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.
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.
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.
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
[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.
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.