Slashdot Mirror
China Sends First Taikonaut To Space
tuxlove writes "Space.com reports that China has just
successfully launched its first manned space mission. "Blasting off from a remote space base in the Gobi Desert atop a Long March 2F rocket,
a single Chinese astronaut named Yang Liwei is on his way
to circle the planet every 90 minutes aboard the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft. As a result, China has become only the third nation on Earth capable of
independently launching its citizens into orbit. " Perhaps this will kick the US space program back into gear?"
aerojad points to this
Reuters report, about which he says "The article is short on details, aside from 'Xinhua said the craft carried
astronaut Yang Liwei, 38. The launch on Wednesday, 42 years after the Soviet Union put the first man into space, marked a milestone for China's
secretive space programme, which analysts say has its sights set on a manned mission to the moon.' The mission is due to end in 21 hours."
zxm adds a link to China
Daily's coverage, and puiwah to a story on MSNBC.
"China Sends First Takeout To Space"
Given the comments I've heard recently here on slashdot, I think I speak for many of us when I say GO CHINA!
Sincerest congratulations to the Chinese. I hope everyone here realizes what a momentous occaision in history has just occured - This may well be remembered as the beginning of the second space race.
Of interest, I believe this is the first time since 1969 that a single person has traveled alone in space. Every US flight since Mercury has had at least 2 people, the last 1 person flight was when the Soyuz was being validated.
Sadly, Komarov (the pilot of Soyuz 1) died when his spacecraft impacted the ground. I hope this brave Chinese pilot will have better luck.
TAIKONAUTS GO!
Taikonaut was the term coined by an American (IIRC) observer of the Chinese program. The Chinese use "Yuhangyuan" which is closer to a proper translation of astronaut.
Taikonaut was formed by taking the Chinese Chinese word for 'Space' and adding the '-onaut' ending.
There's an article by James Oberg, space expert, on the spacecraft hardware design decisions the Chinese have made. To sum it up -- they are indeed very serious about being in this game for the long haul (or Long March, whatever).
They took their sweet time for a very good reason, and have every intention of leapfrogging past the mistakes of the US and Russians. Slow and steady wins the race.
Eh, not entirely. Like with aircraft, the most dangerous bit tends to be launch and landing. (Note that of the three cases of fatalities, one was on the launch pad (for a test, but I'd say it still is indicative), one was just after launch, and the final was on landing.) Landing tends to be most coasting/parachuting, which is relatively easy to do right. In fact, you can make it very safe by clever design of the module. (I believe that the Mercury and Apollo capsules were actually designed to always tend to re-enter in the correct orientation.)
Launch is more dangerous in some ways if only because you've got X tons of very flammable (dare I say explosive?) materials under your butt. A slip-up there will tend to be much harder to fix or escape from.
I congratulate the Chinese on their achievement, it is truly awesome for them to put a man in orbit. However I have to wonder about how the world, especially the US, will react in the long-term to an accelerating Chinese space program. Mayalsia has announced that it wants to send a cosmonaut up to the ISS, India has hinted that it wants a manned space program, Japan has a shuttle in the works, and the European Space Agency has yet to even plan for manned space travel after the Hermes shuttle failed to materialize.
Overall this may be the spark of a new space race. No one wants to see their neighbors achieve a presence in space that they cannot reach, thus we open the door for half-a-dozen groups to begin sending men into space for political and scientific purposes. China has already announced that they intend to build their own station in orbit to compete with the ISS, and old USSR/Russian technology/training is for sale to whoever can afford it (India, ESA, USA, etc.). If manned spacefaring technology is truly the passport to being a first-rate power of the 21st century, we will see almost every nation with ballistic missile technology attempting at least some sort of manned spaceflight capacity.
Thus a new space race may prove detrimental since most of the technology is dual-use. No doubt, it would be uber-cool to have observatories on the backside of the moon and a space station comparable to those seen only in sci-fi platforms thus far. Microwave solar power systems like those under development at the University of Kyoto could solve most of the world's power problems. Yet these also become quite potent orbital weapons capable of incinerating missile silos, labs, and cities is "accidentally misalinged". Space rockets were ballistic missiles, and the whole of composite materials, microcomputers, velcro, and hosts od other civilican and military discoveries trace their way back to the Space Race of the 1960s.
