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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."
The more the merrier. Man Spaceflight is sorta like Chess, its no fun playing by yourself. This will foster competition and everyone wins!
time is a perception of a being's consciousness
time is your 6th sense, the wierd ones are 7+
I am also considering a moonbase, but I don't get a front page story.
Now that Japan is trying to do stuff on the moon, I am sure that old GW will stop at nothing to claim the entire moon in the name of USA and freedom fries.
"Gentlemen, allow me to demonstrate the awesome lethality of the Alan Parsons Project. Fire the laser!"
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
Is there an "official" body for sectioning off the moon? How does all that work?
Sure, any country with enough balls and explosives can stick a flag there, but, unlike terrestrial land, I doubt that other countries take that as a solid stake of ownership.
If there isn't an official body, what happens when, say, Japan decides to plant themselves in some choice piece of real estate, like the lunar equator, or wherever in lunar geography is best for launching rockets for Earth? That's a pretty easy to imagine situation, and it would put the Japanese (or the Russians, or the US, or whoever) in a pretty solid dominating position.
This not been thought of before?
Israel and India also have a pact to reach the moon by 2008 with an unmanned probe (and for a mere $83 million US dollars!) . Maybe reaching the moon is becoming the new "it" thing to do for goverments, much like becoming a nuclear power once was (or is)?
In other news, the JAXA robotic space probe seems to have taken great interest in the American flag on the moon. Aparently the Japanese have figured out how to use spray paint effectivly in space...
There's the 1979 Moon Treaty - see wikipedia.
## W.Finlay McWalter ## http://www.mcwalter.org ##
OK, maybe I do watch The Simpsons way too often.
Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational tentacle station upon the quivering form of a miniskirt-wearing Sarah Connor!
Never underestimate the power of the otaku side.
Pierre Boulle, the chap who wrote "Planet of The Apes," wrote a novel called "The Garden On The Moon," in which the Japanese competed against the other "powers" to land on the moon.
It was a poignant read.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
We know NASA wont, whose p*ss*ng half its funds into a $100 billion dollar space station that has trouble keeping two astronauts alive.
That's a toughie. "Diamonds Are Forever" had a plot involving a satellite with a heat-ray (same with "Die Another Day"), "You Only Live Twice" had SPECTRE stealing both the Russian and the US's space-ships to spark World War III, and "The Man With The Golden Gun" had, as a lower-teir baddy, a corrupt Japanese businessman who was working with Scaramanga (although "You Only Live Twice" had that too).
Zagreus sits inside your head, Zagreus lives among the dead, Zagreus sees you in your bed and eats you in your sleep.
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
So we set up a colony on the moon, then we set up one on mars. Then the moon decides they want to be independent, so there is a bloody war that is swept under the rugs and the survivors from the moon escape past Jupiter where they find an alien weapons factory, and later attack us using giant robots.
Leave it to Japan to start something like this =)
The coolest part is that their rocket ship will be nuclear powered and turns into a really big robot when attacked or befriended by a child.
Hey, maybe this is what NASA needs to convince the gov't we need another moon mission.
Well, it's probably a better use of $57 billion a year than the standard Japanese economy-boosting habit of building enormous public works; seven billion 1988-dollars for the Honshu to Hokkaido undersea tunnel (longer than the Chunnel), for example.
With all the current focus on China, people forget that Japan has (in dollar terms; the CIA World Factbook figures use slightly dubious purchasing-power-adjusted figures) the second largest economy in the world. It's an economy in a deep recession, but huge government spending is a traditional way out of those.
I want a wing on back of my lunar rover!
Oh wait, no atmosphere...
I guess a Type R sticker will have to do.
Not on the Peak of Eternal Light.
Don't take a knife to a gunfight, or even a knife to a knife fight. Take a gun to a knife fight.
The plans also include...alerts to cell phones in the event of major emergencies like a tsunami
Having just read the previous story, now I can't help but wonder 'what ringtone would best signify the impending doom of a tsunami?'
I remember that back in the 1980's it was said that the United States was planning to have a moon base by the year 2000.
Look where that ended up.
So, as for the Japan's plan for a moon base, I'll have to see the thing actually under construction before I believe it. I find the robotic probe plan to be much more realistic. I think they have a pretty good chance of succeeding there.
In other news, the Japanese government has proposed to raise the sunken WWII-era battleship Yamato...
Someday, you're going to die. Get over it.
i remember in his "expanded universe" that he wrote if the u.s. didn't get off its ass and develop a real space program, japan would, and we would end up having our visas stamped by japanese customs officers when we space tourists arrived at the moon.
