Slashdot Mirror
The New Moon Race
An anonymous reader writes "News.com has a pictoral and editorial look at the quickly-heating second race to the moon. A Japanese orbital probe is expected to reach orbit of the satellite sometime today, just one of the dozens of projects now aiming to exploit Earth's orbital partner for scientific and business gains. 'The next lunar visitor may come from China. The Chang'e-1 spacecraft is scheduled to lift off near the end of October. It is slated to study the moon's topography in 3D and also investigate its elements. Chang'e-3 is a soft lunar lander that is scheduled to fly in 2010 ... If all goes as planned, the United States and India will have astronauts on the moon by 2020, China by 2022, and Japan and Russia by 2025.'"
Does it really take 13 freaking years to dig up the notes from Apollo program, dust off/refresh the equipment and relaunch? Did we take such a big step back?
The creatures outside looked from Alt-Right to Antifa; but already it was impossible to say which was which.
Not to be too cynical, but I've not had too good of luck with the "Made in China" tools and equipment I've used over the years.
Not that I'm saying they couldn't do it, jus tthat they might want to outsource the parts from their regular factories.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Winning this race is easy. Stay out of it. The reward for winning is you can return tens of billions of dollars to your taxpayers.
Seriously, the moon is sterile. It is covered in dangerous, sticky, abrasive, lung-destroying dust. It appears to have no valuable resources, other than perhaps He3, which might be valuable 30 or 40 years from now when / if fusion power becomes a commercial reality. Being honest about it, there is little or no science value to having a manned base up there. It is not a good jumping-off point for Mars missions or anything else. All it's good for is spending money which would be better spent on Earth.
So we can win this race very easily by doing nothing.
If people really want to go there, they should start a private foundation and do fund-raising. Taxpayers should guard their wallets and purses and not blow any money on this pie-in-the-sky nonsense.
Gee, what with the International Space Station, which has cost billions of dollars and which seems to have little or no scientific or other value, you would think we would start asking, "why are we doing this", especially when the subject is manned space bases.
"NASA must complete the ISS so it can be dropped into the ocean on schedule in finished form." The moon base can't even be dropped in the ocean, but we could say, "We must build a moon base so it can be abandoned on schedule in finished form before anyone else can do it."
It's more depressing than that.
1957: Soviets launch Sputnik.
1969: Americans land humans on the moon.
2007: Slashdotter reports "If all goes as planned, the United States and India will have astronauts on the moon by 2020, China by 2022, and Japan and Russia by 2025." 2020: Americans return to the moon.
The first time around, it took us 12 years to do it from scratch, with tooling recovered from WW2 V-2 rocket bases, and computers less sophisticated than present-day wristwatches. We're now talking about maybe being able to do it in 13 years.
It's not just a lack of progress. We're going backwards.
I mean, why? In the past there was the propaganda race for space and the moon. Now, it's pretty much useless to go to the moon.
Moonbase? Big deal, it will be a huge waste of resources. I mean, what can you do on the moon? There's basically a lot of rocks there. Lower gravity? Who cares, we have the ISS for that and even that is a big barrel of pork. The cost to ship everything to maintain a moonbase is huge and the benifits are mostly of the teflon kind. I propose we stay on earth untill we find a way to do something usefull in space. Things like good telescopes and satelites.
This will be the Ted Stevens of pork, the second race to the moon.
Knowledge is power. Knowledge shared is power lost.
Arthur C. Clarke recently said something to the effect that had it not been for Cold War politics (international pissing contest + good public face on ICBM research) science wouldn't have really gotten to much space exploration until the components had become much cheaper and lighter.
It's not so much that we've had a slow go, it's that we had an artificially false start.
Similarly, Europeans landed on North America sometime around 1000, but it was an accident, and Norse sailing craft, which were the best in the western world, weren't really up to the task of regular trans-atlantic voyages, it would be another 500 years before really practical technology caught up to the mere feasibility.
And it might be 400 years again here. Even though technology (in some ways) progresses faster now than 500 years ago, the challenge of space is more difficult than the challenge of long ocean voyage, not just by an order of magnitude, but along many different *dimensions* of difficulty.
The failure of reality to keep up with science fiction isn't the fault of reality (or of science fiction) it was only a strange confluence of events that allowed the two to look, for a moment, similar.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
The US has fairly credible plans for man-rated lunar launchers in the Ares I and Ares V, spacecraft in the Orion vehicle, and a large lunar lander. It seems to me that if these other nations are to reach the moon in their stated time frames they should be presenting plans for similar very large launchers and space architecture. Yet none are forthcoming. Russia won't get to the moon with a Soyuz or proton. Europe won't get there on an Arianne V. China won't get their with a Long March 4. Japan won't get there with an H2. India will not get there with one of their satellite launchers
an ill wind that blows no good
Maybe someone can explain why a proven and highly effective spacecraft like the Saturn V was retired for the space shuttle, which proved to be more dangerous, complicated, and expensive than NASA ever imagined.
The Apollo tech was abandoned because the shuttle tech was supposed to be cheaper, and more reliable. Not only that, but the Air Force was supposed to split the cost. Unfortunately none of these things came to pass. It's easy in hindsight to say we should have stayed with Apollo tech, but we were pretty much all cheering the shuttle until its limitations started glaring through.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
Moore's law works because they're not running into fundamental limits, but running into practical limits of manufacturing capability and cooling. Unfortunately, the cost of space travel is a pretty solid barrier based on physics (specific impulse, combustion chemistry, and delta-v), and the Apollo design was pretty well optimized; the main advantage we have now is lighter computers and better comm equipment. We can also do some controls stuff, but that will only help so much.
Significant reductions in cost and capabilities (beyond an order of magnitude, which could be possible with volume, such as SpaceX's plans) really depend on a completely new propulsion technology. All of the current alternatives are promising but still have glaring limits.
You're right, but for the wrong reason. You have progress and motion confused. Going to the moon for the sake of going to the moon is pointless. If you want pointless and exciting, the National Football League, NASCAR, and major league baseball will provide that for you at essentially zero cost to the taxpayers.
Spend many billions on scientific research? I'm in favor of it. There's a payback -- maybe not direct, but it's there. There is a reason that the US leads the world in information technology and that is largely that we spent a lot of money in the second half of the 20th Century learning what works and what doesn't.
So, a few billion for a huge atom smasher -- fine (within limits). billions for unmanned probes to Mars, Mercury, Titan -- sure. Get some rocks back ... Please bring some rocks back. Figure out how to get reliable broadband to rural areas? Pretty good idea.
Many tens of billions for a pointless space station, ill conceived space shuttle, and manned return to the moon. That's nuts for the US. Been there, done that. Got a good reason for going back? Thought not. If China wants to spend billions on a Lunar expedition -- fine. More power to them. I'd rather they spent money on moon landings than on building aircraft carriers.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey