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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."
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.
Everything in the world is controlled by a small, evil group to which, unfortunately, no one you know belongs.
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.
Blaze a trail to the New World
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... ;-)
Galileo: "The Earth revolves around the Sun!"
Score: -1 100% Flamebait
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.