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China To Launch 2 Into Space In September
Doug Dante writes "China Daily reports that China's space agency plans to launch two Chinese astronauts into space for a 6-day mission in September. The spacecraft includes both a re-entry and an orbital module. The article, an official publication of the Chinese government in English, also extends a plain invitation for the U.S. to partner with China on space."
Co-operation between countries in space exploration is only a good thing. Build up trust, knock down militarisation.
I look forward to the day when space exploration is done by private companies with staff all over the world. Then, the competition will be between companies and not some sort of xenophobic constest between mutually distrustful national governments. The pace of progress will probably increase by an order of magnitude too.
Stick Men
On the other hand, the Chinese have (so far) been very good a keeping the operation of their space program separate from issues of national pride. They launch misions when they are ready, not in time for some politico's birthday or scheduled speech. Linking the two was one of the reasons the Russians never made it to the Moon and one of the reasons the Americans lost Challenger.
If you asked most people in Europe to rank governments in decreasing order of hostility, the US would be above China.
Phil
I guess today is a passable day to die.
I would never consider cooperating with the Chinese until China becomes a normal country (free elections, non-hostile government, etc.)
Let me guess - you're not American!
(Rigged elections; government hostile to more countries than any other government on earth.)
It may or may not be Bush bashing depending on the source. It doesn't change the reality that there are certain activities within our society that are better left to at least mostly neutral agencies (think utilities, media, space, military, social security, health care) since to put them in the hands of private corporations leaves them open to even more cynical manipulation than they are subject to as government bodies. It may not suit the purposes of Dubya, Cheney, O'Reilly (bill, that is), Limbaugh and others who seek to direct as much money and power to themselves and their friends using a platform of "free markets" and "competition" but it doesn't mean it's not true. Until the American people realize that these folks and the folks like the parent post who seek to color this truth to their own ends are only out to take advantage of the average consumer, the future prospects for the USA are bleak. Providing for the common good is what made America great. The current status quo of "more for me" is what our founding fathers (and mothers) were fleeing when the left the European continent hundreds of years ago. It's just that our current "leaders" have devised a way of warping democracy to do what the aristocrats of England had been doing for hundreds of years before 1776. The American people just haven't realized it yet.
As one of the cousing posts points out, until America realizes this, China and India will continue to advance and ultimately overtake America as not only manufacturers but also as innovators. We have to do it together as one in the US, or we won't be able to do it at all.
If "your media" say taikonaut, you should really get around more. In my experience tabloids use the term taikonaut while real newspapers call them astronauts.
Complaining about the completely unambiguous term "Chinese astrunaut" is simply trolling. And from an aesthetic viewpoint, taikonaut is an abomination of a word, and it's abundantly clear that it did not originate in China. The terms astronaut and cosmonaut both have in common that they are used by the respective space travellers' own nations, and that the languages which they occur in have a tradition of borrowing words and suffixes from Latin, which Chinese does not.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
"Astronauts? Shouldn't the corrent term be Taikonaut?""
"Astro" being the prefix meaning "american"? If you're going to use the English language then at least be consistant - astronaut is the word for someone who works in space.
If you use taikonaut, then for consistantancy you'd also need to use anglianaut or usianaut to describe americans who work in space. If you want to use the chinese language, then by all means do so, but you'd need to use chinese words like yháng yuán rather than chinese-sounding english pseudowords.
Presumably in your view of the world the foreigners also have taikophysists studying taikophotography and taikoscience?
They soviets have:
- Better ejection technologies (can the shuttle crew eject on the takeoff platform if they think things are going south?)
- More reliable, simpler designs. (What the US achieves with multiple backup systems and tons of high-tech engineering, the russians achieved with much more testing to find a design that was inherently reliable. eg: soyuz, mir)
- As you said, Gagarin was the first man in space. It's not like the US space program, even decades after this, doesn't still have it's share of carnage and destruction.
"what other innovations have asia brought us in the 19th or 20th century?"
When you are being fucked over by foreign powers and have to worry about how to survive to the next day, you don't tend to have leisure time to think about science.
Just the 19th and 20th century? Why don't you complain about how the Europeans were so backward and barbaric when the Chinese or the Islam Empire or whoever were advancing technologies on all fronts?
Holly shit, get the fuck over yourself. Every peak power of its time makes significant contribution to innovating in all kinds of fronts because it can afford its citizen the resource and leisure time. It just so happens that for the past few hundrends years it has been Western countries who were in the position to dominate. All the innovations you talked of are build of previous innovations from other dynasties and powers.
