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."
What Aliens really need is SARS?
Je t'aime Stéphanie
This is exactly whats needed to kick nasa into shape!
There is no god
When you take your holiday to the moon in twenty years time you'll be spoilt for choice when it comes to takeout/takeaway food. Chow mein or curry? It's always a dilemma for me...
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
I wonder if there is enough public interest for the government to enter this new space race. The American side of the race may involve private venture.
I'm glad to see China and Russia get over their differences in a productive, co-operative venture such as this. The world needs to work together as a whole. Remember, we're all the same species! :-)
I know it's offtopic, but I'm feeling philosophical this afternoon...
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.
I really do hope that America and China start a new space race, especially if the prize is a useful resource rather than just patriotic pride. That way any technology that's developed as a result will be more immediately useful to the rest of us, rather than more interesting ideas waiting for applications.
I'm not a great fan of the idea of China and America carving up the moon between them, though.
is always the balance of power. from the napoleonic era to the realpolitik era, to inter-war period and post war period, then cold war, it's always balance of power that acts on the world to prevent world domination.
Powers comes and goes. Napoleon rises, and falls. Bismarck rises, and falls. The franks, then the prussians, the list goes on and on, now it comes to america, who knows if the next one is China?
Yet i don't think china could gasp the key to victory here by having space mission that denotes quite a bit of nothing in military terms (forget the whole lot on spy satellite, they are of no significant use on a direct confrontation of two nuclear-powered countries). To me, I would be more impressed and scared off by the change to democratic (NOT the democratic party but rather democratic society-type form, i.e. humanitarian, [n.b. vegetarian eats vegetable.. so humanitarian eats.. oh nevermind.]) or there is a significant change in the government structure and the way people do business (i.e. guanxi or so.)
enough offtopic, but here's what I want to say on space mission for china.
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For india, I think that they better feed their crowd better before the birth mortality rate goes back to the 1930s standard. (THAT'S flamey.)
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In terms of mining, minerals, resources we could acquire out there, if it takes China or whoever else to spank around the U.S. and make them realise that they'll gladly take the whole pie if we do nothing about it.. if that's what it takes to get NASA off of life support and back into space, then bring it on. The ultimate end will justify all the means.
SecondPageMedia - Wha
It is good that India and China are competing through science, and not through arms. Honestly, I don't see how this could be a bad thing for anyone. India and China will both make new scientific discoveries, and seeing them get into space may inspire the EU, the US and Russia to increase their space efforts.
I know lots of people are going to complain that India should be focusing their efforts on improving their living standards rather than going on wild adventures. But I don't think the one has to distract from the other. India actually has enough food to feed herself, its just a problem of social structure and education. And it is not as if the resources used for going into space make that great of a impact on the ability of India to educate its population. In economic terms, there isn't that great of a cost of space missions, because the resources that go into them can't really easily go anywhere else.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
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.
dire domestic matters first, eh?
Isn't that what they said about America?
Ever recall "Whitey on the moon"?
India has just as legitimate a reason to go into space as China. Aside from needing the room, they have just as much right to push into the ultra modern age as the rest of us.
Jeesh, what a bunch of racist banter.
At least the US isn't threatened with nuclear war with India over Taiwan.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
"The day we were visiting, the Chinese crew was utilizing the EVA (extra-vehicular activity) building. You do not train for EVAs if you are doing simple orbital missions. EVAs are typically related to space-based construction work."
That's just plain FUD. The US and Soviets EVA'ed for years and years before they ever did any space-based construction work.
From Skylab to Mir the majority of space stations were assembled by docking modules togeather with minimal EVA for bolting things on.
Ed White's Gemini EVA took place 20 years before Shuttle missions started EVAs for fixing equipment in orbit.
Been there, done that with a flag up there. What China should do is to beat US in the manned mission to Mars. Then they can claim that Mars is historically theirs 100 years later and demand re-unification to the "renegade planet".
Heh...your post sounds like the middle eastern population calling us "american devils" and whatnot
Give them the benefit of the doubt. Not everything a communist country does has to be a "politically correct ploy for world destruction."
