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."
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?
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.
Just tell Bush that Osama is hiding in a cave on the moon and you have new rockets developed and people there in no time.
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.
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!
Yea, cept it aint going happen. The Bush administration is hell bent on destroying the environment, casting away alliances 40+ years in the making, starting wars, continuing to lose a war on drugs that makes the rich richer and the poor poorer while locking up thousands of people for non-viloent crimes.
I doubt Nasa or and science/space related issues even come close to becoming part of their agenda unless a tradegy happens like the Columbia accident happens.
America will wakeup and rush back into the space arena only when it suits the politicans politically and financially and by then it will be to late. JFK did a good thing by creating the goal of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely. Its a shame that the politicans and american publics support for that program died after that happened.
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."
It'll be a come-uppance for the "market-always-determines-the-best-solution-crowd" to see these state-sponsored ventures dominating comercial use of space-exploration, while the "Market Solutions" stop somewhere around Dish Network.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
The Chinese and Indian people are just as smart and educated as any other, and a whole lot less comfortable and hungrier for achievment. Sit back, relax, and you'll watch them eat your lunch.
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 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
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.
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).