At worst we might be seeing the beginnings of a new arms race. Hopefully the initiative by China will evolve into an independent space station that goads India, Japan, the ESA, and USA to seriously pump funding back into their own programs and develop the spacefaring technology of 2001 by 2051. Maybe whoever said, "the 1960s were a decade transplanted from the 21st century because of the space race" will be proven right after all. If the US does not get off its duff soon, we may see a Chinese camera on the moon looking at two taikonauts wondering whether to take down the American flag still found at the Sea of Tranquility before we know it.
Anyone else have any thoughts/comments?
As long as there is a Second Amendment, there will always be a First Amendment.
A rocket? Capsule? Training? What a waste of money.
Think about it. According to the CIA Factbook China has about 1,286,975,468 people. Figure the average person is 5' tall and you've got 1,218,726 miles worth of people. The moon at apogee is about 251,655 miles away, so they've got enough people to build a ladder to the moon with a nice stable base, even figuring in the inevitable attrition. Hell, take a look at the prototype. Just start passing up building supplies and poof! Instant colony!
Me too, until I read Landes' _The Wealth and Poverty Of Nations_, which is a fascinating economic view of history of the past thousand years. The Chinese pretty much had the Europeans beaten in shipbuilding:
After this, they pulled inward, but I never learned about the previous achievements until adulthood.
The Race never ends. And we have not lapped anyone, because we stopped advancing. The shuttle, while cool, gives us no advantages over a Chinese rocket based program.
They will catch up quick. In fact, they are basically all caught up as of today. China doesn't have to build a shuttle to catch... in fact, they and the ISS are slowing US down... so those things are going to make it easier for China to catch up.
China is saying "space science is still important". We can agree or disagree, but we can't sit on our laurels and expect it to last long.
-pyrrho
Anyone have any insight into why the Chinese would build their space base in the Gobi Desert, which I believe is in the northern part of the country? Wouldn't it make more sense to stick it on the Tibetan Plateau or somewhere nearer the equator? IIRC, this is why the U.S. space program launches from southern Florida and why I believe most of the Soviet launch sites are in Kazakhtstan (aren't they?)? Just seems like it would make more sense to launch from the southwestern part of the country, where there are still very few people but you get boosts from being nearer the equator and being higher in elevation (you know, less distance to go and weaker gravity at launch, not to mention less air resistance (Hmm, speaking of which, maybe the U.S. should start launching from Mauna Kea instead of Florida - we could make a "space sea-plane" so it would be able to land back in Hawaii)). Just seems that the Gobi Desert, which I assume was chosen more for remoteness than anything else, wouldn't have been the best spot for them to stick their space program (but I guess if they have a launch failure it will impact Mongolia, not China, so maybe thats why).
water vapor is invisible until it condenses. and at ground level it takes an awful lot of water vapor to be visible. and it isnt generally visible for very long at ground level. thats why when you boil water, its visible for maybe a second or two, then disappates.
well ask yourself why you're breathing out WATER VAPOR, but its not making huge clouds every time you breathe? because it ain't condensing, bucko.
it'll condense in winter, but the air is very cold then.
tah dah. basic gradeschool physics.
your tinfoil hat needs adjusting, as well as your basic education.
I wrote in the article yesterday on the amazing amount racist xenophobia posted here whenever some other nation achieves something new in a scientific or technological field.
I am simply flabbergasted. Instead of congratulating the Chinese for a well planned, robust and cheap human space effort, which it is, there are literaly hundreds of hateful, ignorant, racist posts filled to the brim with spite and jealously. And I think it's a real problem with a lot of Americans because it happens so consistently. You want to know why so much of the world has a poor opinion of the USA? Read slashdot, where the supposedly technophile elite make comments based on a lack of knowledge, a sense of low self esteem and jealousy.
In my opinion, if there is anything that will be the undoing of the USA, it is those attitudes, because jealousy never won a space race. There's an old saying that basing one's actions on jealousy or envy is a guarantee of failure.
You want my real opinion? No, you don't but here it is anyway.
