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Japan Considering Moon Base, Shuttle Projects
ScentCone writes "A brief article at Newsday mentions a Monday report that JAXA, Japan's counterpart to NASA, is looking at robotic probes on the moon by 2015, and construction on a solar-powered manned research base starting there by 2025. The (very) big bump in the agency's budget will also get spent on tsunami warning technology and other terrestrial communications technology development."
They can 'consider' it all they want. Money/resources and willpower to make it happen are something completely different.
Asia's leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.
:)
One month after China's breakthrough, a Japanese H-2A rocket carrying two spy satellites malfunctioned after liftoff, forcing controllers to end its mission in a spectacular fireball.
Well first, go Japan. This should make things interesting (competition spurring innvovation and all that.)
Second, did anyone else miss the story about the failed Japanese launch? I'd imagine the video clips must be pretty spectacular -- anyone see them or know where one might find a link? Torrent?
everything in moderation
My only question, and it's a question that crops up every time I hear about nations/people hollering for moon missions, is "What do you do once you get there?"
I've heard about mining and spaceship fabrication, but both of those have very high transportation costs involved. Just getting a habitable structure for the lunies (or is it "loonies"?) to stay in for weeks/months at a time is going to be a fantastic challenge -- do you use inflatables? -- do you burrow bug tunnels into the moon?
Back when I had an interest in tokamaks (those plasma-fusion-toroid-shaped doohickeys), I'd heard that the moon has a fairly rich quantity of Helium-3, a good fuel for tokamak-style fusion reactors. One shuttle bay full of moondust could power the whole earth for a year, supposedly. How much would it cost to get a shuttle to the moon, fill it with dirt and send it back? It must be a lot of moolah. Would it be worth it? I dunno.
Somehow, though, I'll bet the Chinese and the Japanese could work it out.
Still, my inner skeptic holds sway -- I don't believe it when the President says it, and I have a feeling that China and Japan will reconsider when the costs of such far-flung plans become real.
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
The property status of the moon is determined by whomever puts military bases in place first.
It's not a new phenomenon--at the start of the last century, the border between the United States and Canada was very vaguely defined in the area of the valuable seaports in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia. How was the situation resolved? The United States Army built Fort William H. Seward in the disputed territory and trained its guns on the narrow waterways. Now, 105 years later, the US controls all the port cities in Southeast Alaska and the Canadian border is 40 miles away from the ocean most of the way down.
See? No politics required. It's called "staking a claim".
According to international treaties, no country can claim land outside of the Earth. But who's going to stop them? Basically it's going to come down to who can get there and put people there.
IIRC they can put research facilites and whatnot there, and they own the facilities but not the ground they're on.
The other side is that international law makes no mention of nongovernment agencies (ie Corporations) claiming parts.
Basically it's going to all come down to ability to claim and hold an area. We've got crazy people all over the earth who "buy" plots of land from compainies who purport that they can claim parts of the moon even though they've sent no one there and have no intentions to.
Mining resources is also going to bring up interesting implications, since countries can't claim the land and minerals, how can one make money from the sale of it?
This whole thing has been the subject of countless SciFi books and will probably come to the fore front soon as we approach the capabilities to actually use extra-planetary sites.
To an extent a moon shot is an extension of a ballistic missile programme. The space race of the 50's and 60's between the USSR and USA was partly a PR excersice to cover the massive developments needed for intercontinental missle technologies needed to maintain the status in the arms race.
It would be great if all this interest was purely for scientific and discovery purposes, but under the surface of any programme will be a significant component for the development of millitary technology.
Zubrin (Guy who wrote case for Mars), who is a bit of a nut, but knows a lot about rocket engines, has suggested that while a reusable system is a good idea, the shuttle is basically built backwards. What we need is a system that has a disposable top, TPS if applicable, etc. But, a reusable first stage booster assembly. The first stage won't be subjected to the same level of thermal stress as the last stage, and so needs much less in the way of protection to be made reusable.
In many cases, there may not even be a reason to bring the last stage back, such as satellite deployment, etc, and the last stage mission requirements will vary so widely that it may not make sense to reuse it even if it is free.
I hate when people bring up this kind of moral argument. By this logic instead of paying for the internet connection you are using, shouldn't you just feed the poor around you? Or give it to the local homeless shelter?
Why you're at you should probally just take every cent you don't spend on rent on food and send it to the UN. After all that last food program they had worked out real well didn't it...
Sigh. OK, he said:
I can easily imagine that Japan may be able to seriously leverage the commercial use of space the way the current corrupt leadership in the US cannot. What mean if the Japanese seriously started space based businesses while the US did not?
What country has even come close to what the U.S. has done to further the world's commercial use of space? Our telecommunications pioneering alone lead the world into a new age. Of course Europe (and to a certain extent now, Asia) are catching up. But as country with an industrial focus in this area, it's no contest. Is the US focus in space spread around too awkwardly of late? Yes. I'm glad to see Bush's recent directives to NASA to focus some more riveting projects. Can't wait for more of the same.
Now, will Europe use an arrangement not unlike Airbus to actually get those governments directly into the business? Will the Japanese government become a bigger part of their country's corporate space business? Probably.
But: is some "corruption" (as the twit poster put it) keeping the US out of a healthy commercial role in space? Please. And, to your point: I didn't "refute" the post because it was so non-specific (non-meaningful, really) that there's nothing but anti-Americanism to refute. As nothing more than a cranky-sounding excuse to say that America is corrupt, I called that troll a troll.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.