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.