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.
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.
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).