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China Accelerates Mars Program
securitas writes "You read it correctly - Mars. China has announced it intends to accelerate its Mars program, using experience and expertise from its fledgling lunar program. Following China's proposed Moon missions, the first phase would send a Mars orbiter to examine and survey the Red Planet; the second phase will involve wheeled robotic probes like China's Mars Explorer roving vehicle prototype, used to collect and analyze rock samples; and the third phase will involve returning spacecraft from the planet and establishing a permanent automated base on Mars. This puts the China-India space race and the China-USA space race in a very different light and clearly indicates that China plans to play with the big boys of Mars exploration."
Asia has it's representative in space exploration.
Go China!
Welley Corporation - SLM Scammers
..whay can't they all work together?
Rocket science is easy. Neurosurgery, now *that's* difficult.
China is very wise to beat the rest of us to Mars. It will let them set up fried rice stands and an oppressive totalitarian government before anyone can else can show up to defend Martian civil and human rights.
The U.S. was always dilligent and careful, mistakes were made due to the state of the art, not sloppiness. China's record of corruption and cutting corners on state projects is appalling. I'm really not looking forward to the Three Gorges dam filling up, I've heard a lot of scare stories about sloppy construction. (I just checked, it's full enough to test the generators now)
It always amazes me when people read military documents and then badly misinterpret them. The document didn't say it planned to deny other countries access to space. It wants the *capability* to deny future *adversaries* access to space. It wants to stop future Saddams or North Koreans (or French?) from attacking GPS systems or deploying orbiting nuclear weapons. Well, I guess we are just bad guys for having such intentions!
The US military already has systems to deny access to land, air, sea and undersea. Does that mean that nobody can use these? Of course not. Furthermore, these systems, like any military system, are not perfect.
Capabilities to deny adversaries access to space is the natural successor and is of course necessary to a country which is highly dependent on space based technology.
It simply means that space command is doing what it should be doing: developing the capability to fight successfully in its area of operations, and to vitally defend national assets in that area.
For example, as has also been mentioned in this thread, the military is highly dependent on GPS. If, during the Iraq war, the GPS systems had been knocked out, we would have had to use a lot more "dumb bombs" - with the result that many more people, mostly Iraqi's, would have died, and we still would have won. Future adversaries, of course, will want to take out GPS, so it would be beyond stupid for the US not work on systems to protect it!
This isn't stupid and it isn't arrogant and it doesn't mean that the US doesn't need allies. We know we need allies and we wish some who did so well under our protection were a little more loyal now that we are under attack by the Islamofascists. We already have over half of our army tied up just in Iraq, and North Korea is threatening to nuke Japan (talk about a bad attitude!). Contrary to world opinion, we are not militarily omnipotent and we know it.
There have been similar knee-jerk reactions to the DARPA idea to develop hypersonic drones. Guess what... DARPA works on future projects, and these hypersonic drones are obvious weapon systems of the future, IF the engineering is practical. Furthermore, don't kid yourself that future adversaries (China in particular) aren't working on the same sorts of things.
Finally, DARPA projects produce lots of technological spin-offs. As others have pointed out, the internet was one of these.
It would seem that since the US has developed its military superiority, and has used it in the war on terrorism (after the worst terrorist attack in history) to destroy two vicious regimes that nobody on Slashdot would ever want to live under, the rest of the world suddenly imagines that we are going to use it arbitrarily and capriciously. It also seems that the minute we act in our own self defense without getting permission from actual adversaries, we are arrogant and evil and need to be boycotted.
One of these adversaries is France, which has proclaimed its desire to obstruct US efforts and set up an opposite "pole" of power - apparently in the belief that the old 19th century European polar theories produced an ideal world! This same France colluded for decades with a vicious dictator (Saddam) and even gave him our diplomatic intelligence prior to the war. The good news is that France is so busy spending its money on labor unions and welfare that its military is a joke, suitable only for interfering in its former African colonies when French economic interests are threatened, or for launching one of its 449 thermonuclear warheads at anyone who speaks improper French (I don't see France giving up its force de frappe to the UN!). Also fortunate is that the French are so laughable that they provide a new source of humor for Americans.
When the rapidly occurring demographic collapse of non-muslim France (look at the trends - France will be a muslim country in a few decades), those weapons may very well be in the hands of Islamofascists.
The only good weather is bad weather.