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Will China Beat the United States Back to the Moon?
MarkWhittington writes "During an address on the space economy to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the space age, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made the assertion that China would beat the United States back to the Moon. 'Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it. I think we will see, as we have seen with China's introductory manned space flights so far, we will see again that nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It's one of the things that made us the world's greatest economic power. So I think we'll be reinstructed in that lesson in the coming years and I hope that Americans will take that instruction positively and react to it by investing in those things that are the leading edge of what's possible."'"
Cold War ended twenty years ago did it not?
I don't know if China would really beat us in the back to the moon race, but if it does, it would have a very positive impact on America. After the end of cold war, America has become somewhat lethargic. If this serves to unify behind some kind of scientific goal, it would really be great.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
Mostly only innovating when they're threatened... (see: US manned space program after the Soviets sent someone into Earth orbit)
...and bullying everyone else in the meantime.
US businesses that currently accept chip and PIN/signature
We got first post! I mean on the moon, not Slashdot.
We went there and there was nothing there. Just pride and Cold War points. Me? Loved it. Still recall watching the launches and Apollo 13 as a youngster. I was so into it as a 6-10 year-old. Definitely made a huge impact on the direction of my life.
While we Slashdotters often mock "If they can put a man on the moon...", there really is something to that. Look at the technology at that time. Look at the mission and the time frame. Amazing stuff. The politicians (mostly) kept their noses out. Even more amazing...
I don't want us to go back on tax bucks. I don't want another stupid political race, this time with China. I want the private sector to make money in space. We went there for the glory, let's go back for cash. I honestly mean it. If there is a return to be made, let's have the private sector do it, and let's give incentives for that.
"If you want to improve, be content to be thought foolish and stupid." - Epictetus
What, is the moon race a "do over"?
We go there in 1969, period, dot.
China beating us back is a false challenge. It would be like if the Soviet Union had landed a man on the moon in September of 1969 and claimed it "beat us back" to the moon because they got there before Apollo 12.
NASA's budget for 2007 was $16.8 billion. The Google Lunar X-Prize is $0.030 billion with a duration of 5 years. Assuming NASA budget remains approximately the same that means NASA's budget could renewably fund the equivalent of 2800 Google Lunar X-Prizes.
Seastead this.
The question we all need to ask is why do we even need to go back? We're not building moon bases anytime in the near future and extracting resources is way to expensive for the foreseeable future.
Some one please tell me what possible reason we would have for even wanting to waste billions of dollars on another trip to the moon for. It's a big floating rock.
I ignore Anonymous Coward posts. If you want to discuss something, that's awesome. Log in.
Doesn't China have to get to the moon on seven different occasions if they want to beat the US back?
IOU one (1) signature
Who is going to be better at risk management inherent in technology development: Someone who is spending their own money or someone who is spending other people's money?
Seastead this.
"... we will see again that nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid..."
The U.S. avoided competing in the race to make a Supersonic Transport airliner. That was a very sensible decision.
There is no need to visit the moon because we already know what is there: Rocks.
Since we already have enough rocks on earth, another race to the moon would be merely a psychological equivalent of a test for penis length.
Just one? Pick your favorite:
* astronomy unfettered by an atmosphere and complexities of zero-G environment
* unlimited vacuum and little concern for pollution for industrial processes
* lots of sunshine for power generation
* tourism
There's longer term, and more altruistic goals as well, like getting our eggs out of one basket.
I'm imagining you looking out at the ocean from the beach, and saying "why go sailing? There's water in my bathtub."
Land on them.
They own a huge chunk of US gov't debt. Which the gov't can repudiate at any time, or (as is the current case) pay off with inflated dollar bills.
Do you even lift?
These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.
Nothing for 6-digit uids?
The US needs to look at the rest of the world as equals rather than sneer down their noses at us. How much longer can the US keep up its huge military spending necessary to support an empire of it current size? We know from history that every empire falls eventually. You might not think of the US as currently having an empire as such but it does have the largest military on the planet and bases in an awful lot of other countries. Some of those countries are happy with the US presence but some are not.
