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.
Hey, America's already Been There, Done That.
Here's what we discovered.
With all those veiled Internet trolls to whom Art Bell &c. give a voice.
I hope they figure out who owns what before it touches down, too, or we'll end up with frivolous lawsuits aplenty over lunar property rights.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
Wonder if Europe and China will start a "king of the hill" by knocking over the U.S. flag and posting their own when they get there.
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.
Well theres the supposed ice in the perpetual shadows of some craters.
And they could only mine to see whats down there to start with, to see how the moon is made up and to determine if it was part of the earth once.
Though space.com has good articles, I think http://www.spacer.com (also going by the name spacedaily.com) has some very nice write-ups. Check out the following three articles on the Chinese space ventures -6 fq.html 9 c7.html
i. China to shoot for the moon after sending man into orbit - http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030302075956.spawz
ii. China may launch unmanned moon mission in 2005 - http://www.spacedaily.com/2003/030303030843.54odg
iii. Shenzhou's Changing Face - http://www.spacedaily.com/news/china-03j.html
Suhit
We'll probably be bombing people at that time. We wouldn't want to divide our brilliant minds between science and bombing, would we?
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.
It's great that Europe and China are making their first attempts to send robotic probes to the moon. The United States has some experience in this area. Yes, Americans can sit around and watch to see how well the Europeans and Chinese do something that NASA achieved over four decades ago - and repeated dozens of times since.
A bulleted history of US missions to the Moon:
1998 - Lunar Prospector
1994 - Clementine
1972 - Apollo 16,17
1971 - Apollo 14,15
1970 - Apollo 13
1969 - Apollo 10,11,12
1968 - Apollo 8, Surveyor 7
1967 - Lunar Orbiter 3,4,5, Surveyor 3,4,5,6
1966 - Lunar Orbiter 1,2, Surveyor 1,2
1965 - Ranger 8, 9
1964 - Ranger 7
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.
Nope, the US is planning sabotage. We can't have all those euro-socialist scumbags find out that we didn't really go there in the 60's. Of course not!
I hear they're planning to send Buzz Aldrin by himself to Europe to personally pummel the ESA's people.
And I hope they get it on tape again!
/^[A-Z0-9._%+-]+@[A-Z0-9.-]+\.[A-Z]{2,4}$/i
The thing I am wondering is when a country will decide to build a space station on L4 or L5 so that they can more easily go to Mars, or other places.
;^)
(For those that don't know, L4 and L5 are the stable Lagrange points, where the gravity of the Earth and Moon are equal. Can be said for any other set of orbiting bodies too, but I am talking about the moon)
Whoever controls L4 and L5 would have the capability to control all travel to Mars,Venus, etc. Not like we will have a manned visit to Venus any time soon
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
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.
Which is important because after a long day of working in the mines, nothing is better than a nice cold beverage, preferably scotch on the rocks. We need that ice!!!
It's funny to see how cold war thinking still infects US minds. The "space race" was only a "race" because the US desparately wanted to prove that US society was superior; in part, this was because right after WWII, the Soviet model actually seemed to be working pretty well in terms of economics and science, and it looked for a while as if the Soviets were going to take over pretty much the rest of the world. In contrast, after WWII, Europeans didn't really care about anybody proving superiority to anyone anymore, they just wanted to live in peace and prosperity. Big guns, big rockets, or big words stopped impressing Europeans. This is perhaps also why Bush finds it so hard to get much support for his current adventures.
The moon isn't going anywhere. Missions to it (as all space exploration) should be driven by available technology, resources, and scientific goals, not by some horse race mentality.
we are planning just to do the staged moon landing thing and save a few bucks.
Our alternative plan is to secretly sew our flag inside another countries flag (with the outer flag being UV sensitive).
Wonder what they are doing in Soviet Russia?
Damn, they never told me continental drift was that bad.
I should point out that some powers in the world are on the way to militarizing outer space...
. ht ml
The US is seriously planning to deploy orbital weapons. One part of the current missile defense program is a space based laser system. First tests are due in 2012, so it is still a fair way off.
Take a look here for details:
http://www.acq.osd.mil/bmdo/bmdolink/html/boost
Although you will not find any mention of this at the MDA webstite, it is a fair bet that one function of such a system will be to defend US intelligence asets in space. Now that the US military is so heavily dependent on these asets, countries like China are starting to look at such asets as a potential weak link in US military power. Satelites are relatively easy to kill, and hard to replace at short notice.
