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China Plans 5-day Manned Space Mission
rune writes "Both the BBC and The Register have articles on China's next manned space mission. This time two taikonauts are planned to be on board the Shenzou VI spacecraft sometime during 2005 for about five days. There is also a brief mention of the plans of the Chinese Space Agency for lunar exploration." hrld1,kon adds a link to this article on Chinaview, the official English-language news source for the People's Republic of China.
Meanwhile in North America, we've perfected manufacture of the double bacon cheeseburger. Gulp.
they will remain in orbit for five days, although their craft could support them for up to one week.
wow, IMO that's a pretty a small buffer! i would add more to accomodate for any miscalculations or if they must stay up for londer for whatever reason.
fair enough... seeing that the US is thinking of shutting down the shuttle missions soon, and it sending astronauts by way of the Russian rockets.. maybe china will come out on top after all in the next round of the space race (Man on mars??)
Not exactly... As people have been mentioning with Space Ship One and the private space industry in particular, there is a lot of borrowed technology and knowledge from previous missions. A lot of the legwork has already been done. But you are absolutely correct in saying that competition is good. Ain't no good capitalist gonna let no pinko commie space rocket beat us to space again!!! (Holy crap that triple negative actually came out logically correct!!) I think it'll be interesting to see who gets to Mars first, China or non-government private enterprise. We're in for a good show no matter what.
Sorry, but the word "Cosmonaut" was there first.
The first man in space was Russian.
The only reason we have the rights we have is that people just like us died to gain those rights. -- Cheerio Boy
FYI: even today, you can't send more than a 486 in orbit, mostly because of feature sizes. The smaller the feature size, the easier for cosmic radiation to screw things up.
The Raven
... does this mean that we can stop sending them economic aid? (http://www.tibet.ca/en/wtnarchive/2004/4/6_5.html )
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine.
Anyway, here is the big problem with nuclear rockets: getting them into LEO. At some point you have to launch the fuel. That tends to attract a lot of protesters. To early in the morning to google the exact mission, but there was a deep space problem launched by NASA from Cape in the last 5 years that used Plutonium as its fuel source much like the Voyager probes. Green Peace and other groups protested the launch because of potential dangers if the self-destruct had to be employed because the launch failed in the atmosphere. People living in Denver get higher doses of radiation on a daily basis then would have been released if the rocket had to be destroyed for any reason. But still it garners a lot of political pressures.
Also, if I remember correctly, there are parts of the Moon treaty which prohibit (at least potentually) deploying such engines in space because the amounts of Uranium could be considered as a bomb/weapon in space. At least according to the treaty.
Even if the Russians, Americans, and others decided to allow fission reactors in space (which is a real possiblity in today's world), there would still be political protests against the move just because the shipment of radioactive materials into space.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
The dam cost $24.65 billion.
The ISS has cost estimates on the order of $30 to $40 billion (including shuttle launch costs)
I'm not sure I understand your point. Anyway, a better comparison to China's dam would likely be the Panama Canal, the Tennessee Valley Project, or Hoover Dam. As for modern projects, how about New York's third water tunnel ($6 billion) or the $21 billion Chunnel. Oh yeah, the Iraq war ~totally~ dwarfs the cost of that dam too.
We let people die in various ways and huge numbers all the time... The economic choices we make help millions to die in 3rd world. The car industry makes thousands of people (both drivers, passengers and pedestrians) die every year. Pollution causes many many unncessary deaths every year. And so on.
The point is, whatever human activity, people die! Can't stop it, fact of life.
So the question becomes, how many people are allowed to die, what is the acceptable risk per person. And if you say "no death is acceptable" then I sure hope you for example don't drive a car, since a lot of people kill other people with their cars every day, and only way it can be stopped is to stop driving cars completely.
If we want to progress science and technology, we have to accept higher rate of deaths than is acceptable in "normal life". If we don't, we can as well give up and let those willing to take the risks to reap the rewards as well.
I'm curious why the occupation involved with the exploration of space must use names derived from the language of the country doing the exploring?
In what way does "astronaut" convey that the explorer must be from the USA? Why the segregation? Because a precedence was set with "cosmonaut" during the cold war? Do russians and chinese use different names for the space explorers of other countries? Why doesn't the ESA have their own word in place of "astronaut"?
Dan East
Better known as 318230.