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.'"

Comments

And this Is Sadder

[Anonymous Coward]

> The fact that we're racing to the moon again is a depressing statement about what we've been doing recently, though I guess any progress is better than none.

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.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[frup]

I see it as more an issue of budgeting than progression. If the evil moon goblin terrorists had attacked New York, well I bet you the moon would be painted blue white and red by now.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[rufty_tufty]

*sigh*

What is different this time is it is done how things should be.
Let me give some examples:
* the capsules this time will be a much more friendly environment - just like the shuttle your average school teacher will be able to ride in it. This is very different from the apollo capsules which ran with weird atmosphere capabilities that limited the time you could spend there and were hellish places to work
* The capabilities will be much greater - they're not stuck to equitorial landings this time, they can go to the poles too.
* The lander will have an airlock - no more depressurising the entire capsule for every moonwalk - sounds a small thing but it is a big improvement in terms of safety and workability.
* It's desiged using modern NASA safty requirements - that's a big shift.

Look at it this way, suppose it took 2 years to create the first unix (from spec to first product to customer). Could you in 2 months produce a full unix system to current requirements (starting from a blank-ish sheet with just the specification - no code reuse). I doubt it, yet this is what you are asking nasa to do when you bemoan the fact it is taking a similar length of time to update their design.

Look in this day and age it often takes several years to specify, design and produce a new IC, and that's re-using IP - These guys have a whole system to build pratically from scratch and it is safty critical too!
This stuff doesn't happen overnight - well not in any engineering project I'd entrust my life to anyway.

As an example of how expensive and timeconsuming aerospace engineering is take the 787 program $10-12 Billion, and approx 5 years. This is for a slight upgrade to a well established design/aeroframe(some new materials redesign of avionics).
I don't think you realise just how hard rocket science is.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[ZombieRoboNinja]

Tell you what, rebuild the original Apollo system EXACTLY the way they did it the first time, crappy computers and missing airlocks and all, and see if there is anyone willing to take the same risks those astronauts did in the 60s.

I'm guessing just about every pilot in NASA and 50 million people who AREN'T in NASA will volunteer.

So the capsule is "unfriendly" and the whole setup is fairly dangerous. IT'S THE FREAKING MOON.

Re:And this Is Sadder

[Teancum]

You are missing the goal here, which isn't to rush and try to get to the Moon at any cost (that was the goal of Apollo). In addition, it was just to "plant the flag", gather a few rocks that were close by just to see what is up there, and get back before the sun set on the controllers back on Earth.

The current goal is to set up something that can be used for a bit of a longer term mission. Perhaps even more important is to simply survive the Lunar night. Apollo never even tried to accomplish that task at all.

While I would agree with your post in the sense that it seems NASA is trying to re-create Apollo all over again, even down to nearly identical "Apollo II" capsules (try to Google that term, BTW... that was some program that never happened). How this is being sold to Congress is another plant the flag mission, but I think that would be a huge mistake. If that is all that NASA accomplishes, they truly do need to be considered as a relic of the past no longer worthy of their heritage and the agency disbanded.

What is needed is a genuine permanent human presence off of the Earth, and I believe that must include families and children, with the potential of human childbirth taking place somewhere off of the Earth. If this is to happen, the safety factors need to improve nearly a whole order of magnitude, and is something far more challenging. Even if all that happens is a Lunar equivalent of the South Pole Research Station, I would be incredibly impressed, but it can and should be more.

BTW, don't retread the argument about people not raising families in Antarctica. The reason that is the current situation is more political than technical... not even economic reasons are keeping families from Antarctica. Some parts of Antarctica are at least as habitable as the North Slope of Alaska, and there are some pretty big cities in that part of the world, and places in Siberia where conditions are even worse. If 100 years from now there aren't whole families waiting for the 3rd generation of lunatics (literally... people of the Moon) to be born, it will be also for purely terrestrial political reasons and not for any technical or even economic rational that will keep it from happening. Ditto more so for Mars.

Re:This Is Sad

[colmore]

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.

Re:How to win the moon race

[MightyMartian]

The problem, as I see it, is that China is willing to take the risks, just as the US was forty years ago. The US went there, costing lots of money, proving ultimately that the Soviets were years away from duplicating it, came home and that was that. NASA was sent off to waste valuable resources on the shuttle program, which really has been nothing more than a satellite launch and repair service.

China is clearly doing this for nationalistic reasons, just as the US did in its time, but it also knows the spin-off technologies from such a venture are huge. Sure it costs billions to go there, but the funding of research could give China a boost in surprising areas.

This is the problem with the myopic "the Moon is a waste" and "fix problems down on Earth" line. It really does ignore how much value these sorts of massive state experiments, even if the direct benefits are negligible, can add.

There's also the idea of the long-term view, that the national interest of great powers (like China, Russia and the US) or would-be great powers (like India) will not be served by planting themselves firmly on the ground. China is clearly thinking into the future, and hoping it can find itself in a few generations as a leader, and not playing catch-up.

This is the United States' race to lose, and I think only now are folks beginning to catch on to that. Resting your laurels on a space program that ceased to exist a generation ago is not in the national interest.

Where are the advanced technical plans?

[amightywind]

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

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