Of course all talk of "peaceful exploration" in space has to be taken with a grain of salt. The technology that you need to launch to orbit and return to Earth is exactly the same technology that you need to build ICBM's. "Peaceful exploration" is a convenient way to test new missile systems without attracting bad press.
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.
But, since the moon is in orbit, thrust is an issue. But the question is, why waste a lot of money getting their fast when you're just sending a robot? It sounds like the ESA is going to get valuable ion engine experience out of this, and at the same time get to the moon cheap. And that's what going to the moon should be; cheap.
If going to the moon isn't cheap, how can we reasonably expect to go to Mars?
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.
Interestingly enough, after the second last ESA launch "problem", the artemis satellite which was on board was brought from low ellipitical orbit to geo-stationary orbit using the only system available, its ion thrusters. Pretty impressive achievement, especially when 20% of the satellites command and control software had to be rewritten to allow the fine control of the engines required.
This is valuable experience for the ESA. They also did some other pretty nifty stuff, like image transfer using an optical link
Story here
Rational thought is the only true freedom
No, the US is planning to create its own lunar surface in the Middle East
To remake the heavy lift Saturn rockets or reconstruct the Apollo heat sheilds, we would have to redo everything from scratch.
that doesnt make any sense. i went to the kennedy space center and they have a saturn V just sitting there.
in fact, who cares? if we were to remake ENIAC right now it'd probably cost millions and require infrastructure to make vacuum tubes that we might not have nowadays, but nobody would say we can't match the feats of ENIAC, or that we're behind where we were in the 40s.
if we really had a reason to go to the moon (and hence a budget to do so), then we'd go. to say otherwise is ridiculous, "Now we don't have a clue as to how to get back." give me a break.
Sigh.
No they didn't. First the Soviets managed to kill just four cosmonauts during their manned missions. After each failure their was a long stand down whilst the ships and procedures were checked thoroughly.
The first disaster was Soyuz 1 in April 1967. Soyuz had been under development for several years, but the programme had been thrown into confusion by the death of the Chief Designer Sergei Korolev. He was replaced by Vasily Michin - a fine engineer, but not up to the job of controlling the Soviet space programme, which was in itself in crisis. There were too many competing programmes vying for attention and too little money. It was during this time that the Soviet Moon programme completely lost its way - for which Michin would eventually take the blame.
Soyuz was a highly advanced craft and needed a lot of testing. That testing was nowhere near complete. However, the manned Soyuz 1 was launched under political pressure to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. The engineers complied despite the failure of three unmanned versions of the craft.
Had Yuri Gagarin lived, it was almost certain he would have flown the mission. Instead, Soyuz 1 was piloted by Vladimir Komarov it had a succession of failures whilst in orbit, including the failure of one solar panel to deploy correctly. The craft re-entered the atmosphere as planned, but with a slight rotation. The parachute lines became entangled and the craft crashed to Earth at a high speed killing Komarov.
It had been planned that Soyuz 2 would be launched one day after Soyuz 1 and they would rendezvous in orbit. The launch was cancelled. The Soyuz 2 spacecraft was dismantled and found to have identical problems to the ship that flew. Had it been launched, it would have killed its crew.
(By horrible coincidence the flight of Soyuz 1 occured just six months after the Apollo 1 fire that killed three American astronauts.)
Soyuz was grounded whilst the entire manufacturing and quality control process was reorganised. Only when that was complete did the Soviets launch five unmanned Soyuz craft as part of their Kosmos series. When these were considered successful they then launched a second Soyuz 2 completely unmanned.
Soyuz 3 was the first successful manned mission in a Soyuz which flew in October 1968 - 16 months after the disaster.
The second cosmonaut disaster was Soyuz 11, which suffered decompression during re-entry after a mission to the Salyut 1 space station. The disaster killed three men in June 1971. The craft landed automatically and the technicians were able to see that a valve had been opened during undocking.
The Soyuz 12 mission which would have used the same design of Soyuz module was cancelled. No further flights were made with this model of ship.
It was already due to be replaced by a new Soyuz design which flew eight unmanned missions before Soyuz 12 became the next Soviet manned flight in September 1973; more than two years after the loss of Soyuz 11.
Best wishes,
Mike.