Oh man I love the absolute seethe in the comments whenever there's an update on China's reusable rocket program. I wonder if those retards realize that whenever they call out the chinese for being uncreative subhumans for only copying or when they're throwing shade at China's political/governmental system for suppressing innovation or whatever, do they ever stop to consider that they're basically also throwing literally every other country on earth under the same bus?
If China bad then what are they're going to say for Europe or Russia or Japan or India that are also busy working on their own Falcon 9/Starship copy, but are only on a powerpoint and will be two decades late instead of having actual hardware to test today. Or the half a dozen or so American newspace rocket companies that are also more or less copying SpaceX by the book. Surely all of them will be a dozen times worse right? By nah, complete radio silence from the same group of people once ESA, ISRO or Jaxa or ULA rolls out their totally not Faclon 9 clone by 2035.
Some of them probably aren't American and don't realise the irony of shitting on China while every other space agency is busy drooling their way into irreverencey. If it was their own country making a hard pivot into reusable rockets, they would be praising it to hell and back. At least China has the excuse of having low GDP per captia and being fairly undeveloped compared to the like of Europe and Japan, especially 10 years ago. If anything China changing course so fast and on a country wide scale is unprecedented, it's basically a country sized SpaceX. Even NASA is stuck with the SLS for the next decade and American oldspace simply can't keep up with SpaceX or China.
Best part is all the comments about "commies" or how their private space companies are fake and just shells for the centeral government and thus won't succeed because they aren't truly private, as if ULA/Boeing/Northrop Grumman wasn't absolutely stagnating the American space industry for the last 30 years, or how there's basically no activity in the European/Japanese/Indian private space industry and probably won't be for another decade while Chinese private space companies have already launched a dozen times, while Blue Origin continues to not launch anything into orbit.
It doesn't make any sense anyway, the Raptor is such a rapidly evolving engine that unless China can see the future, there's no way to copy/steal the Raptor, anyone with more then room temperature IQ can see this within 5 seconds.