When the next super power rises, it will drive even a bigger jump in progress for the rest of world, based on today's achievements. I guess by that time they can say, sure the Americans have brought us the internet, and etc., but what have they done lately? It seems that they are just good at refinements!
Morons. Read the quote from the article:
". . . there is an arrangement for astronauts to move from the spaceship's re-entry module to live and do scientific tests in the craft's orbital module."
The Chinese orbiter appears to be a modular craft, more like Apollo than Gemini. The Chinese "re-entry module" would be the capsule, with the "orbital module" being the can.
By the way, SF writers and other students of the future have noted for decades that when the Chinese take a serious interest in space, the rest of us had better get busy or get out of the way.
Have a nice war,
Mal the Elder
Unlike the good ol' USA? Who is hostile to just about everyone, including its own citizens?
I went to DC _before_ 9/11, every single bloody federal building had metal detectors and bag searches before we could get in. They automatically _assume_ everyone is against them.
I'm a f**king US citizen (by birth, not by choice), and I do not feel safe with with the Feds. I recently went to the social security building. The procedure? 1 person through the door at a time, metal detector, search and all. There's an old granny with a cane (not visible minority) ahead of me. They took her cane and made her take off her shoes and belts before making her hobble through the metal detector.
I'd be more worried about the US Government than the Chinese government. At least in China, they're nominally a dictatorship, but the average citizen gets left alone (if you guys know anyone there, you'll know the situation is way over-blown). Unless you do mass protests in public, you'll get no trouble.
In America, geeze, the average citizen should worry about getting unfair treatment from the gov., the cops, anybody in the "estabilishment", especially if you're the wrong colour.
The worst I've done is speeding tickets (and that's not even in America), and everytime I cross the border, they're not friendly at all.
Is America free? Shit no! Didn't those protestors get prevented from getting X feet away from the Republican/Democratic conventions?
"You can only protest under our rules" -- what kind of country does that sound like to you?
The safest, free-est country in the world is not USA. In a free country, you can do what you want, you don't have to lock the doors, you don't have to worry about somebody wanting to beat the shit out of you.
Unfortunately, an informed post or two on Slashdot can do little to reverse what amounts to essentially, in the case of most Slashdotters, more than a decade of cold war propaganda.
While most of us wear our tin foil hats most of the time, for some reason we are extremely reticent when it comes to admitting to ourselves that our government has been (and in fact continues) to deliberately deceive us when it comes to world politics and affairs. This is an extremely uncomfortable realization for Americans in particular, who are taught from birth that theirs is the best nation in all respects, followed by Europe (although we're quick to point out that they were a continent of fascists before we liberated them in WWII). All other nations are either wallowing in poverty or being actively repressed by dictatorial communist sympathisers.
Consider, for example, that most Americans believe that the Chinese carry around Mao's little red book, and that the Chinese people live in a world that has no concept of freedom or individualism.
This view was most true more than three decades ago, and even then was -- as any reasonable person would expect, in a country with a population like China's -- prone to rather large regional variation, and the direct result of a power struggle between Mao Zi Dong and reform-oriented members of the CCP (the Red Army and the Cultural Revolution were, by in large, a direct result of Mao attempting to solidify power by building a cult of personality.)
The moment he died, Deng Xiao Ping pretty much went ahead and set China on the path that would transform it from a Maoist (not communist -- it was never that) dictatorship into a capitalist power likely to become the economic superpower of the 21st century.
When it comes down to it, Americans would prefer not to see the China of today. It's not surprising -- it's scary. America is begining to lose its edge. We at one point benefited from the sort of manufacturing boom that the Chinese are experiencing now -- Europe moved most of its manufacturing base to the US at one time, because it was cheaper -- and look what happened to the then thought to be unending empires that sat on the old continent: they took second seat to us.
We fear the same will happen with China. It is growing at a rate that we cannot hope to match. It is not hard to imagine, when you're in China, that they will be the next United States. This is very, very frightening.
So instead, we remain ignorant, as best we can.
Only actually going there can remove that willful ignorance. Which is why most Slashdotters will never bother.
I am American; I have lived and worked in the PRC for the better part of three years now.
I can just imagine the "No Blood for Chips" marches on Washington and "Give Peace a Chance" sit-ins, while Taiwanese defenses are dismembered.
Japan will need to amend its Constitution (again) to do anything.
I too hope, the Taiwanese will prevail, but it is not certain -- and we (rightly) promised to help them.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.