Will it be possible to support such a huge military when the worlds oil supplies run even lower.
These are all questions that the US people need to ask in order to ensure that if they are no longer able to enforce their will overseas militarily no other nation tries looking for revenge against a weakened opponent.
I dont read
...pulled out of you know where. The Chinese have easy, no hassle access to 99% of our best R and D and tech already. They have hard but doable access to 1/2 of the remainder 1%, and are working on the last half via espionage. Between student access and corporate give away access, they have two nations combined expertise to pull from, and that leaves out all the other sources they have, europe in general is giving away the store as well.
This competitive edge, designed and implemented to make western millionaires into billionaires in a very short time frame, and sold/shilled to the middle class west under the illusion that cheap goods for a few years is worth destroying manufacturing for, will result in their becoming the dominant player in the 21st century, space and every place else. It is inevitable now. Nothing will stop it short of global war, and even there they are rapidly catching up in force projection, leapfrogging decades in years, something the DOD and CIA finally admitted to last year in some redacted but accessible studies. By around 2015 or so, they will have the largest economy on the planet, based on actual produced wealth. and rough parity in military force with any western military, and superiority if you count asymmetrical warfare capability.
These studies were presented to congress in the last few years and have been updated, one might have to google a bit, but you can find them. Even if exaggerated somewhat to help insure military budgets, other studies have come up with similar findings.
A hundred years from now, historians will wonder why the western economies allowed such traitorous business leaders and politicians to gut their own nations for personal profit. Or maybe not, given the rate of success and sophistication of mass brainwashing, starting in the corporate government run schools, there might not be much mention of it along with heavy revisionism of events that lead to the "second worlding" of the west.
If you are middle class now and enjoying it, get out of debt as soon as possible and be prepared to live a much more modest and frugal lifestyle soon, so you can enjoy being just "normal" poor and not OMG poverty poor. The big bank/wall street credit boom and sell-off of generations of hard work by the previous generations that fueled cheap goods for a few years is just about over. The only stuff left the business traitors have to sell off is national infrastructure, roads, waterworks, ports, etc, and they are fast tracking that right this second. Again, google is your friend there.
This Griffin surely and funding ploy for NASA. The facts suggest China's program is grossly overrated.
Based on the facts how can you conclude that China will get there first? Indeed, it is not clear that they will beat Japan as the leader in Asian spaceflight.
an ill wind that blows no good
What's so bad about company profits?
Private space enterprise has not even matched Yuri yet. Not even close. The Russians poured money into the space race just to determine that a manned moon landing was not even realistic.
We tried very hard. It took 10 years (starting with Mercury / Gemini etc..) with the involvement of 400,000 people in Apollo on what was basically an initiative mandated by the president. Dozens of the best and most advanced private aerospace companies were funded by lucrative government contracts to the tune of about 19 billion dollars (in the 1960's & just for Apollo, not Mercury or Gemini). If you add Mercury and Gemini and the remainder of NASA's programs it's about $150B. (in 1996 dollars)
I fail to see how a private company could commit comparable resources and not vanish from lack of profit immediately after the first orbital test flights. Or even do it in 10-15 years with a fraction of that. There are companies with the money, perhaps, but few with the talent and the infrastructure. I don't think Boeing has a spare $150B laying around. I think you'd need lots of big powerful companies working together, or some as yet unforeseen commercial space gold mine.
We do have the knowledge, but really, I don't think that would be a huge advantage and I'm not so certain we'd aim for a straight repeat of Apollo anyhow.
Military bases around the world does not an empire make. Personally, though, I think we should definitely remove ourselves from places that are capable of defending themselves now. We need maybe one or two supply bases in Europe to help protect our interests in the Mediterranean. We need something in the Middle East--be it an ongoing presence in Iraq or just in Oman--which can protect our interests in the Middle East and the Indian Ocean. And we need something in either Japan or South Korea--but not both.
I don't think it would take that much money to support that military level. The rest of our troops should be at home. And when they're not training, they should be defending our southern border, helping build levees, etc. We need military readiness, but most of that can be domestic and put the troops to productive use domestically in peacetime.
