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Two Views On a China-US Space Race
An anonmous submitter writes "While there has been recent discussion about China and India engaging in a space race, most people are still focused on a potential race between China and the US in near future. The Space Review recently published a pair of essays on this topic: the first argues that China-US space race is both unlikely and undesirable, given the aftermath of the US-USSR space race thirty years ago. A followup article suggests that a China-US space race is vital, so long as it takes a more commercial, long-term approach than the US-USSR one. Food for thought..."
Well, of course, Americans didn't create any new design either. It was the German engineers brought from the V2 project who designed the rockets that went to the Moon. After the German engineers and scientists retired or died, NASA became the bureaucratic mess it's today.
Another point which shows a lack of understanding (or intentional obfuscation) of the US space program is this,
Ummm, NASA only developes manned launch vehicles, specifically the space shuttle. All the unmanned launch vehicles (Titan, Atlas, Delta, Pegasus) are developed and maintained by private companies which compete for launches. With the EELV program, the government (mostly the Air Force) has taken a much more hands-off approach in the development of these launch vehicles (Delta IV and Atlas V). Further, shuttle is mostly maintained by private companies; for the Orbital Space Plane in development, the intention is to build the manned section of the vehicle to sit atop one of these Heavy Lift Vehicles.Finally, the government is still heavily involved with these unmanned vehicles, but it is the DOD, not NASA, that funds their development. NASA's budget is about $15 billion, have of which is for their manned and unmanned programs (the rest is for aviation stuff & general research). The DOD space budget is also $15 billion, $0 of which supports ISS or the shuttle. The DOD has funded the developments of just about every launch vehicle for the last 30 years, with the obvious exception of shuttle.
And the shuttle is a remarkable piece of technology, the likes of which we may not see again for 20+ years. A heavy-lift, man rated vehicle which launches as a rocket and lands like a plane. It's had some obvious problems, but NASA took a big bite (given the constraints imposed from the outside by non-engineers and DOD officials) and came up with a great system. Sadly, NASA has not had the chance to apply a lessons-learned to build a Shuttle II. Maintenance is too expensive, and our materials are much better now than 30 years ago,so Shuttle II would be 2-3X less expensive than Shuttle I. Reduce it's lift capability in half, and it'd be much more capable of fulfilling its core requirements.
injecting some market force into the space race sounds great, but the fact is, the field is wide open to anyone to develop a launch vehicle w/o government help. Many have tried and failed. A big reason the government has funded the development of every lauch vehicle in the US is simple-- it's not cost-effective to develope one without government help. When Teledisic wanted to luanch 243 satellites into low-earth orbit, do you think anything prevented them from going outside NASA? When Iridium and Globalstar launched their constellations, do you think NASA was involved in any way other than ensuring the safety of those on the ground?
There's so much more to space in this country than 99% of the population realizes. It is largely private, and guess what-- we've had more success with the pure NASA and DOD programs.
Back to the point. China obviously seeks to improve their use of space for commercial and military purposes. They see the US as dominant in space, and I'm sure they would like to have better communication and geo-location capabilities. Going to the moon seems to be more about prestige, and thinking 100 years ahead, not 10 years. Eventually, we will have outposts on Mars and the Moon, maybe even colonies.
As the Europens sailed off into the unkown 500 years ago, so to do the Chinese fly off into the unknown today. The fruits they bear will not be realized for decades, but the eventual impact is undeniable. I say good for China for pushing into a new frontier, and I hope the US also decides to push ahead into the unkown, despite its dangers.
which is, to quoute Dr. Strangelove:
"In order to build such a device, you must first have the will to do so."
They do.
The leaders of a very shame/reputation-conscious society have committed to some very bold statements about technology and progress. Good for them!
For all our wealth and WMD's, it's more than the US has been willing to ventur in decades.
Kremvax
--- Little Atomo - The Amazing Thinking Robot from Atomocom! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIP9KisHi4k
This is a case of "who bother answer because the question is wrong"
TCAP-Abort
Other kind of undergraduates might even remeber Zenon from Elea and his aporias, where he proved that movement is impossible... Please, somebody, mod me down or something, I don't deserve that "Insightful"!!!
Hell is not other people; it is yourself. - Ludwig Wittgenstein
There is nothing on the moon valuable enough as a commodity worth bringing back to Earth
Helium-3, an isotope of Helium, is rare on Earth and reasonably common on the Moon. It's useful as a fuel for fusion reactors, in part because it doesn't produce much radioactive residue. One would have to design a much more robust space program than what anyone currently has to make it profitable to mine the moon for anything, but it's useful and useful in a place where the gravity well isn't so steep.
Robots are much better in space than humans.
Robots are useful, but they're stupid. Barring the creation of sapient robots (which would then be human and afforded all the rights of human beings, if you know what's good for you), you'll never be able to create a robot as flexible as a human being. Robots are tough, robots are sturdy, robots don't care if they fly for decades through space, alone, or if they're sent to plummet into a hostile planet's atmosphere, but they are dumb, dumb, dumb.
The only industry requiring people in space is tourism.
Mining, exploration, science, manufacturing-- all of these things, conducted in space, would benefit from a sapient human presence. Even if it's only one guy making sure, in near-realtime, that the robots don't mess something up.
O'neill envisaged a trillion people in his colonies. It would be cheaper to hollow out mountains on Earth to house them.
Possibly, but no amount of mountain-hollowing would aid in exploring space. The point of a space colony is to live in space, to spread the human species throughout the solar system. Carving up mountains would give us more space here, but that's not the point. There's no way, with anything we could build in the next century, that we could ever alleviate the world's population burden by hurling people into space. There are far too many people born every year to make a dent in.
Ergo, If you really want to open up space to people, think tourism.
If you really want to open up space to people, send crazy explorers and robots out to look around, to find what's interesting and valuable and tell people about it. Then send out the settlers, the people willing to work hard for the chance to live well in a new world. They'll build the cities, the factories, the sort of stuff that will maintain society in space. After that, you'll get tourists. It's not like we haven't done this before.
-OTR