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
Can any one point to where this one came from?
The number of H-bomb warheads in circulation demonstrates that there is not exactly a world shortage of tritium or ability to produce it; certainly as the US wasn't afraid of polluting the Colorado River, and the UK of polluting the Irish Sea, I can't imagine that the Chinese would be too worried about the side effects of massive tritium production.
Conclusion: this is an attempt to frighten paranoid hawks into believing that the Space Race must be resumed to prevent the Chinese from laying claim to all those tritium mines on the Moon. Whereas, actually, we might be better off with some serious international negotiation on space, perhaps even some cooperation. While articles like this one reinforce Chinese paranoia about US intentions, (the author makes it clear that the US must not lose domination in space) we all surely have more to gain by trying to defuse the potential tensions in advance. Which might mean that Dubya has to rethink his approach to ripping up international agreements, but would that be a bad thing?
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
Bruce Sterling talked about the India/China space race in his May 2003 Wired column. Some extracts:
"Nobody in the Western press takes much notice of India's space aspirations, because by Yankee standards it doesn't make sense for India to have any. Yet India launched its first missile in 1963 and its first cosmonaut in 1984. Nobody in the West thought the country would ever go nuclear, either. That was a blunder in judgment. [...]
"Why is Gandhi's homeland trying to reach the moon when people sleep on the streets in Calcutta and AIDS gnaws the country's flesh? For the same reason the US sloughed off poverty programs to fund Apollo in the 1960s: global prestige.
"India doesn't need long-range missiles to nuke neighbor and archrival Pakistan. For a war that intimate, bullock carts would do. The Agni III is aimed straight at world public opinion. The India-Pakistan PR skirmish is already almost over, and India is clearly winning. Every great power sweats bullets over Pakistan's bomb, but India's somehow makes that country worthy of consideration for a permanent seat on the UN Security Council. [...]
"Since India demonstrated its bomb in 1998, the Chinese have been increasingly uneasy. China reacted to the detonation with angry demands that the international community keep India contained. When that got nowhere, China helped Pakistan go nuclear. In retrospect, that was a scary, destabilizing misstep. But now India and China are poised to continue their rivalry on safer high ground - beyond Earth's atmosphere.
"Nuclear India versus nuclear China is Kennedy versus Kruschev, and Reagan versus Gorbachev, all over again. Now, as then, a space race is a sexy alternative to nuclear annihilation. [...]
"Who will become top dog in South Asia? That's an open question, and there aren't many good ways to answer short of a useless massacre. A space race offers a good solution. It's a symbolic tournament that tests competing political and economic systems to their limit.
"A decade after the end of the Cold War, good old-fashioned space programs still matter. Not for exploration's sake, but to settle new cold wars. If you doubt it, imagine this scenario: It's 2029, and a lunar mission lands at Tranquillity Base. A crew of heroic young Indians - or Chinese - quietly folds and puts away America's 60-year-old flag. If the world saw that on television, wouldn't the gesture be worth tens of billions of rupees or yuan? Of course it would."
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
three words - conflict of interest.
some nations believes (and is true!) that they have better technology than the others, thus any synergy movement would narrow'en the gap between her and the other countries. They believe that better technology = better position in the world.
On the contrary, many nations, which are of lower technological level do have these sort of policy. However, most channels are through institutional (i.e. university-university or researchfacility-researchfacility) base rather than national cooperation.
wow, that's it.
This means that American tech jobs will soon be exported...to the moon!
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
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.
Follow-up to my post
I think my post would be misleading, so I have to make something clear (some of it is just restating or rephrasing what I said before, but I hope it would be clearer):
Thus there is no reason for anyone to be worried about India having a successful moon programme.
You are confusing a person's ability to pay for food with a nation's ability to provide it in the first place.
Yes some Americans are too poor to buy food. But the food IS there. The US Government provides subsidies to farmers who's products go unbought because of a global food GLUT. The issue isn't food availability, its food affordability.
So yes the US is quite capable of feeding itself, and then some.
Mac OS X and Windows XP working side by side to fight back the night.
