Slashdot Mirror
Europe Heads for the Moon in July
Orlando writes "The BBC are reporting that Arianespace are all set for sending Smart1 to the Moon in July. The mission's primary objectives are testing planetary exploration technologies. This is particularly good news after the recent Arianne rocket explosion." China's also planning a moon mission. The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.
That SMART-1 is a solar-plasma-hall-effect propelled... thing? (I don't know what to call it. "technology demo" would be most fitting)
Anyway, with US short a shuttle, I'd think there should be more of europe stepping up to support the ISS; you know, the *international* space station? of which they are also a part of?
Granted, it'd be the day when you see muslim (like, say, from Saudi) or chinese (as in, from Beijing) flying to the ISS on a regular basis, so maybe it's not that international...
My life in the land of the rising sun.
This isn't a race. In case you forgot, we visited the moon over 30 years ago. The value of a trip now wouldn't justify the cost. I fully support the space program and realize its importance, but realistically the only reason it's around is for the boost it gives to nationalism.
A little competition to get us back on track. We need to take NASA away from the politicians and give it back to the engineers.
I think it'll be good for us. When the Ruskies got sputnik up there, it really riled us up. A lot of people stepped up and said, "I can do better than that!". "I'll see your satelite and raise you the Moon," they said.
So Europe wants to go to the moon? Good for them. They can have second place, and if it motivates us a bit, we'll see Mars, astroid mining, and the Space Hilton long before I'm visiting the Lunar Beni Hana.
I hope they go there; it'll light a fire under our ass to get back into the swing of things.
Quit your bellyaching and get a reality check. The cool tech most people in China are waiting for is running water. All empire fall, but it is going to be a while still before China uniformly leaves the U.S. in the dust....that is assuming they themselves aren't subverted economically by labor and intellectual capital even cheaper than themselvs. So far they are the low cost choice, but once standards start to rise there, they will also hear that "giant sucking sound" from cheaper locales like every other producer in the free trade world.
The same reason Michael thinks it's worth noting that the US is "just" going to sit and watch is the same reason this article will probably be duped in an hour or two like so many others.
Welcome to 40 years ago.
Isn't amnesia fun?
Ben
Work Safe Porn
This is totally offtopic until Iraq threatens to nuke the moon. But let me answer your idiotic points -- yes Iraq has not accounted for chem weapons; we know this not because they declared it (since you're so anxious to believe them) but because we (i.e. the USA) SOLD THE FUCKING WEAPONS TO THEM. Then we stood idly by and watched them gas their own people with them, and Rumsfeld didn't miss the chance for a photo-op shaking hands with Saddam at the time. For the US to get high and mighty about this shit 20 years later is fucking ridiculous. And finally since when is mere possession of chem weapons grounds for war? Hussein is no more "criminally insane" than Musharaff (whose country, don't forget, has had NUKES as well as chems since the 80s, and has openly threatened to use them against India in the very recent past), or any other fucking tinpot tyrant with access to nasty weapons. Hussein may be a cruel dictator but he's not suicidal and like most state leaders, he will do what is in his best interest -- threatening the US with an unprovoked chemical attack is not there. Now, using chems or whatever else in response to a US attack on Iraq -- that's a much more likely scenario. And its one that the criminals currently in power in the US had better start taking seriously otherwise American lives will be sacrificed to their shortsightedness.
Are we supposed to go do it again? Considering we did this four decades ago?
Yes. Or admit that the USA has passed its prime as a society and is now on the slow slide into cultural and moral decay. It is not what you did in the past, it is what have you done lately that counts.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
Ok, honestly, this is starting to get on my nerves.
Tell me if I'm wrong, but I think that Russia had:
- The first rocket in space
- The first animal in space
- The first man in space
- The first woman in space
- The first probe on the moon
And probably some other stuff I can't rememberand
Then a US president decided that having a man on the moon was important... So the US won an arbitary race they contrived.
I have often heard that Americans won the Space Race. It was not the "Space Race", the Russians won that. It was not the "Moon Race", the Russians won that too. It was the "Man on the Moon Race". So well done, have a gold star.
It reminds me of the claim that Americans built the first computer... It depends on what properties are necessary for a device to be classed as a computer: That it's electronic? That it has Randomly Acessable Memory? That it operates on a stored program? (This last one seems most plausible to me.) I am tempted to suggest that one of the requirements implicit in some people's lists is that it was built in America.
