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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?"
it's like my dad always said, "a little competition never hurt anyone."
look at the last time the US had a space race, we achieved what many call the greatest achievement of mankind, we landed on the moon.
Mike
and I really hope everything goes perfect for them.
Because it seems that China will be the only hope for real advances in space. The US program will never gear up to what it is supposed to be at.
All I know is the thing that may do it, is china placing a moon base just might get the attention of the tubs of idiocy that sit in the congress and house of represenatives....
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
then I don't know what else could get NASA moving again.
I am the Alpha and the Omega-3
Hopefully the Chinese pushing forward with developing their own space program might give NASA, ESA, and Multi-national Corporations the kick in the ass they need.
:-|
can't wait to be able to say "We live in a world where a Chinaman has walked on the Moon." can you?
Belief that Perspectives matter more than Facts = Mark of the Truly Ignorant
There is a lot to be said for unmanned flight. Just because the Chinese are getting ready to send a manned spacecraft up does not mean that we should assume that this race is good. In reality it costs a LOT more to send a manned flight into space (safety concerns). That's money that might be better spent in other places. I can understand if lots of you are skeptical about it given where Congress chooses to spend money. Still, I would think that it might be worth a pause before deciding this is a race we need to win.
The Slashdot community should be ashamed. This story has only been up a short while, and already I'm seeing references to rockets made of bamboo, astronauts eating freeze-dried dog meat, and even the despicable phrase, "runar rander." This sort of bigotry and racism is unbefitting of one of the most respectworthy technical communities on the web today.
You are probably all just jealous because you lost your jobs to better trained immigrants, or because you always strike out with the cute Chinese ladies. Sad.
Boromir, son of Faramir, King of Gondor and Minas Tirith
Spacedaily.com claims sources say it will be later, somewhere in december, also rumours go that there's a big possibility for a 2 man crew, or even a 3 men crew, that would be a first in history: first launch attempt, and a 2 (or 3) men crew... i wish them all the luck they'll need.
The only reason you are alive is becuase your ancestors were competitive and won.
I am referring to the single celled organisms that COMPETED with the other single celled organisms and won. Then they formed multi-celled organisms and kicked the other multi-celled organisms butts (well, what was going to become a butt eventually)
So you say: "I'd love to live in a world where competition wasn't the driving reason to succeed," and to be blunt, there is no life if we don't compete. At least not as we know it.
M@
Krispy Cream is people
So instead of saying the space race is heating up, we should say "It looks like the space meander is idling on luke-warm"?
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
And the chinese are not doing the same goal as the US mission. The US mission was to reach the moon for Glory purposes and examination of the moon.
The chinese mission is instead to improve their man mission space technology to be competitive with the US and russia. The moon is just a handy tourist attraction that is being used as a mile marker so that they will know they are getting it right.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
Sometimes I wish the Soviets would have gotten to the Moon first because then Americans wouldn't have had any other choice but to put a man on Mars to save face.
Either that or a nuclear strike against the USSR (I'm not kidding, there were people who seriously suggested that to the US administration if the Soviet Moon program got too far) because otherwise the political situation would have been intolerable. It's all political, science is a third-rate consideration, and noble goals like actual expansion to the space are not even mentioned. But still, I wish them luck, any step forward for whatever reasons is better than our current self-admiring stagnation (like how long can we hype the moon landing?? It is still the main exhibit in all space-related museums after 35 years!)
When men used to be men
(Seriously. Where would we be if the explorers of "yesteryear" had been as timid as we are today? I mean, do you think a single one of the explorers to the new world didn't expect it was VERY likely their ship would sink at sea and they would die? Yet they went anyway. Of course, it probably helped that almost all of Christopher Columbus's crew, they could only get them to go on the journey becuase they were all condemned criminals anyway, and it was life in jail or go on this boat to God knows where that might kill you. But still. The extent to which NASA protects its astronaut's lives is amazing, but things are *going* to happen, and I suspect no one becomes an astronaut without knowing and accepting that fully. Now, you may also say it isn't a great idea to spend billions on these spacecraft if quite possibly they're just going to blow up anyway, but i would counter that our government already spends billions and billions on devices which are designed and built for no other purpose other than to blow up in the most destructive way possible...)
Ironically YOU wouldn't exist if all the cells in your body didn't cooperate with each other. The real evolutionary steps came when there was cooperation: single cells forming multicellular organisms, animals forming groups, people forming tribes, etc. Competition only holds the status quo; it keeps things in a kind of entropy until the next big step forward.
Alone I can build a house. We together can build a city.
Furthermore, do you know what we call something that is so over compeditive that it cannot do anything BUT compete with everything?
Cancer.
The reason why Americans suck at space is cause you are too busy being a racist worldwide, you just don't have time for science.
