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.'"
Did you even read the article?
China is expected to launch its first lunar exploration satellite later this month; India has plans for a moon launch in April 2008; the next U.S. moon mission is slated for 2008; and Russia could be flying private citizens around the moon and back as early as 2009. All of those countries are making plans to land a spacecraft on the moon by 2012--with astronauts and cosmonauts to follow soon after. Reports say Germany is also interested in joining the space community. Meanwhile, Google is offering $30 million to encourage private teams to land a rover on the moon by December 2012.
New energy sources...plain old space exploration progress...a moon base...the possibilities are endless and all you can come up with is "depressing"? Maybe you should consider therapy.
Maybe the original set is really really dirty.
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.
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 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.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
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
Unfortunately, with the current emphasis on returning to the moon, funding for possible Mars missions has been siphoned off (since NASA's budget is definitely not large enough to work toward both goals at once). The Mars mission would also be of great value scientifically, since the rovers currently exploring the planet cannot accomplish as much as a actual human in the same timespan, and being the first country to set foot on another planet would be an event worthy of space history books.
Robert Zubrin and David Baker have already outlined an inexpessive, easy to prepare mission plan, which also minimizes the risk to the astronauts [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mars_Direct]. The plan calls for Earth Return Vehicles (ERVs) to be launched unmanned with rockets no larger than were needed for Apollo, followed by a second with astronauts onboard. The ERVs would then make fuel for the return trip out of the martian atmosphere, saving payload costs from earth. If anything went wrong, we would also only lose the machines, not any astronauts, which should be a major selling point for NASA in light of recent tragedies.
The pricetag: $55 billion for an 18 month stay on the planet, and it would leave one ERV on the planet's surface, enabling a continuous cycling of astronauts to and from Mars, a truly worthwhile investment.
We are made wise not by the collection of our past, but by the responsibility for our future. -George Bernard Shaw
Fortunately that isn't an issue. You can, today, remotely verify the existence of the laser retroreflector arrays installed on the moon by the Apollo missions.
DNA just wants to be free...
we don't have a JFK to push through it
It wasn't JFK that pushed it through, it was LBJ. Most of Jack's legislation was dead in the Congress, but once Jack died, Lyndon went to work.
Now, Lyndon Johnson wasn't much of a popular guy like Jack. There wasn't an ounce of Camelot in him. But Lyndon had a few advantages, in that, he was a physically big guy, a real bear of a man, and, he was really a lot more connected in with the still important Roosevelt wing of the Democratic Party - much more so than Jack did. He was relentless on the phone, cunning as a lobbyist, could cut deals with the best of them, and if none of that worked, he was a frigging big guy and he could just hover over you and intimidate you.
LBJ was one of the most powerful President, legislatively, that this country has had, until the current President George W Bush. It's a Texas thing. No President between LBJ and W got asserted the executive nearly as much, both utterly dominated their own political parties like no other leader could (Carter comes to mind), and both, well, were very divisive presidents in times of great national consequence.
This is my sig.
What risks are those? Their manned space program is derived from a Soyuz. Their first flight was in 2003. Their third won't be until 2008. They are flying a lunar mission to NASA's lunar orbiter of the early 1960's. The US has an absolute armada of spacecraft scattered around the solar system. I'd say China's space program is pretty moribund in comparison.
an ill wind that blows no good
I know what I'm about to say is anathema to many geeks, but just hear me out before you open the can of napalm. With our limited budget and socio-political 'attention span', I say that research money is much better spent doing research here on earth.
Understanding the true nature of the heavens, getting off of our own planet, and traveling to the stars has been a dream of mankind probably since the beginning. But as we learn more about it, we also learn how inhospitable and impractical is it to make a living out there. The cool factor is off the scale, but the idea that we are going to colonize first our solar system, second the galaxy, seems a little bogus to me.
I don't forsee any self-sustaining extra-terrestrial colony in the near future. The moon is dead; Mars is dead; those places have nothing to eat and nothing to breath. Our closest experiment, Biosphere 2, needed imports of oxygen. The vertebrates and pollinating insects died. Any people living out in space would be totally dependent on resources constantly shipped in from the earth. Anything they might mine and ship back would be extremely unprofitable due to costs of launch and shipping. Can you imagine the cost of blasting rocks off of Mars and shipping them to Earth?
We would see a lot of cool things, learn a lot of great things, do some wonderful experiments, understand the solar system better, etc. etc., but with our limited budget, I think we might have more pressing needs.
Here on earth, we are living in a cornucopia of biodiversity. We are living in the midst of a great library of genes, compiled over the past several million years. Sadly, there is a four-alarm blaze in the library, happening right now, and we are doing very little to stop it. We won't be finding any new medicines or genes on Mars. They are already right here on earth, right under our noses, in the rainforests and deserts.
I know we need to get off this rock if we have any hope for long term survival. But I think, as Biosphere 2 showed, we also need to have an understanding of the biosphere in order to have any long-term prospects in space, especially in the case that convoys from Earth are not available. Mars and the moon will always be out there, quietly waiting for us... We are in the middle of an emergency, and those celestial bodies can wait another few centures.
Computers are useless. They can only give you answers.
-- Pablo Picasso
It's not such a really big step back for two reasons;
First, Apollo took much longer than most people think - some parts of it were started as much as six years before Kennedy's speech, though as basic research programs without specific applications. Apollo (the moon version) was only possible at all because the trade studies had already been largely done on Apollo (the general purpose earth orbiter version) and hardware design and development (not research) was already well underway. This is why the pacing item to the landing was the LM - which had to be started essentially from scratch. (The CSM was already well underway, as were the F1 engines.)
Second, because this time (nominally) we aren't devoting such a large fraction of the federal budget to the project. The Apollo era motto was 'waste anything but time', todays motto is 'waste anything but money'. (Even though they aren't doing too well at that.)