..... kris
seems to me the real space race has started.
"I thought I could organize freedom. How Scandinavian of me."
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I guess if I intended not to do what the subject says i wouldn't post this. None the less I suppose it has to be mentioned.
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The UN has estimated that for 81 billion dollars a year everyone on Earth could be fed.
Now nevermind the US military budget
Err.. space travel is cool. but someone has to say it. Priorities?
I guess the real point is that we could have space travel and no world hunger (and hense no terrorists and far less wars) but..
err.. interested to see if anyone has any thoughts (always surprised by the depth of insite and depths of cynacism on here)
Mike
You've been paying too much attention in school. Despite what the prophets of capitalism will say, competition does not mean everyone wins. In fact, by definition, competition means that someone will win and someone will lose.
While there may be tangible benefits from competition by nations in space exploration, there are certainly benefits from cooperation as some recent explorations have shown, particularly Cassini/Huygens. Two nations with $10 billion each can do projects together that are impossible alone.
Part of the problem with your thinking is that you seem to think that nations aren't driven to innovate in the field of space research. The main problem right now is that there isn't enough money to do what they imagine they can do; we're not short on ideas by any means, but we're short on means to be sure.
My belief is that we're not going to see significant care shown to the space programs here in America any time soon, as most politicians are too busy solidifying their power bases by exploiting whatever hot-ticket item they can. Space exploration isn't going to win over Nascar dads, but being pro-life and imprisoning American citizens without hearings because they are suspected of terror ties that cannot be proven seems to work.
So how long before we can expect to see bi-pedal Gundam-like mechs on this moonbase?
"If you were plowing a field, which would you rather use? Two strong oxen or 1024 chickens?" --Seymour Cray
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.
There is a reason's Columbus' home country of Portugal refused to fund his voyage. (Portugal was a major power at the time, they had the money, perhaps more than Spain) In fact, it is the same reason Spain's King refused to fund the mission until his wife got interested.[1]
The kings were well aware that the earth was round, and they knew how big the earth was. This was calculated about 200BC(IIRC). Columbus calculated the earth's size at about 1/4th the correct size. With the correct size it isn't worth sailing around the world to get to Asia, with Columbus' size it was.
When Spain finally gave Columbus sponsorship they gave him junk ships and essentially prisoners as crew. As they watched him leave they were fully expecting that he would starve to death on the trip. (And if you read the accounts it is clear they came close) Spain was surprised when he came back reporting he found land.
[1]Those who are married can understand why you would pay for a stupid mission if you wife was interested.
On Columbus (actually "Colon" - he was not Italian), he had been part of Prince Henry's navigation school (an evolution of the Portugeuse Templars - the Order of Christ), Colon learned the new sailing skills and also saw maps that the prince collected. Colon also took part in a 1477 trip from Norway (royalty linked to Portugal), to Iceland and probably beyond. Colon probably heard northern seamen's tales of vast land beyond the "land of cod" that we now call the Grand Banks. The Vikings and later Scandinavians had been travelling the whole northern arc of the Atlantic from at least 800AD onward, with fishermen from Bristol, the Shetlands and Orkneys, Norway, Bremen and Basque following from at least the 1300s. Supposedly the permission letter from Ferdinand and Isabella granted him to go claim the lands he had already discovered (past/present tenses being important in Spanish). Colon's calculation of the size of the Earth and his brother's maps were largley political, IMHO - they were trying to sell this trip any way they could.
Colon wasn't the only southern European traveller to the Americas in the late 1400s, either. The whole Atlantic had been a Portugeuse pond from the 1450s onward. The settlement of the Azores and Madieras spawned plenty of journeys that included possible settlement in Puerto Rico and the discovery in the 1470s of "Lavrador" by Juan Corte Real, sailing a privately funded mission. Maps from the 1400s (based on Ptolemy even) show the Americas as a third peninsula hanging off China - the oldest sometimes just show Mexico and isthmus of Panama, the later ones (1448 Walsperger, IIRC) have complete maps of S. America rivers and coastal N. America labelled as "India Meridionalis".
What Columbus/Colon did was not original but part of a spectrum of trips that were taking place at the time. The Portugeuse contibution is obscured because of the Lisbon earthquake and the fact that much of the School of Navigation's work was a state secret. An argument could be made that the only thing Columbus did was commit an act of supreme treason against the Portugeuse Crown.
ObSpace: we can draw VERY important lessons from exploration and frontiers of the past - but the new situation is equally different in nature. "Space" still needs to pay for any of us to be able to go - so NASA, JAXA, ESA are only going to be bit-players in a truly space-faring future.
Josh
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