial itself I honestly find no problem as long as we lock the values - and we do. The only remaining problem is with standards which tends to be both a) prescriptive and b) simplistic.

Vehicles and rockets are pretty much original. Mission architecture... I mean what do you expect to be different, really ? It's all just moving between Earth and Mars, orbital mechanics and whatnot is all the same. Document illustration... some say that imitation is the most sincere form of flattery. Actually since a lot of the people who work at their programme used to work over at the 'western' space programmes as well it's only natural to think for them to have the same aspiration.

... only because you use base 10 numerals XD With base 12 numerals you'd be looking at 50 rather than 60.

Given there's about 1.5 billion people who natively uses YY年MM月DD日/YY년MM월DD일 then I think that's not completely universal.

Well, better than trapped in the rubble of a collapsed non-seismic-resisting building... They do exist for tornadoes and hurricanes. Problem is I'm sure rocket launches are more frequent and riskier than either still, wrt homes and properties (you can't tell where a tornado will land, so you cross your fingers and hope for the best, but you know where the path of a rocket spent stage/debris is, with some accuracy - at least compared to tornado shelter design wind speed maps).

Less safety, more "secure". If I can satisfy life-safety requirements by asking people not to be inside a building when an earthquake hits (like, the entire time the earthquake happens) my life would've been a lot easier...

Would say that it does matter when we're referring codes and standards. The differences are slight, sure, and conservatism is welcome, but where do you cut the line becomes more glaringly obvious than otherwise.

With other countries right in front of it. They don't really have a clean access to the Pacific. There's a good reason Wenchang is only used for near-equatorial (so like out of KSC straight east) or polar (straight south, or with slight dogleg) launches. It's probably why they do their station on that inclination too and wouldn't risk putting it on higher inclination like what some other party asked, they already had to dogleg this one as it is. But to be fair to them, they're phasing out the hypergolics. The inland launches are going to stay, they're a lot more secure and less problematic diplomatically that way.

There's still a lot of part of the world that have similar situation as well. The concept works, the (immediate) effect on the masses works, but we'll see if there's anything interesting coming in the future as well.

Would've labelled it a favourite as we haven't go back to Uranus and Neptune, but it's kinda sad since soon they'll go away from our contact... would also lump New Horizons in as well, it won't fade on us so quickly but that's the ultimate fate. Still they are a bit lacking in terms of their interaction with us. With sample returns you get stuff back and after that the probe is free to do other things. The sample stays with us indefinitely, the probe can retire knowing it done a job well.

Rockets / spacecraft. My protest is that we barely touch unmanned spacecraft here. They might be only a machine, a robot - but they deserve the love too.

Looks over at us referring to U.S. standards and their official version is in imperial, and there are typos in the metric version and we carried over the typos leading to illogical results Would've made sense when measuring chains are all you have ! (railway mileage used to be done in chain-miles in the UK, they now technically still do that but many design documents use metric) Also still more sensible than using ft for railway mileage like in the US, even more so in design documents... like seriously it's waay too small for the scale of stuff you're working... I will say, I've always used DD/MM/YYYY nearly all my life (all 19 years ever since I properly understand stuff) since that's how we would explain it in words, but after learning languages where they naturally do things YY年MM月DD日 that alternative makes sense too. There was actually a proposal to use base 12 numbers.

Wow, what an old dig. Really sorry for the OP and the mods for quoting this. Incidentally (or perhaps completely logical ?), I'm from Indonesia and we officially do that - comma as fractions, point as 103. Given you said NL perhaps history had to do with that. However my computer is set up with the other (point as fraction, comma as 103), so... good luck trying to write documents correctly XD I think in their own language they tend to omit 103 separators. They do use comma for fractions though. EDIT : Well German Wikipedia goes and put in the same as what you thought. EDIT 2 : As an interesting aside, all three of Chinese, Japanese and Korean use the "US" system, although for Chinese and Japanese since they have symbols for 10,000 (萬 / 万) as well as multiplies of it (so 108 then 1012 then 1016 and so on) they rarely need to use the 103 separator, usually only for technical stuff.

Favourite rocket : H-IIA/B. Those strutted stubby SRBs, the larger core for the B variant which then shrinks for the upper stage only to sport a large fairing, LH2/LOX... idk, it's interesting in many ways despite arguably not the most complicated. H3 is losing the strutted look... Favourite spacecraft, manned : Shuttle. We'll never send a 737 up into space again. (we're probably going to send grain silos though, but grain silos ain't an aircraft.) Favourite spacecraft, unmanned : Anything small, anything that actually returns something new physically home. Soft spot for Hayabusa and Hayabusa2, with the tiny tumbling rovers and free-flying remote cameras and whatnot, and it sends us back a sample capsule from a celestial body we've never been on (and we'd probably never be there). Should mention OSIRIS-REx here too, though sadly it doesn't carry any add-ons (probably makes for a less risky mission too), godspeed to the team carrying samples back. In the run-up list : Delta II : 9 SRBs for maximum kerbalness. Delta III would've been here but it's too unreliable... Vega : Truly bat out of hell Ariane IV : Most kerbal-looking. Probably grain silo would replace this... maybe if they stuck a side booster or something XD Titan IV : Just for the massive SRBs. Never seen a launch of it live though (and wasn't as interested in space when it flew)

I like how all those teeny tiny engines somehow get a decent building-height stick up for some 100 kg to orbit. This is like, exactly what I did all the time launching all the probes I made in KSP XD Wondering if the economies of scale help things if you make more engine units...

Plus it'd be a bad thing if certain gasses only concentrate in certain locations - other than that you wouldn't see it being detected by the central monitoring (do they have it on every module or is it just one for the whole station ?) since no natural convection happens, esp. if you stay stationary in one point in the station you can end up like using all the oxygen around you I think... Hence when it comes to smells etc. I think it's only fair if you can smell it, and that's already with the circulation fans running continuously.

AFAIK Space stations generally requires good circulation anyway, since convection doesn't really happen like down here. So if there're any circulation fans up there they're working 24/7/365.

Interestingly something similar happened with Mariner 9 and Mars 2/3... albeit wrt reaching Mars. That's why it's best to take a look at the stuff no one is looking at yet. In any case, the more samples the merrier. If you want to terraform stuff you better have soil samples.

Once you're in orbit, you're already halfway to anywhere else...

Honestly seems like you could do it with Dragon and LSS on MEO/HEO maybe ? They want all the starship tech they're planning for anyway (most important of which is refuel), NASA pulling the plug doesn't change anything for them.

Yeah if they get SH up and running for LSS it's honestly a no-brainer to mess things with NRHO instead. Just go from LEO dock, straight landing, get back to LEO. Might even use the ISS ? We wouldn't even need Gateway or any sort of cislunar station... Either that or kessler syndrome first, not sure.

Nah I'm just surprised on the 4 mm part. To be fair they have internal pressures and stuff*. Most static structures don't. *EDIT : the internal pressure resists buckling.

Do they use stiffeners (?) like in the skirt of the test SN's (??)