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Chinese Manned Space Flight Set For Autumn
brandido writes "According to an article at Space.com, "Chinese space officials remain on schedule for the first piloted flight of that nation's Shenzhou spacecraft. Chief designers and mission directors say Shenzhou 5 will be launched in autumn, reported the People's Daily last week." Between this, the X-Prize, and multiple launches of Mars probes in the last few weeks, it looks like the space race may be heating back up?"
Wish them best luck.
on spacedaily.com : Arianespace, Boeing and Mitsubishi Heavy Plan alliance. By the way, Arianespace is already planning to work with the russian Proton guys... Looks like this kind of cooperation could be interesting in the long run for bigger projects, if this works out, a multi business way of thinking for e.g. future Mars missions wouldn't be looked upon as farfetched as it used to be (today, that is)
You mean 2010. And hopefully this mission won't end the same way Tsien did...
"putting a Chinese man somewhere above the trophosphere"
A hate to break it to the undisclosed Chinese official, but a Chinese man has already been above the troposphere. We sent him up in the Space Shuttle. He is my former boss, and all around great guy Taylor Wang. http://www.jsc.nasa.gov/Bios/htmlbios/wang-t.html
He is now a prof. at Vanderbilt University, where I worked for his dept. as a student worker for several years.
Superficially they look similar, but compare the numbers:
CZ-2F: Diameter: 3.4 m, length 62.0 m. LEO Payload: 8,400 kg
Saturn V: Diameter: 10.1 m, length 102.0 m, LEO Payload: 118,000 kg(!)
If you removed the Apollo spacecraft and the 3rd stage (S-IVB) from the Saturn it still wouldn't fit through the CZ-2F's little door.
Don't forget Soyuz was never just intended for one purpose (like Apollo), it is a family of spacecraft that can be configured to several purposes - including, had the Soviets been able to tame their N1 booster, fly around and orbit the Moon.
In many respects Soyuz was far superior to the Apollo capsule, so it makes a great start for a country with limited resources to get into the manned space program.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The type of comments the author referred to are simply bigoted, racist, and ignorant.
PC is saying things like, "persons of mainland asiatic descent" instead of Chinese. Bigoted is "Chink"
We're all old enough to know the difference.
Two Rules For Success:
1) Never tell people everything you know.
The space shuttle was actually conceived in the 60's, I think and built in the 70s. The first flights were in the early 80s.
By the way, the space shuttles have been updated quite a bit over the years. I believe each shuttle has undergone one or two complete rebuilds in their lives. All the old CRT displays were replaced with LCD models, etc. Now, the thermal protection technology hasn't been improved much, if at all, but when Columbia was lost, it was a much different shuttle than the Columbia that was first launched in the 80s. It was the same airframe, most of the rest of it had been replaced.
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The internet is the greatest source of biased information in the history of mankind.
From pictures I've seen, the Soyuz spacecraft was definitely much roomier than the Apollo spacecraft, given there are two pressurized sections of the spacecraft. It was fortunate the the Russians were able to overcome the early chequered history of the spacecraft, given the Soyuz 1 crash and the unfortunate air leak that killed the Soyuz 11 cosmonauts. The newest Soyuz T-4 variant owes almost nothing to the original Soyuz design with its interior design.