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China Scrubs Moon Mission Plans
Jim McCoy writes "CNN is reporting that according to China's state media, plans for a manned moon mission have been shelved due to cost. They are planning on a space station though..."
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This is obviously something just to save face. Everyone knew they would run into cost issues I believe. It can't be cheap to do stuff on the moon. Just as it can't be cheap to do things in orbit.
Give it 6 months or so and their space station will become some kind of probe, then a rocket, etc...
Der Tod ist der einzige Weg hier raus!
last thing anyone needs is another space station.
china could do well with planetary probes. you get a lot of bang for the buck -- look at what the recent NASA mars probes accomplished.
something like a couple chinese venusian landers (rovers?) would be easily within the chinese monetary and technological budget, and would put them on the map. venusian exploration has been extremely sparse, despite how easy it is to get there compared to mars.
or how about a mercurian orbiter/lander? nobody's been there yet.
It appears that energy is a major factor that is pacing Chinese economic development. Have the Chinese established some other energy sources through R&D(say some results in some other form of hot fusion) or diplomatic arrangements(i.e. a deal with the Russians or Islamic oil exporters)?
From my perspective manned space exploration does make sense. Surely, a rover on Mars is a very cool thing, and can accomplish a lot on it's own. Yet, a human can accomplish so much more on a much shorter time.
Further, isn't it just human nature to want to go?
Kinetic stupidity has a new brand leader: Allen Zadr.
This sort of thinking misses the point: it usually falls under the name "broken window fallacy." For instance, after every hurricane, you hear about how there is a boom in home construction and window repair to fix damaged buildings. If you just watched the local news on TV, you might naively wonder "if hurricanes are so good for business, why don't we break windows all year round?"
The answer is that all the resources (capital, raw materials, and labor) that went into fixing the broken windows could have been used, in the absence of a hurricane, to build new structures, so that over the same period, you would have had more buildings, instead of the same number of buildings returned to pre-storm condition.
You can't simply count the money and claim that it is a net benefit to the nation's welfare (in the sense of happiness/utility). If we paid billions of dollars to dig a hole in the ground and billions more to fill it up, you should agree that is a net waste of resources, even if that money got paid to Earthlings. Sure, the hole diggers and fillers will claim all sorts of spin-off benefits (better technology to dig holes!) and "jobs created" by their efforts, but it doesn't make it a good policy.
Any government-mandated spending has the effect of distorting capital, labor, and resource markets, in ways which might (might: I'm not some die-hard starve-the-government type) reduce overall welfare.
Spending billions of dollars to place robotic go-karts on Mars, for instance, is not self-evidently the best way to spend the money.
we need to work on getting industrial capacity in orbit.
Don't let her go. I'm serious. Marry her in a small ceremony, and wait until you get your I-131. This is experience talking.
Hoist Number One and Number Six.
You forgot to mention Korea, VietNam and Cambodia. All of which had Civil Unrest that was actively, militarily supported by China.
Wang told a gathering of high school students on Sunday
I think it probably has as more to do with finding a way to shovel large amounts of money in to the coffers of the aerospace companies that are key benefactors of the Bush administration. Boeing in particular is looking to be in deep trouble trying to compete with Airbus in the commercial aviation market. There are some who contend Airbus is winning thanks to subsidies from European governments. This program would be a great way for the U.S. to subsidize Boeing without it being challenged in the WTO. The DOD already tried a blatant subsidy to Boeing last year by trying to award it a huge contract for 767 tankers with no competition and using leases that dramatically inflated the costs and Boeing's profits.
In this it has a lot in common with the missile defense program. Another program where vast sums are being spent over a long period which may or may not result in anything that ever works or is deployed.
If you are seeking to pour money in to the pockets of your friends a program with a multidecade life span which may or may not actually bend any metal or go anywhere for a decade, if ever, is a pretty good program.
It will also result in a bunch of highly paid, high tech jobs in the U.S. that will be hard to outsource. I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of them end up in swing states like Florida where grateful workers will help shore up the Republicans at the ballot box. I wonder how many of them will be filled by foreign born engineers when they discover there aren't enough qualified engineers in the U.S. to do the work, and the ones there are are busy working on weapons.
Think of it as a counterpart to the Medicare "Reform" bill which subsidizes the health and drug companies (key Republican benefactors), or the the Energy Bill which subsidizes big oil, gas, coal companies (key Republican benefactors) or the War in Iraq which subsidizes Halliburton and Bechtel (key Republican benefactors). The Bush administration is pretty creative in finding ways to loosen up the purse strings on your tax dollars so they can go to their friends.
@de_machina
Here is a more plausible reason for this smoke and mirrors program. To emphasize, its sure as hell not to distract people from the mess in Iraq. The fact is the only people who even remember he proposed this are the wannabe Trekkies, aerospace workers and NASA employees. How exactly are you going to distract the nation when no one is paying any attention to this outside of /.
I'm imaging Karl Rove sitting in his office crunching the numbers on the swing states for the 2004 election. Florida of course pops up at the top of the list for potential nail biters.
So you have this relatively small demographic in the Space Coast around Cocoa Beach and Melbourne whose livelihood is entirely dependent on the space program. If those few hundred thousand votes could swing Florida in or out of the R column would you want to go in to the election with them:
A. Facing the cancellation of the Space Shuttle and the ISS and with no manned space program to keep them employed. The unmanned and military programs might keep the Space Coast going but wiping out the Space Shuttle and the manned space program with no replacement would really screw up their local economy, their careers and their prestige.
B. Drooling over a multidecade, ultra exciting and interesting program to go back to the Moon and Mars that would keep even the younger people employed up to retirement age.
Pretty easy answer huh, B. So what does Rove do? He proposes a Mars/Moon program and pretty much locks up the vote on the Space Coast for Bush, and as a bonus any other place where there are a lot of aerospace workers and trekkies. Problem is you probably have zero desire to spend any actual money on it since your priorities are in defense spending, wars in the Middle East and tax cuts, and NASA is the last place you want to sink money.
So you throw tiny amounts of money at it and ramp it up very slowly, just enough to sucker all the voters in the Space Coast until November. After the election let it drag on until it reaches the point they are going to have to spend a lot of money, bend metal and go someplace, then you kill it because the nation can't afford it. Ideally you drag it out through 2008 before you have to spend any money.
I know its pretty cynical and someone may lob the standard tin hat reply at this but politicians really are this cynical and this election is shaping up to be both close enough and vicious enough the candidates are willing to do stuff like this to win.
@de_machina