The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch.
no the US is going to figure out what killed seven of our astronoughts before we kill any more. Plus continue other projects into deeper space than the moon. I just love the way the comment is phrased. Bash us for our genuinly stupid foreign policy, you can point to good fodder with Bush and his "kill all brown people" policies without making up ways to poke the space program. But of course bashing the US for anything and everything is an internatial pastime, some of it well deservered. NASA however, is the least deserving of bashing.
-- Insert wisdom here:
The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch
why is everyone like, "well, we already did it."
sure we already did it. And I already backed the server up last week, so why do it again?
we sure didn't learn everything we could from a mere 7 landings!
The first cut? Nope. Science benefits in times like these. The US government is the biggest VC in world history. Of course, it depends what you're researching. You can map technological innovation almost directly to the time leading up to conflicts and the conflict itself. It's only in very recent history that commerical use has been a driving force (and that doesn't pay for big research, high-risk research.)
This is basically what the history books say about the Vikings and North America--technically first, but who cares. Columbus and the English (and French, Spanish Germans, Dutch in descending order) get the recognition.
That, of course, begs the question as to what indeginous Moon people Eurasia will replace when they do colonize the Moon, but let's not go there, shall we?
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
Yes, the US Shield! The myth that the United States of America does Everything for Everybody! The USA is the modern day Jesus Christ Superstar of nations!
I am sick of blind patriotism. Just because the United States does some things right, doesn't mean it does everything right. In fact, it does some things horribly, horribly wrong. Turning a blind eye to it is irresponsible, sheep.
evil adrian
dpete4552 wrote:
> Israel has violated UN declarations as well, you never see
> us huff and puff about them. Probably because there is
> no significant amount of oil, if any, in Isreal.
Israel has great religious significance to the religious right, a strong faction of the republican party, and the part of it currently in the White House. Not only do we not huff and puff, we send them aid and sell them many weapons. But then we helped Iraq obtain the very biological, chemical, and nuclear weapons we now accuse them of still having.
> North Korea readily admits to developing a nuclear
> program and defying the US, and we don't care too much
> about them either (no oil).
North Korea was a major blunder on Bush's part. North and South Korea are in the process of reuniting into one Korea, which Bush didn't approve of. Bush made a bunch of warlike rhetoric, talking about taking on Iraq, "axis of evil", blah, blah, blah. N. Korea got scared, and started making nuclear noises. It isn't clear that they actually have any working nukes, but fear that they exist has thus far deterred the US from attacking. The US had their fuel oil supplies cut off, leaving them only nuclear plants to heat their homes, which they started up. Unfortunately, we did not keep our 1994 promise to build nice peaceful light water reactors, so the only ones they have to heat their homes with also make the material for nuclear weapons. And up and up it escalates. Bush has been told repeatedly by N. Korea's neighbors to sit down and talk to them, but I guess that would ruin his plans for Korean War II.
> China launches takes and uses its army to kill its own
> people, including children, it is broadcast live to our
> livingrooms, and they just get scoled by Bush Sr. "Bad
> china! Don't do that again!" (No oil).
China produces oil, about the same amount as the US itself. China is too big to swallow whole, making diplomacy the route that the US has chosen to deal with this situation. Of course, diplomacy could solve most of the stuff Bush wants to go to war over, even Iraq. In diplomacy, you have give and take. In war, you have conquer and rule. The latter is more fun, but only if you are the president of the conquering nation.
> Now when we are in a very depressing economic
> situation isn't it convenient that the Bush Administration
> is pulling Iraq out of their hat again. Nothing like
> bringing up Iraq changes the subject so well eh?
You think this is depressing, just wait. The new budget has a $300 billion deficit (mostly Homeland Security, as a lot of other stuff got cut), not counting Iraq costs. The war could be $50 to $200 billion (depending on who you talk to) without reconstruction costs. State and local governments are in deep financial trouble, with no help coming from the federal government.
What does this mean to you and me? Well, not only is the US not going to the Moon anytime soon, but between insane gas prices and badly maintained roads, we are going to have a heck of a time getting to work. Assuming we have jobs...
> Well at least Bushinomics are bringing tax cuts for the
> rich.
So the rich get richer, and the rest of us have billions more government debt, no decent government services, and all of our own problems to boot. Great system for a feudal kingdom constantly running off to the Crusades (if you don't mind an occasional Robin Hood), but very bad for a 21st century USA.
> Of course the masses are too busy being destracted by
> Bush and all of his war mongering.
