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China Aims At Moon
SEWilco writes: "ABC News reports the head of the State Aerospace Bureau says China will explore the Moon. They've conducted an unmanned test of their first capsule, but not much else is known about their project. The comments were made at U.N. World Space Week, on the Sputnik 1 43rd anniversary."
I personally think that this is kinda cool. I think that if the US & China (and whomever else...I'm just mentioning those countries because they're regarded as "enemies"), are able to find common ground exploring space, then hopefully we could live in a safer world. (Granted, I'm aware that they could be using this as cover to explore missile propultion technology, but I'll be an optimist...)
Doh!
Excuse me?
I think that they got a good chance.
China has to have learned from the US and the Russians. When we were trying this kind of stuff in the fifties and sixties, it was all theoretical. It had never been done before. It's all well-documented now.
China already has been making quite a bit of progress in the area of spaceflight, recently- See the articles about how they are preparing for
manned spaceflight. They are not as backwards as some people believe, technologically.
They already have a good variety of launchers, as shown here. They have more powerful and more accurate rockets than we did when we first started sending boosters to the moon. So why is this so unreasonable? Plus, its not like they're saying they are going to go next week. It's going to be a space program. They're going to go through all the research and design, the work, and then do it.
If they can keep up the pace that a lunar program would take, then why not? Plus, you have to admit, the propaganda value for the Chinese would be incredibly valuable... just as it was for America in the sixties.
What do I do, when it seems I relate to Judas more than You?
Still not dead.
...if the nationalist model works. Right now, China is conspicuously absent from the International Space Station. That's due to reasons mostly of politics, but suffice it to say that they're doing all their own development work. One reason the IP's (International Partners) want to work with the USA and Russia is to learn.
China has the ability to show us if the one-country model works. I'm not totally thrilled with ISS, even though I'm helping build a payload for it for a foreign company. It's a mess, and that's primarily from the bureaucracy.
Perhaps China can shake up some of the market. The story states that Mars is their goal. It should be ours, too.
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-- Geof F. Morris
Then we shouldn't have bothered sending ships to look for water on the Moon. And we know some of the minerals on the Moon...but China is interested in actually mining them. Well, we already know what minerals are there, we don't have to actually use them...
The ABC article says they intend to actually do things on the Moon. It is not just exploration. They don't say if they're going to mine tritium, build bases, refine ores, or launch building materials from the Moon.
As a challenge.
In the sense that the Apollo program was good, this also promises to be good.
But the Apollo program was a very bad thing!
The Apollo program was very bad because it created NASA -- an umbrella bureaucracy that refuses to die and sees any true independent innovation as inimical to its interests as the "leader" of space activities.
A pan-Western NASA could easily grow out of renewed politicization of space -- especially at the level of East vs West.
Seastead this.