Slashdot Mirror
Asia's Space Race: China vs. India
securitas writes "London-based military historian and commentator Gwynne Dyer writes about Asia's developing space race with plans from China and India to land people on the Moon, previously mentioned on Slashdot in China's case. In April India announced it will send an unmanned probe to the Moon by 2005 and a manned mission by 2015. Critics say it's a waste of time and money for India to pursue the goal. Meanwhile, Russian space experts are quietly helping China in what is seen as a growing alliance and a somewhat alarmist op-ed piece from the Washington Times worries about China's 21st century space dominance and monopolization of strategic resources like H3, used in nuclear fusion."
Finally some global interest in spacefaring. As long as only one nation has any interest in space stuff, there's never going to be any substantial new developments. That, and the US really doesn't have any right to be the sole ruler up there (although it's our (europe's) own fault, as we just let the US lead every mission and all research). I hope europe, asia, and the US will working together more than they are today, in the near future.
China is too risk adverse to become a major player. They'll probably get to the moon. Then the first major accident after that (loosing face) will have them scale back to the "Floating in endless circles" model the US uses.
And when China gives up, India will bow out soon after.
Space will be conqured by people, THEN the governments will follow.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
Look at the timeline for Americas ICBM program in comparison for our "Race for the moon".
Seems pretty close, odd part is, it's the same for the former USSR.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
I am an Indian (note this before you start flaming or modding down) and has been following the Indian space programme and a whole lot of other programmes for quite a while, (and yes, I can claim to understand the Indian psychology more).
In India everything of this nature are 90% for PR and public consumption and 10% realistic projects.
This is a not stupid move either [although, it does end up foul, read on], unlike many Sladhdotters who think that India is stupidly wasting money on space, ocean, Antarctica and a whole lot of crap that are playthings for rich countries, while the people starve.
It is a calculated risk, more money is spent on trying to keep the economy stable, trying to provide decent health etc. (The percentage of GDP spent on defence in India is much less than that of the US.) The problem is that the corruption in this area is a whole lot more than the corruption that takes place in the high-tech stuff.
Okey, to make it short the basic ideas are:
The bottomline is that it is more PR, these vision are not realistic from the financial point of view --India doesn't have the money to pull this off, nor will they be ready to take money from the food-health-economy dept. and put it here, even with domestic private investors, for the simple reason that corrupt dudes would lose the easy buck and money laundering private businessmen will lose a lot of opportunities.
What is the current status, and how has signed it...the Lunar Treaty gives The Moon similar status to Antartica, saying that The Moon is a common property of all people of the Earth, and any country that makes use of it's resources must share them equally with the people of the Earth. Did China sign, or are they following the US lead and ignoring treaties?
ttyl
Farrell
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I agree on both counts. Rakesh Sharma was India's first cosmonaut (much like Kalpana Chawla being the first Indian-born astronaut), and yes, while not to take points out of the Chinese, I have a lot of respect for Chinese scientists, it does seem to me that China is ripping Soviet technology off.
Incidentally, it's ironical that you were talking about clean, cheap electric power, that is exactly what Rakesh Sharma apparently researched on, while aboard the Soyuz capsule.
That said, I believe all this talk of The Next Great Space Race is all (western?) media speculation; really, I'd be hardpressed to see anyone at Sriharikota (that's India's launch base) itching to compete with the Chinese (or the Chinese competing with us Indians); my impression so far has been that ISRO is all Zen-like in its aspirations. There's an interesting piece on this in Raj Chengappa's Weapons of Peace for anyone interested in Indian science.
More than mere navel gazing.
The moon is an excellent source of Helium-3, which when reacted with Hydrogen-1 provides much cleaner, and more importantly, lower activation energy fusion than H3-H2 or H2-H2 fusion.
Actually, D+T is still far easier. He3+_D_ is about on par with D+D, and more importantly produces an energetic _proton_ as the decay product. He3 will not fuse with p, as that would give you something like Li4 (no dice).
D+T is easy but produces a boatload of neutrons, which carry away most of the reaction energy. As these aren't confined by the reactor's magnetic field, you're stuck letting the shielding material heat up and drawing power off of it with a heat engine. The reactor vessel itself rapidly degrades due to intense neutron radiation.
You also need to produce a steady supply of T, but you can breed that from a lithium blanket, or just surround the reactor vessel with heavy water and let it breed from D.
D+D fusion is a bit cleaner than D+T, but much harder to achieve. It produces He3+n half the time and T+p the other half. The T will react very quickly to produce He4+n, which carries away most of the energy in the neutron. If you don't have a long confinement time, you're stuck with this. If you do have a long confinement time, the He3 will burn with D to produce He4+p, which carries away a lot of the energy in the p, which stays confined, heats the plasma, and is otherwise nice.
Summary for D+D: Only decent if you can keep it confined for a while, still releases half its energy as neutrons, much harder than D+T.
He3+D is slightly easier than D+D, but still in the same ballpark (much harder than D+T). Most importantly, He3+D gives He4+p, so almost all of your energy ends up in charged particles. The problem is that you get D+D happening as long as there's D in the plasma, so you have to run a reactor with much more He3 than D, and still get neutrons coming out - just much less than with D+D. This means your reactor vessel lasts at least 10 times longer, your plasma heats itself, and you can use higher-efficiency methods of tapping power if you want to.
The problem is that He3 is rare, and trying to breed it via D+D just gives you a D+D reactor, with its neutron problem.
If there's a lot of He3 on the moon and it's relatively easily harvested, it may be a viable source of fuel. I have my doubts about this being practical (I think we'd be better off filtering it out of natural helium, though that's not a picnic either, as it's much rarer than deuterium).
Perhaps you misunderstood me. I didn't say I was in favor of it, just reporting what they are saying they are going to do, which is, dominate space and keep other people *out* of space.
When it comers to weapons I would support a world wide planetary ban on anything not man portable. that won't happen of course, but that's the level I think humans are at socially, technologically we are far more advanced of course, but realisitcally, we are just medievals with better technology. For all practical purposes humans haven't changed for thousands of years. Advanced weapons will be our undoing as a species I'm afraid, because it's where the BIG money and big efforts go. It sucks, but there ya go.
The reason why they (US 'space command') are doing this is because we are rapidly losing any sort of conventional superiority. In particular china will overtake the US within one decade. And that's the CIAs analysis too, they will be the worlds largest economy and have the largest conventional forces. they are leapfrogging multiple years of what we in the west consider "normal" advancements in single years. They are advancing several years to our one, and a buck goes ten times further there in getting hardware on the ground. We simply do not build things in quantity any more, and military stuff is just stuff, it has to be built, not just designed and have committees about it. Crap like Iraq is not a real war, and even that took huge amounts of our forces to accompliosh, plus bribing off the top generals in advance with suitcases of benjamins, euros, and bars of gold. It wouldn't have been the same outcome fighting a much larger force with closer to ours technology. the only advantage we have is to try and stay so far advanced that no one dares attack (or resists being attacked). It has to be quality now, not quantity, we simply can't do it that way any longer. And,tactically speaking, the high ground is that, the high ground, that's been the same since we fought with thrown rocks. High ground keeps you safer, and makes it easier to rain destruction on your enemies. Gravity works. Joe pentagon has ALWAYS worked towards owning the high ground.