Public opinion worldwide, including the US, is against this war. In every member state of the coalition of the "willing", the leaders are joining in defiance of their people's wishes, and at risk to their careers. The peace movement is huge, organized, and extremely active: whether it's getting 10+ million people to protest on the same day in 60 countries and 600 locations, or organizing a call/fax/email your US senator and president day for 400,000 people (with, oops, over 1 million actually participating)! The unions in the US have come out against the war, so I would expect a lot more people to get undistracted quite quickly.
And, yes, those against the war know what it is doing to our economy. That is one of many, many reasons to oppose the war.
"All our tomorrows, Great Sun, by the Light, are very forgotten.
The Light dies. We pray and it sleeps."
"Oh Peace Oh Light Return" (national song of mourning) from "Gojira" (Godzilla) 1954
[The USA attitude re: Moon exploration] it's more of a "Been there, done that" stance.
At its time, the "Moon Race" was an effective political ploy. Maybe not the best cold war strategy, but an effective one.
But to regard lunar exploration as something the USA has already accomplished is dumb. While there was some good technology fallout, and some good science, they were incidental to the thrust of the USA effort. Which was simply to establish "First Post" bragging rights on the Moon. Which gives the USA all the enduring value of "FP!" claim on slashdot.
I don't disagree with your assessment-- it does seem like most of my fellow Americans do think that way. Which I think is a pity.
Don't be ridiculous. Bush only glanced favorably at space travel following the Columbia disaster and the subsequent (immediate and temporary) surge in the mob's interest in space. His pollsters (puppetmasters, whatever) told him it was time to throw a little care in the direction of NASA, and for the first time in his administration, he gave them some funding, rather than slashing and slashing, which he has been doing (including shuttle related projects). And gee look, the project he picked to help has craploads of direct relation to weapons research. What an ass.
So, you think the slashdot crowd is interested in science for the sake of science?
...RIGHT?
The first thing that happens when some other country tries to go to the moon is that there's nooo reason to do it, it's been done... the us has already won...
and we all know that science is about winning right?
not about the pursuit of knowledge.
America won science 40 years ago...
and of course ESA is planning to test equipment on the moon for nationalistic reasons...
becuase Europe is a nation?
If this story tells us anything, it'd have to be that technology is at a point where it's economically feasible to go to the moon for scientific reasons...
of course we can do incredible things if there are political reasons to do it... but what can we do for purely scientific reasons?
In my mind a far more interesting question.
Would have thought the slashdot crowd had the same interest in science.. but I guess I was wrong.
"I don't know that Atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots." -George H.W. Bush
This is not funny. This must be the most overrated joke ever. AYBABTU jokes are funnier. So are 12?P and ISR jokes.
There are many reasons why the French surrendered in 40. Most are wrong. For instance I think they should have transferred much logistics to England, which would have happened, hadn't Darlan gotten a nice position in the Petain puppet regime.
But remember before them the Poles, the Checks (however you write that), the Danes, the Norwegians, the Dutch, the Luxemburgers, the Belgians had surrendered -Yet you never mock them.
Days before the English HAD to go back to their island to save their ass. The Americans wouldn't enter the war (this is not a blame).
They chose to surrender and payed a very harsh prize for that in the four next years. Thousands of jews through the chimney, thousand more dead in the resistance.
The French (and the Brittish) had lost the war far before 1940, for instance by not preemptively invading Belgium. Belgium was neutral and the king with autocratic pretentions Leopold III wouldn't let them in, but everyone knows we would have let them in with no fighting.
For instance by not letting Hitler invade the Rhine in 37, or to gain air parity in 36. (Hey modern day warmongers, don't try to pull a Hitler-Saddam parallel to me, I do more believe in a Bush-Saddam parallel, after all it is the USA who has the nukes, the gas payloads and it is the USA who invades foreign countries, something Saddam wouldn't do in 12 years, but I digress)
The French couldn't win the battle of France with the Brittish, I don't see how they could have won it after Dunkirk. Would England not have been an island, I'm not sure they wouldn't have been beaten too.
So stop your stupid jokes about the French surrendering. They're not funny.
Yes. Or admit that the USA has passed its prime as a society and is now on the slow slide into cultural and moral decay. It is not what you did in the past, it is what have you done lately that counts.
People like you have been declaring the "death of America" for the past hundred or so years. Our slide into "cultural and moral decay" is the reason why Japan thought we wouldn't fight back after Pearl Harbor, the reason why the USSR thought we needed to be forced into Communism, the reason why everybody thought Japan was going to whip our butts in the 70s and 80s and why on September 11th a bunch of terrorists thought that they could blow up the Twin Towers without any retribution.
