alt Hacker News> Do we really need to frame China’s succes here in terms of American decline?
They are co-occurring facts in the same area and the only reason China’s success is relevant in this discussion is because it is co-occurring with and in the same field as the American decline that is (unlike the tangential Chinese angle) directly relevant to the story here.
So, in this specific case, if we are going to mention China at all, the answer is yes. Not because the two things are so linked that they ALWAYS need to be discussed together, but because that is the relevant nexus between the present subject and China at all.
This doesn’t actually represent an American decline in space exploration, though.
The NASA/ESA Mars sample return was poorly designed, they basically attached a half baked idea to the Perseverance mission in the hopes that having the mission “underway” would make it easier to fund the rest of the mission. That meant Perseverance was just putting things in tubes and leaving them sealed on the ground at random places around Mars. So that meant they would need to devise another system to go collect them, another system to store and launch them, and another system to return them to Earth. That’s a ridiculous process. The costs exploded, the gambit failed.
China’s was much better planned, having the rover and launch vehicle land together, fully funded from the beginning. However, it’s also much simpler, there’s no picking and choosing what to sample from a wide area, it’s just whatever is available to the lander wherever it happens to land.
And this would not have been the only future mission to deep space. The US is going to land a fleet of drones on Mars. They’re launching a nuclear powered drone to Titan.
The US has led the world in reusable rocket development, satellite constellations, and crewed LEO operations.
The big picture is clear. This one mission doesn’t really say much about the space program in general.