The point of ICBMs is not to actually deploy nuclear weapons, it's to have the ability to deploy them. Consider four classes of countries:
China and India want to upgrade to World Powers. To do that they need mutually-assured-wounding power. They also need the military infrastructure to send their armies all over the place. The space race fulfills both of these needs.
Too many Chiefs spoil the broth. Or in this case, too many scientists spoil the program. Look at ISS, it is there and it works, but it is expensive and took a long time to get there. (Note that the goal of ISS was never science, but a way for the US to keep smart russian scientists from selling their abilities to "bad nations" after the Soviet breakup)
There are many ways to make a rocket. The principal is similear, but there are many possibal designs. Getting everyone togather tends to result in choosing one early, and then working hard to make it work instead of figguring out which is worth making. Generally the early one is choosen more because it has enough picese to divi up between all the parties.
Much better for China, India, Russia, Japan, and US to go it alone and develope all concepts seperately, and then step back and note what worked why and build something better on all of that.
That might be true for india but would not quite apply to China.
First, China is already considered a "power".
And, they *ALREADY* have rockets that can deliver nuclear weapons with pinpoint accuracy to any spot in the world.
It pretty much leaves the advancement of science as the biggest reason of their space program.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
The caste system society in India is now more or less similar to class system societies in many other parts of the world (including developed countries).
While I agree with your assessment that caste system is bad, I think the sentence "Any intelligent person should not look respectfully at India as a country until the caste system is snuffed out in every form". Rememer, USA has had won two world wars, built the best highway systems in the world, built the bomb, and sent men to moon -- all before it was OK for blacks to sit in the same row seats as whites in a bus.
So, while there are some things that are bad with India, it should not be used as a reason for denying her some other good things.
S
>Powers comes and goes.
This has been true, but has any nuclear enabled nation been overtaken in combat? Nope.
You are absolutely correct that power comes and goes but the combo of ICBMs and Nuclear weapons means that there's a much greater certainty that the "nuclear club" will establish what Europe calls a multipolar world: many powers competiting for a greater good (like in this article) and hopefully not starting WWIII.
Once we're all happily armed with nukes it will only be internal unrest that changes power from now on. I think thats a good thing and a step in the right direction. Its a very arguable point, but the policies of MAD may very well continue into the next few centuries if not for the rest of the time humans populate the planet. At the very least, there will not be an incentive to begin true global disarmament until everyone is about equally armed.
Sounds scary, then again so is human nature.
But I wish the goal were not space, but cancer, or nanofabrication, or such. It would mean more to the lives of their citizens and eventually the world if they spent the money on bioengineering, medicine, genetic modification of crops, training their people in science and engineering, IT, and such. Space is a less efficient expenditure of resources, despite how cool and prestigious it is. Certain other technical objectives as the goal for the race could have greater rewards than Space.
... in the last few weeks the US has anounced that it will be militarizing space "officially" and it won't be allowing other nations to take the high ground. There will be wars over it, cooperation is over for now. They will play act at it, that's about it.
And it goes back to planetary population and natural resources, namely oil and freshwater. Anyone may run the numbers for themselves, projected growth rates, current planetary useage,proven reserves, yada yada, then make some assumptions. There's enough oil for around 1.5 billion people tops to be middle class the way it is now, for around 20 more years. There isn't enough for 4 to 8 billion people.
Everyone wants to be at least middle class now, ie, have a car, heating and cooling, electric outlets that work in the wall, running water, etc.
This is the century of the great culling and the resource wars. We are in the good old days right now. I give humans way under 50% odds of making it to the next century. All the WMD jennis are out of the bottle, and by some accounts directed energy weapons are here at least in good prototype stages, and weather warfare is on the horizon. All of those techniques will be used,so my best guess is primarily the combo of nukes and biologicals will wipe out humans.
I don't think we are anywhere near ready for such a form of cooperation. It's obvious that if humanity worked together efficiently we might be able to accomplish some awesome goals but aren't we as a race too immature to handle such a thing?
Just look at the UN... way too many conflicts of interest. I dont' think that such a group of countries/rivals will ever work together in such a way for a long time. But then and again rivalry can also be very good. What do you guys think?