Heck, you can even go back to the founding of this nation when the wise Europeans didn't think we would last more than a couple years at best.
America has been underestimated for pretty much its entire existence.
NASA's "focus" for the past two decades has been to build a space station and a shuttle to get to it. After the moon landings this is a pretty logical next step.
Unfortunately we have ran into more technical and engineering challenges that we would have liked. But we tried. Now we have to move forward and figure out what to do next. However, you cannot start comparing us to the Chinese and Europeans until after they have landed on the moon and asked themselves "what's next?".
BTW, we have sent up a ton of different mission including the Hubble Telescope and the Mars Pathfinder. These have generally been "side projets" in comparison to the grand vision, but any one of these would be considered a "tremendous accomplishment" to China or Europe.
Brian Ellenberger
We know what's up there, we know how to get there, we know how to get back.
Well, to get snide about it, we don't know what's up there (but we do know that a golf club can be used in a space suit, and that funny wheels make an effective lunar go-cart, and we collected enough rocks that I think a strong man would have a problem lifting them all at once-- but I'm not sure). We knew how to get there, but like Goldie Hawn frequently said at the time, "I used to know all that stuff." Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back. We threw all that technology away.
Yes, I mean that. The Apollo program was based on technology that used (get ready for it) sliderules. The total amount of computer power that was used in the entire Apollo program is dwarfed by the desktop machine that you turn off without giving it a second thought, when your done with your evening's slashdot entertainment. You couldn't muster up enough people in the workforce today who know how to use a sliderule to repeat what was then done, or even understand the notes that were written about it. The technology of the Apollo program was never carried across into computers. To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch. We orphaned the whole thing as we moved on to better technology.
Terribly shortsighted, that was.
In response to another of your comments: I did not discredit what you call the "residual accomplishments". Re-read my post.
As to Christopher Columbus-- he made several repeat voyages to the New World. He stuck to his program, even though it failed in the long run. His program was designed to return spices and gold-- the keys of that age. Our space adventure had no pragmatic purpose, and so was shut down before it accomplished anything of lasting significance. It was truly just a "First Post" effort.
The lander is actually European, the orbiter is American.
if you want "No More Hiroshimas" then I say "You First. No More Pearl Harbors."
An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind. Mahatma GandhiIf at first you don't succeed, skydiving is not for you
that the US isn't threatening war against nations researching space travel in the name of 'national security'
Humanity needs to get off this planet, and a permanent mission on the Moon will be a good first step. If it does nothing more than mine fuel and put it into lunar orbit for use by other missions, it will have paid for itself.
I'm old enough to remember the Apollo missions; how vividly I recall that day in July 1969, when the words "Tranquility Base here: the 'Eagle' has landed." came crackling over my transistor radio. Years later, when I took my own children to see "Apollo 13", I tried to explain to them what it was like back then, when we used to fly to the Moon. They asked me why we were going any more, and I didn't have a good answer. Still don't.
So, three cheers for the Chinese and the Euros, and God speed to them.
[this
We know what's up there
... people had been to America before him - Columbus is not a forerunner, he came after others and still he was the one that initiated the real change, not those that were first - he is equal to the EU and China in this one not the US.
Huh? We do?
Sorry pal, but we've squatted here on Earth for over hundred thousand years and we still don't know everything that's here.
And you think you know everything that's up in the moon by spending what, few hours, there. Get real.
And what comes to Columbus, funny that you took him up in an effort to try belittle this when it's perfectly the opposite
I hate to admit it, but your wrong. It would take the US atleast a year if not 2 to get back to the moon. We DO NOT have the equpment/knowledge to build a saturn V (or even to get the parts outside kennedy spaceworthy). We would need to design a WHOLE new craft. Remember getting to the moon is easy, it's being able to get BACK that's hard. The shuttle, which is the ONLY current re-launchable craft requires MAJOR overhaul between a landing and a take off. You would need a craft that could land and take off with NO maintanence. This is not an easy task.... If one of these other governments launches a team to the moon and they get stranded, the US wouldn't be able to mount a rescue mission even if we wanted to....we would need to design and build a craft from scratch. Remember no shuttle has ever even ORBITED the moon.
Hmm; seems to be a fair sprinkling of ESA projects in there, not to mention national agency projects.
Not wanting to picky, or anything, mind. NASA certainly contributes elements to many of these projects but to imply that they are NASA projects is a little disingenuous.
Please remain calm, there is no reason to pani... wait, where are you all going?