China's Lunar Rover Has Mechanical Trouble

[Xithras]

58. Indeed. Some of the most brilliant engineers I've worked with have been Chinese nationals.

It's true that China pumps out a lot of cheap disposable crap for Walmart, but they do so because that's what WalMart wants. Nobody who has ever worked with actual Chinese engineers would question that they are, at a minimum, our intellectual equals. Hell, roughly 10% of the students in the UC system, one of the top university systems on the planet when it comes to cranking out inventors and engineers, are Chinese nationals (U.C. Berkeley actually has a campus IN China!)

If we get cheap Chinese crap in the United States, it's because companies like WalMart have decided that Americans will buy cheap crap and won't pay for things that are built properly. The Chinese themselves are more than capable of building anything they want.

Besides, it would be good to remind Americans that NASA didn't get a lunar probe right until try number THIRTEEN. Tries 1-12 either blew up during launch, missed their targets, or simply failed when they got there. Pioneer 4, which was try #5, is sometimes considered a "success", but it actually missed its intended trajectory so badly that its onboard cameras didn't even register its proximity and fire (it was supposed to pass within 10k kilometers of the surface, but actually missed by over 60,000 kilometers...it was presented as a "success" to the media to save face...one sensor was still able to get a radiation reading from the surface).

This really is rocket science. It's extreme engineering, and I applaud the Chinese for getting a working probe there in the first place. It would have been nice if it could have lasted longer, but I have no question that they'll get there.