The China of today is, if anything, a fascist market state. The ignorance displayed here on Chinese (well, on any non US) poiltics is symbolic of a nation stearing blindly to its own future. The nominally Communist party has very little in common with collectivisation or any other tenets of Marx or Mao's preachings.
The Chinese have achieved a human launch in space with a well paced programme that has taken it's time and not rushed things, which is why this has gone so smoothly. It has done this with a budget that is less than 1/7th of NASA's. And before you start yet another round of 30 year old technology trolling, may I point out to you that the computing power in the Chinese rocketry is at least 20 years newer than that in the Space Shuttle.
NASA would be well advised to take a lesson from the simplicity and pacing of the Chinese programme.
There have been many posts here about the Chinese basing their capsule design on the Russian Soyuz design from the 60's and how this supposedly makes the Chinese effort worthless. Think about this.
The whole entire complete US space programme was based on German technology and ideas from WWII taken from Germany and transplanted into the US along with the German rocket team people under Werner von Braun. Even the idea of a space plane was based on a German WWII idea called the "Saenger Amerikabomber" which was an idea to develop a manned spcae plane that would be able to reach the continental United States and drop a bomb before completing one sub orbit by skippping off the atmosphere and then returning to Germany.
Because, of course, dogs being cute and fluffy and cows not being cute and fluffy puts them in a completely different league. Unless you're a vegetarian, it's pretty hypocritical to complain about people eating cats and dogs while regularly shoving cow parts down your jaded throat. Just because we've deigned a certain animal as a pet, it doesn't magically transcend to some level above cows and pigs. Meat is meat.
At 5:58 EDT, Shenzhou 5 will be visible over Boston
At 11:28 GMT, it'll be visible over Chicago.
Last chance at 5:59 PDT to see it over the West Coast.
Orbit details at space weather.
The China of today is, if anything, a fascist market state. The ignorance displayed here on Chinese (well, on any non US) poiltics is symbolic of a nation stearing blindly to its own future. The nominally Communist party has very little in common with collectivisation or any other tenets of Marx or Mao's preachings.
Sorry for going off-topic. Honestly speaking, I see very little difference between practical applications of Fascism (3rd Reich, Mussolini's Italy) and Communism (Soviet Union, China). The rhetoric is different, but the practical effects are similar: a totalitarian state. Minorities (Jews or Tibetans or whatever) are persecuted, no criticism of the government is allowed, censorship and corruption are part of everyday life, military has a very important role in politics, ... the rant goes on and on.
A political decision ("put more money in a space program") is made in an entirely different environment in the USA. When the small, monolithic elite decides something in China, everyone has to shut up, expect when they are told to cheer. In USA, congress, elections, mass media and all the NGO:s influence the politics. Threefolding the Space Program spending for a decade is so much easier when you have no checks or balances.
I think you need to stop getting your history from your much-celebrated "U.S. media". The sixties space race was just as much a piece of nationalist propaganda as China's space program is today. It was as much about discrediting communism as it was anything else. The first satellite, the first astronaut were all serious embarrasments for the "leader of the free world", and the last thing the U.S. government was going to do at that point was let the Soviets beat them again.
Continuing, I don't know how you can say that the U.S. has the most diverse media in the world. You're extrapolating from the fact that yes, there are a large number of media sources ultimately available, but the fact remains that the majority of the news reoprted here comes from a very small number of large media corporations, whose loyalty to actually reporting the news is very questionable (i.e., Disney/ABC, General Electric/NBC, Westinghouse/CBS, The "vast right-wing conspiracy"/Fox, Time Warner/CNN). The existence of all those other media sources is irrelevant, as they realistically constitute a very small portion of the media spectrum, and not the portion that influences public opinion. Compare this to Europe, where a the media is more evenly divided between a greater number of news agencies, who arguably represent a larger spectrum of views, given the European tendency for individual media outlets to be far more ideological. Of course, when you compare the U.S. to the rest of the world, you're probably just thinking about Russia or Cuba...
Get off your high horse. The U.S. has a number of good things going for it, but your posting is way too in the vain of "America uber alles" nationalism to be taken seriously. If you're afraid to seriously critique and recognize the flaws in your own country, then you're also unreliable as a source of praise.
fuck you.