Lose a satellite? Us? China silent on fate of Gaofen civilian/spy sat It wasn't just a bad week for SpaceX: China's is mourning the loss of an Earth observation satellite launched on September 1. As US space blog NASA Spaceflight notes, there's no official statement on the fate of the Long March mission that was supposed to lift Gaofen (“high resolution”) 10 into orbit. That's a hint that not …
The Chinese government's position on such things is "If we lose a couple civilians, doesn't matter, we got a billion more they came from", the official position is "We must make sacrifices for the betterment of The People". I believe that the Chinese government has declared that Fucks are government property and are too dangerous to be given to citizens.
On a serious note, they declare large chunks of land the size of counties as being part of the city that exists within it. In some cases there may only be a few dozen people that live in the region, but that whole massive area is still "Blah-Blah City". Its all international posturing, having a bunch of cities makes them look big and powerful.
From the Google translate of the Google archive (yeah, I know) of aihangtian.com linked in the article:
"After the rocket took off south west direction of flight, launch orbit is sun-synchronous orbit. Unfortunately, the launch failure, the satellite did not enter orbit. A Long March rocket four C working properly and crashed into Hill County Shangluo City in Shaanxi Province; fairing also successfully separated, and falling in Enshi City Shing Xiangjiaba territory."
Most likely they're just referencing administrative regions.
But in related history, last week a commenter posted this link to a 1994 disaster at Xichang launch site, and the accompanying state reaction. FYI:
http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/disaster-at-xichang-2873673/?no-ist
America has vendors looser definition of cities which relate more to postal boundaries. An example would be Lāna`i city, population 1.4 if you include cats.
It also leads to some confusion with addresses where you have to put down your postal city but not your town i.e. you live in Nāpili which is a genuine area / town but your address is Lāhainā which is 10 miles away. It took a little getting used to for a Brit but it's just how they roll here.
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I guess we should take things like that at face value... with the caveat that since it was "successful" why remove any information? Including pictures of the local police looking for debris? This really sounds like some of Russia's spectacular fails back in the space race days: Announce and then deny when things go pear-shaped.
I love it when China has the audacity to use the term "civilian". To them, they have a billion entities that can be pressed into service to make cheap junk for every other country and use up resources better used to help "The People".
The only real people in the country are the million or so folk heroically living in huge state-provided mansions and bravely accepting the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of dollars a year from the government for doing the dangerous job of overseeing the local cities and factories. It truly is a burden to deal with that much wealth; the proletariat truly are the lucky ones here, they don't even have to deal with the burden of a living wage or safe work conditions.
</sarcasm>
North Korea tends to announce theirs, so that their capability to utterly destroy the imperialist capitalist scum won't be swept under the carpet. It's therefore comparatively easy for observers to view the brilliant achievements of the North Korean scientists and engineers, even if they then need to try to belittle those achievements by claiming there were only three successful launches where actually there were four, with two so perfectly alike and synchronised that they appeared to the ignorant as being photoshopped.
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