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China Outlines Moon Project Goals
Kulic writes "SpaceDaily.com is reporting that China has announced 4 scientific goals for their Moon project. There are three general goals - orbiting the Moon, docking spacecraft with one another in lunar orbit, and returning moon rock samples to Earth. Each step is outlined, with a detailed description of what they hope to accomplish during the orbiting stage. It looks like China is serious about their space program, and is taking an incremental approach."
It's good to see another nation making a dedicated push towards space exploration. Perhaps it will help redirect US endeavors in that direction as well - at the very least, it's a good way to boost high tech education and business in the US, which is struggling in the face of global competition (i.e. software & IT outsourcing).
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to quote The Economist magazine;
"Congratulations China, no need for aid right?"
The Economist recently pointed out that China still recieved huge wads of international aid (premium content, no link, sorry). Sending men to the moon is a noble goal, but maybe it's something they ought to do on their own nickel.
While it is true that humanity as a whole has previous experince in landing on another rock in the solar system, the chinese do not. And it's more sensible to do it the first time in relative proximity to earth, where communications are nearly instantinious and home is just four days away, rahter than to go to Mars and hope everything works out just like they did in the simulator.
AFAIK, the chinese are plannin g a spacestation as well as a manned moonmission, and I got a hunch they won't stop there. So far all of their achivments can be dismissed as something other nations already has done - but as far as I can understand the mindset that drives the chinese spaceprograme (which appears to be close to the mindset that drove the early soviet and US spaceprogrames), they 'need' to do something spectaluar that no-one has done before.
A permanet moonbase might suit this criteria, or a manned mission to Mars... but they need to learn to walk before they can run.
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This is exactly what NASA needs right now. A kick in their complacent, idle butts. As you can read in my previous post ,I think that NASA needs to have a similar goal-oriented approach to their mission. Perhaps if we get shown up by what had been a second world country, we will get back into the Apollo mindset again.
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>>It looks like China is serious about their space
:) China will be the most, without a doubt the most wealthy nation by far. Im not going to speculate when this happens, but im sure they're already only second to the all mighty USA. So looks like they'll have enough money to keep it going into the future.
>>program, and is taking an incremental approach
Well, at least someone is. Also incase anyone hasnt noticed
Exciting stuff!
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That's what the Moon is - a very large space station in orbit 240,000 miles above the Earth.
It receives unlimited, very strong, solar energy, and provides plenty of raw materials. It also provides unlimited, very high quality industrial vacuum, and is an ideal site for optical and radio astronomy. It is also a fine launch pad for interplanetary traffic, since it has only 1/6 the gravity of Earth and no atmosphere.
Granted, it may be lacking in certain resources, but the recent discovery of 100,000,000 tons of water near the lunar South Pole certainly casts things in a new light. A sustainable colony is most likely feasible.
If we weren't mired down in massive red tape and environmental regulations, perhaps private enterprise here in the West could take a shot at competing with the Chinese government. I'm pretty sure space flight is about to become commercially viable, especially if there is a breakthrough or two. Scramjets and detonation based engines are two possibilities.
We also need a non-crewed heavy lifter that'll take the "freight into space cheap" crown. Then big lunar and interplanetary ships can be constructed in orbit.
Safe, high performance power (fission, fusion or antimatter) needs to become a reality soon for interplanetary travel. That will be the revolution in the 21st century to rival flight in the 20th.
We'll see if we can get more than a million people into space a year by 2100...well probably not me personally... ;-)
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I could level equal charges against the US. 13,000+ shot dead every year, god knows how many more killed on the roads, a welfare system that pales into comparison compared to that of any other developed world nation, a crumbling school system that's badly underfunded yet the US finds it more important to wage war half way around the world.
Why spend billions fighting a war? If Saddam was the problem then why not just put a $1 billion bounty on his head? It would have been cheaper and it probably would have been more successful.
Does the US really need tens of thousands of nuclear warheads? Wouldn't a few hundred be enough? Just how many $1.3 billion B-2 stealth bombers does the USAF need? They're going to get 20, but the original order was 144... Even so, wouldn't that money be better spent elsewhere?
See? I can construct a similar myopic argument detailing why money shouldn't be spent on grand endeavours for just about any nation in the world. Just because you think that there's no benefit to the average Chinese citizen in this lunar programme that doesn't make it so. If I recall correctly, people made the same argument about the NASA Apollo missions, and the scientific acheivements of Apollo and the success of its commercial spin-offs are still benefitting us today.
Something tells me if this new endeavour came from NASA rather than China you'd be the first to jump on the "about time too" bandwagon. Stop being so damn xenophobic.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
Chang'e is the name of a princess, who, according to Chinese legend, lives on the moon with a pet rabbit - having jumped there after consuming the immortality potion, and obviously trying to escape the wrath of an angry husband.
And now, the ship that will enable the Chinese to get to the Moon is named in her (mythical) honour... It isn't ironic - it's poetic.
You apparently don't know much about China. China is a socialist country much like th USSR was. In China, everything is about appearances. For example, when the Olympic committee came to Bejing to see if it was a suitable sight for the olympics, the Chinese government ordered every factory in the area shut down for a week beforehand so that the usually horrid smog would die down.
My in-laws live in Bejing at the moment, and the propaganda there is interesting... There's only one channel in English, and it's a government channel telling how wonderful China is.
The Chinese government blocks CNN, MSNBC, and most all western media. All news comes through the government sponsered tv channels, or through the "rumor train". We often know about things going on over there before they do.
When we were at war in Iraq there was nothing on but sad music and pictures of wounded children...
In China, you are told what school you will go to, what you will study, where you will live, and until recently, where you will work. You need a permit to be able to move to a city, and many families(like husbands and wives families) are split up because they can't both get permits to live in the same place.
Throughout school they have a class they call Propaganda(well, not really, but an equivelant word in Chinese) that is just that, all about how bad the west is and how wonderful China is. How Chinese medicine is so wonderful and western medicine is bad(My inlaws masters biology students don't really think that viruses and germs cause disease, and that if they opened their windows to let the Chi flow and excercised, they wouldn't get SARS. Most of them contuined to eat from a common bowl because it's the chinese way, and their strong chi would keep them from getting sick...)
China is building the worlds largest ferris wheel and going to the moon purely to make themselves look good. If they can set up a moon base it won't be primarily to make money, though I'm sure they wouldn't mind that. It would be much like our space race, to prove that we're better then them.
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