All the more reason to have a military. I personally do not think Iraq was about oil. I do not doubt, however, that there will be wars over energy in the future.
The reality is that our military could be less than half as strong as it is now and there'd still be no other country (or reasonable group of countries) that could project a threat against the U.S. mainland in a conventional assault. Sure, there are some countries that could nuke us, but that's the case regardless of the size of our military.
The threat to the future of the United States is not our military spending. We could easily afford the current military spending if it were the principle expenditure of the Federal Government. The real threat to the solvency of the United States is the social programs that have been instituted in the last 75 years and which are entirely outside what the Federal Government was originally designed to do.
yay! company profits. lets all wait for private enterprise to get a major manned space mission together...twenty years off, at the very least. So screw that.
didn't the Russians explore the surface of the moon as much as anyone would want to with robotic vehicles? (Google Lunokhod programme.) Cost a lot less than the epic self abuse of putting men up there.
anyhow, more to the point why revisit that god forsaken ball of dust anyhow?
Not a problem. You forget that in China, the people are a consumable resource.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
Being first and being beaten out for second?
Griffin is just trolling for a patriotic boost.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Not to come off unpleasantly, but there is no shortage of foreign countries that already are nearly impossible for the US to collect debt from. It's considered 'a serious crisis for the third world' by many handwringers. Which was sort of the point. If a country reneges on its debt it's not the external lenders that suffer heavily (in a sense, it's money they weren't using at the moment anyway), but the country itself, and the internal lenders. Nobody wants to lend more money until they've cleared off the current defaults, but getting the ailing economy going again needs a lot of funds - funds they can't raise since nobody is willing to lend them any. Just like people or companies that default, they get trapped in a hole that is very difficult to get out of again.
Defaulting on your debt payments is not something any country would want to do. And no, the pain would not be on the same order of magnitude for the lenders as for the country.
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
The Neoconvict's goal has always been to concentrate wealth & power in the hands of the few.
Most of us are just along for the ride, and only recently has awareness of how we're being used reached mass consciousness. But even now, some people prefer to cling to the illusion...
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
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If the US did either of those, they would hurt themselves more, china's economy works by selling crap they made in a big factory, it doesn't mater what values their currency is or what currency they use, they can still sell shit really cheap. The us on the other hand, makes money through venture capital, services, brand names, all kinds of shit that relys on a nice stable successful economy, they whole US system relys on the dollar being a safe currency.
The ideas you suggest are terrible anyway, the trade between china and the US is immense, most us companies rely on it, if the US government just said they would not payback their debt, the Chinese would retaliate against US companies and destroy the US economy pretty much instantly. If the US used hyper inflation to pay off the debt, they would destroy their economy themselves.
Of course the US and Chinese economy would both go down together, as would most of the world economy, but the US has further to fall, and in it's post industrial state, would have a big problem getting back up, china would fall back too, but wouldn't have far to go to get back to where they were and the US would have lost it's advantage.
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?
So we're completely free in the states? Oh yeah, there's that patriot act. That's where all of my freedoms have been going. I guess that murdering 150,000 plus Iraqis and sending thousands of brave young men and women off to their deaths seemed like a good idea, especially with all of that petroleum for the taking. Maybe the genocide of 15 million Native American people wasn't enough. Then there's those rigged elections, spiraling crime rates and unemployment. I'll probably be blacklisted for even writing this. Maybe the U.S should work on fixing it's own problems before blindly criticizing others.
You say the left is for restricting freedom, but I'm afraid the facts are against you. It wasn't until we had a right wing congress sitting pretty next to a right wing president that we became a police state.
How is this informative? Hell, it's not even correct. The US is not a police state, no matter how many times you say it. JHC, if the US is a Police State, then what is Great Britain? Hell! What is Cuba, Nicaragua, or China? Don't give me that 'police state' bullshit until you can truly get locked up for stating "the US is a police state." Unless you are risking you neck by saying it, you are lying. (It's ironic that liars like this are the ones saying "Bush Lied")
(Oh, and this can't be Off Topic until the parent is.)
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.