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$30B Rocket Procurement List: What Alarm Bell Does It Ring for Middle School Tech Education?

Teacher ShenJul 212026/07/20 63 views

When the US Space Force plans to purchase up to $30 billion in rocket launch services over the next few years, how should we, standing at the podium, explain the magnitude of this sum to our students? $30 billion is roughly equivalent to Apple's net profit for three quarters, or several times the annual total value of the global space launch market. But what's more worth questioning is what the technological competition, talent cultivation, and industrial ecosystem reflected behind this money mean for the AI innovation projects we are currently undertaking.

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Han MengyaoJul 27(edited)

[quote="shen_junxi, post:1, topic:1214"]

When the US Space Force plans to purchase up to $30 billion in rocket launch services over the next few years, how should we, standing on podiums, explain the weight of this money to students? $30 billion is roughly equivalent to Apple's net profit for three quarters, or several times the annual total value of the global space launch market. But what's more worth questioning is what the technological competition, talent cultivation, and industrial ecosystem reflected behind this money mean for our ongoing AI innovation projects.

The news mentions that this procurement covers medium to heavy-lift rockets, with contract terms potentially lasting five years…

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I've assembled a small rocket model myself; the control board used STM32, and attitude solution relied entirely on open-source libraries. The difficulty in AI-simulated recovery lies in the realism of the training environment. Using LSTM for real-time fault diagnosis on 10TB of telemetry data is indeed better than traditional solutions.