Hmmm... Pie...
This allows the two emerging superpowers of Asia to compete in ways other than an arms race or international satellite countries. I'd like to see this culminate in a Mars race between the US, China, India, Europe, Japan, and perhaps Russia (or at least as part of another team). Competition between space programs drove them to the cutting edge so much faster than would have been possible otherwise, or as Buzz Aldrin said "it was like transplanting a decade from the 21st century into the 20th". Technology will benefit, new technologies will develop, and we just might gain the knowledge needed to get off our little cradle in case of emergency. Lord knows that if someone other than the US gets beyond the moon first we will probably get stirred into action, especially if someone like Bush is in office. With the shuttle program out of whack, we could use a good kick in the pants for our own program anyway.
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
As far as the neocons are concerned, China is still the main game. Why do you *really* think the US is building its missile defence system? "Rogue states" my arse. It's all about being able to defend Taiwan without having to worry (quite so much) about nuclear blackmail from the Chinese if you do so.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo
--Andy Finkel (J. Klass?)
Does anyone have any preference about which billion-plus nation gets their first? I tend to favor India, if for no better reason than their human rights record... Hmm.
They go to and back the moon- one earth distance. India nations do same trick, they only go to moon and stay there, NO return to earth...
I suggest you read Slashdot
You know, there are other Indians out there who'd like to think we've developed our space programmes as technically-capable Indians, not Hindus, Muslims or any other shit. I, for one, can't see why the alleged Hindu contribution should be seperated from an all-Indian one.
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.
I am Indian and I dont think the Indian government's really serious about this mission. Its primarily PR. The Indian Prime Minister is visiting China right now and I think its juss the usual diplomatic games being played. India does have a good space programme.The Indian Space Research Organization (http://www.isro.org) definitely has performed beautifully considering that their budget is a fraction of NASA or the ESA. But the government I'm sure knows its going to be a pointless mission, with the only positive thing coming out of it being "supposed" inflation of India's reputation in international eyes. But I also think the Indian govt. knows exactly what many slashdotters are saying right now, "Welcome to the 60s India" and therefore has doubts of funding such a mission. P.S: India first tested its nuclear bomb in 1974, not in 1998 as the Wired article http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.05/view.html ?pg=4 suggests.
Sure, they are willing to accept losses. So does the US, that's why no matter they went into afhganistan, then iraq, and will soon take over syria and iran and eventually north korea. The US has never cared about military losses,even though the seek to minimalise them, they still *do it*, else they wouldn't occur. The deal is, "losses" for these other large nations mean they gots no guys in space. I expect either big sabotage or actual destruction of any of their craft if they look to be leapfrogging the DOD in space based human access. I have no proof, it's just an opinion, but I think it's a sound opinion based on past events, current political realities, and future projections and statements. The US has quite clearly stated that they will be the only ones to militarize space. Right now they have the juice to pull that off, and if it looks like they can't or will get beat, they'll go to plan B, which is to knock the other guys out before they gain an overwhelming lead.
Maybe because I'm older, but I've never bought into "civilian" space programs, it's always been by and for the military first, the civilian aspects have always been side issues and the public facade of it, it's been a stealth military budget effort speaking of the over-all aspect of "humans in space".
Look at it this way, the US and a few other countries are now the only ones "allowed" to possess WMD, and the US just invaded and took over another nation based on that premise, that the near monopoly will remain so. I also remember when the thought of other nations besides the US having just missiles and nukes was hotly debated, we came pretty close to pre emptive strikes back in the 50s over it. Real_dang_close. I know even before that, generals like Patton wanted to go in and take soviet russia at the end of the war because he and others didn't want the russians to have rockets and then "the bomb". It didn't happen, and I bet a lot of generals wish it had now. They DON'T want to lose their (near) space monopoly, because of the huge advantages, in fact, just "access to space" can be considered a variant of a WMD. The DOD considering any other large nation having the same as they do when it comes to advanced tech gives them the buckwheats. They WILL do something about it before they can't do something about it is my best guess right now.