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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
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
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
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.
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Nice generalization. A few points:
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.
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.