</quote>
Nice generalization. A few points:
Lynn Margulis (famous microbiologist [and first wife of astronomer Carl Sagan, incidently]) wrote an article about what she rates as the five most dramatic steps forward in the evolution of life on Earth. I don't remember the whole list off the top of my head, but it included things like "motility" (going from just floating to moving under ones own control is a far bigger advance than, say, flying, which is just a refinement of motility). All five were not the result of competition but cooperation between formerly seperate organisms. Cooperation has brought about the biggest advances in evolution, competition has done nothing but refine the efficiency of existing designs...
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Sorry, that was a myth put out by the Americans to make the Soviets look slipshod and backwards. All of the supposed cosmonauts who were killed before the flight of Yuri Gagarin have been found to be fictional and all of the flights since then have been accounted for.
The Soviets have lost 4 men in space and no more. They were Vladimir Komarov on Soyuz 1 on April 24, 1967. Soyuz 1 flew well before the ship was ready, it was known to be faulty, but Brezhnev insisted that it was launched to keep up the pace against the Americans. Soyuz 1 suffered a series of faults ending in her parachutes becoming entangled, she crashed to Earth killing Komorov instantly.
The second group of fatalities were Georgi Dobrovolsky, Vladislav Volkov, and Viktor Patsayev on-board Soyuz 11. They were the second crew of Salyut 1, the World's first space station (Skylab was second). After 23 days in orbit, Soyuz 11 returned to Earth, but a pyrotechnic malfunctioned during separation of the orbital and re-entry modules; an air valve was stuck open and the module gradually depressurised. The ship landed automatically, but the crew were found to be dead when the capsule was opened.
And that's it.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Once manned heavier-than-air flight was demonstrated, going to the moon was pretty inevitable
Um, no.
Flight through the atmosphere with heavy craft and launching something into space are almost completely unrelated problems.
For the first, you need to figure out how airfoils work to produce lift (helicopter blades count in this category), and figure out how to move the air that surrounds your craft to produce thrust. Then there's materials engineering to get the performance to weight ratio nice enough.
For the second, you have to figure out celestial mechanics, and you have to figure out how to build reaction drives that _don't_ use the surrounding medium to move (as you won't have air around you for much of your trip, and it's more of a hindrance than a help at significant speed). Then you have the herculean task of materials engineering and clever craft design required to get an impulse-to-weight ratio large enough to escape the gravity well (or at least have enough delta-v for orbit). If the gravity well was even a little deeper, we wouldn't have been able to do it with chemical rockets at all (though aircraft would still be easy to build).
There's a world of difference between a jet engine and a rocket engine. There's a world of difference between something light and strong enough to glide and something light and strong enough to have a 40:1 wet:dry weight and make orbit. It's not a difference of scale - it's a difference of fundamental type of device.
In summary, please do more research about exactly what's involved in each task before proclaiming that one follows from the other. What actually precipitated _both_ was the industrial revolution, which gave a drastic increase in technology and in materials science.
Indeed. However, the universiality of the laws of physics makes a much more convincing explanation than all the other stuff you went on about.
"Convictions are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies."
Perhaps you meant to say "Multiparty Democracy" vs. "Communist" government.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
While the idea of evolution as an endless ass kicking contest holds sway with the Ted Nugent crowd it is neither rational nor an accurate protrayal of evolutionary processes. In the Darwinian sense competition is really a struggle of an organism against its changing environment. As the environment changes the organisms best capable of dealing with the changes survive. This is counterbalanced by the increased rate of reproduction that organisms closely attuned to a very specific set of environmental conditions can achieve. Hence, smaller mammals with lower caloric requirements, warm blood, large broods, short generations and omnivourous diets are better able to survive a cataclysmic event like the nuclear winter like event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs. Furthermore direct competition between species is rarely observed. For example, a lion will rarely go out of its way to attack a leopard unless the lion is near starvation and the leopard has recently made a kill. If the lion is such a poor hunter that it needs to steal food to survive it will probably not be able to reproduce as it will starve to death when the leopard leaves its territory and no other creature will provide food for it to scavenge.
The primary force driving evolution then is the external environment. Direct competition generally occurs only within members of the same species but rarely leads to speciation. Also, direct competition usually is related to sexual (as opposed to asexual) mating and not all organisms that reproduce sexually compete directly. For example male songbirds "compete" by being considered more attractive than other birds (a situation that is mostly a result of genetics although diet and other environmental factors also play a role). In modern human society the ability to kick butt does not generally enhance the chances for reproduction. In the US being wealthy and buying a large house can help in the mating game, but unless you are a boxer or hockey player it is doubtful that butt kicking is going to help one gain those sexually advantageous items.
To extend this analogy to the space race although personally I find stretching biological facts into epistomological facts about the world in general as pointless as deriving philosophical truth from quantum mechanics. Commercial space interests such as the X-prize contestants are generally looking to develop technology to the point where low earth orbit becomes cheap thanks to economies of scale. National space programs however tend to be more interested in prestige building programs: such as putting people in orbit, landing on the moon, and interplanetary missions which will not necessarily make achieving low earth orbit economical. Therefore there is room for cooperation between those who want to make space cheap and those who want to push the boundaries.