China Launches Two Astronauts Into Space

DIY News writes to tell us that China has launched their second manned space mission just two years after becoming only the third nation to launch a human into orbit. Astronauts Fei Julong and Nie Haisheng took off Wednesday at 9:00 pm EST (0100 GMT) for a mission that could last up to five days.

Comments

Re:Such a shame

[ravenspear]

Private citizens are launching themselves into space. Anyone with 20 million to spare can go hang out on the space station. It's hardly prestigous for a country that contains the majority of the world's population to acheive something that private citizens of other countries can beat.

Correction, private citizens can pay a government (Russia) to launch them into space. They cannot do it by themselves. Only two governments currently have the capability. China being only the third to do it puts them in an elite group. It may not be a significant achievement by today's measure of technology, but it is certainly nontrivial.

No Borders in Space

[ndansmith]

Nationalism be damned, go China! I am honestly very excited for space flight, no matter who is doing it.

Re:No Borders in Space

[erlenic]

I agree. I remember when they sent their first guy up there, I saw a poll on cnn.com. The question was: "Do you fear that China sending someone into space will start another space race?" I wanted to answer: "No, I'm not afraid it does, I hope it does."

Re:LEO is the battleground of the future

[QuantumG]

And I have plans to do it with two chicks at the same time one day, doesn't mean it's gunna happen.

Re:Such a shame

[FleaPlus]

that China is only interested in Space as a prestige project.

I suspect it's a little more than that. Here's a little blurb from the wikipedia article on the Chinese Space Program:

China's space program has several goals. The first is to increase China's national prestige. The second is to develop China as a low cost satellite launcher. Finally, there is the ambitious goal of mining space for resources, namely the moon.

Where is this next gen vehical?

[raptor_87]

All of the major companies (and some of the smaller ones) are going with expendable launchers. (Okay, so SpaceLaunch can reuse the L1011 that they drom the rockets from, but that's it.)

SpaceShip2 is just SpaceShip1 with more passengers, more safety(?), and a bit more downrange capability.

How far did any of the other X-Prize contestents get? I understand that no one else was anywhere near a manned attempt as of fall 2004.

taikonauts

[AntiNeutrino]

You mean Taikonauts you insensitive clod!

Food Would Be Nice ? ?

[deathCon4]

I am all for Space Exploration, but a country like China needs to focus its money on feeding and clothing its population first. Millions are homeless and have no chance at a better life. People need to straighten out their priorities.

Re:Food Would Be Nice ? ?

[stienman]

China needs to focus its money on ...

When you go to a food buffet, do you put one item on your plate, sit down and finish it before going back for your second item, which you also sit down and finish before moving on to the third?

Each country has to make decisions on how to allocate their resources. Furthermore, if you focus completely on one task to the exclusion of all others not only do important things fall by the wayside, but your resources are not being used most efficiently.

A country like China needs to focus its money on a multitude of things. Cutting their space program doesn't neessarily improve other programs, especially since the resources needed for space aren't necessarily going to improve the economy when spent elsewhere.

Besides, until your own country has solved poverty you shouldn't be the one lecturing another country on how they should spend their resources.

-Adam

All For?

[dereference]

I am all for Space Exploration, but a country like China needs to focus its money on feeding and clothing its population first. Millions are homeless and have no chance at a better life. People need to straighten out their priorities.

Well, you're off topic, so I hope I don't get modded into oblivion for responding, but I think you should reconsider your logic. Let's reword your statement just a bit, for the sake of argument:

I am all for Space Exploration, but a country like U.S. needs to focus its money on feeding and clothing its population first. Hundreds of thousands are homeless and have no chance at a better life. People need to straighten out their priorities.

Given the relative populations, and uncertainty of the statistics, I'm not sure which country has a bigger homeless problem. But I sure wouldn't argue that the U.S. should adjust its priorities and send all NASA's funding to care for the homeless.

Who cares?

[mschaffer]

China's hardware is obviously based upon the old Soviet Soyuz space hardware. (It may even be a licensed copy.) So, China has made theirs a little bit bigger---big deal. At least they probably got bargain pricing on the technology. (Besides, the Soyuz strongly resembles the hardware and methodology proposed by General Electric in thier failed bid for NASA's Apollo program.)

So, who cares? A country like China should be able to afford and implement these older technologies if they want to spend the money and time. If this project is properly funded and managed there is no excuse for them not to succeed.

Re:Who cares?

[brandido]

I believe the cooperation between the Chinese and the Russian space programs stopped in the 60s. And you are correct, their manned capsule is based on the Soyuz. Even if their launches were just lauches of China built Soyuz, this would still be a significant accomplishment, as it would demostrate their ability to maintain an self-sufficient branch of safe manned space exploration, especially given that the US is currently demostrating an inability to maintain a such a program (the Soyuz has a much better track record than the shuttle, and as such, with the CEV we are actually moving towards something that is more like the Soyuz than the shuttle).

However, it is more than that - the Chinese are doing more than just maintaining the designs that they Russians shared with them in the 60s - they are developing and refining and updating those designs, so that it represents a fully independent developing branch of space travel. It is essentially expanding the market of Manned space travel, so that the opportunity to get into space is not limited to two countries.

Hopefully the time comes soon when a private entity such as SpaceX can provide for access to space separate from government institutions, but until that time, I am happy to see more entries onto the space stage.

They feed their people

[bluGill]

China doesn't have a problem feeding its people. Well The food isn't what you and I would like to eat, but it is healthy. (And from what I can tell the Chinese prefer it to what we eat, so it is a matter of personal taste)

The US is buying a lot of 'junk' from China - China is running a trade surplus. If China has a problem with feeding it's people it could afford to buy food from the US where crops are burned in the field because it isn't worth the cost to harvest them.

The only countries that have starvation issues are countries where the government is actively starving the people, or where war has destroyed the crops, and relief can't get through.

Note that I'm not saying China has no problems, but the problems are not significant in regards to feeding people.