China Plans Space Station By 2020

RedEaredSlider writes "China unveiled plans for its own space station, to be completed by 2020, along with a cargo ship to ferry supplies to and from orbit. The fact that the country is proposing one is a sign of the Chinese government's ambitions in space. China is the third nation to launch its own manned rockets into space, sending its first astronaut into orbit in 2003 aboard the Shenzhou 5 rocket. Since then two other manned missions have been launched."

Comments

Space Race v2.0

[PmanAce]

Hopefully the emergence of the Chinese and others (India?) will fuel a new space race, with bigger ambitions than last time around. Mars maybe?

Re:Space Race v2.0

[rufty_tufty]

I'd like it to have bigger ambitions.
To make a profit from humans in space

Re:Space Race v2.0

[smelch]

We can only hope that something like that will happen. To be honest, we need to start focusing on getting the technology to make using materials from other worlds feasible. With all of the focus on dwindling supplies of rare earth metals and energy sources and economic problems and population problems we should be devoting as much time and effort in to space as we can and pay any costs to get to that point. I'm generally a low taxes kind of guy, but I would definitely support a raise in taxes that was specifically designed to boost the space program. It would have to be genuinely a case of having the budget, then the new budget with higher taxes and the only difference is the amount dedicated to NASA.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[geegel]

Space races bring some footprints and not much else. What I'd want to see is a killer app, some use of space that makes sense from a commercial standpoint. I know that not many agree with me, but when space becomes profitable we'll become a spacefaring race.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[elrous0]

Not likely. The rivalry between the U.S. and China is nothing compared to the rivalry between the U.S. and Soviet Union at the time of the first space race. And the original space race was only prompted by the U.S. realization that the USSR was WAY ahead of us in astronautics. Launching men into space and even a space station just shows that China is on par with the U.S. and Russia, not that it's way ahead. This is likely just another move by China to assert its position as a serious peer, not a move to show superiority or provoke a new space race (which neither they nor we can afford).

Re:Space Race v2.0

[swanzilla]

Communication, navigation, and weather satellites are all commercially viable (and pretty killer.) Space exploration is another pursuit entirely...doing something 'because it is there' to that magnitude is very killer.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[vlm]

What I'd want to see is a killer app, some use of space that makes sense from a commercial standpoint.

Com sats, weather sats, and geolocation sats?

I wonder how the complete GPS program costs compare to the sales tax income from all GPS unit sales. The govt Might be running a profit there...

Re:Space Race v2.0

[obergfellja]

I would like bigger ambitions, than again, at some point, they are too big to look real. Reference: Pamela Anderson

Re:Space Race v2.0

[eggnoglatte]

That is only near-earth, unmanned space flight. What is the commercial motive for a manned mission to another planetary body (even if it is as close as the moon)?

Re:Space Race v2.0

[moonbender]

How much did the GPS program cost? I haven't been able to find any figures. The European GPS system will cost roughly 7.5 billion EUR, so about 11 billion USD. Yikes, those are big numbers! I think it's reasonable to assume GPS was a lot more expensive, so far: they had to do way more R+D, the technology used was more expensive in the past, they launched more than twice as many satellites, etc. If we're using the expenses for Galileo as a lower bound, you'd end up with about 35 USD per US resident. Seems unlikely that the tax from domestic sales of GPS receivers adds up to that much.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[divisionbyzero]

Hopefully the emergence of the Chinese and others (India?) will fuel a new space race, with bigger ambitions than last time around. Mars maybe?

God, I hope not. I hope we stay on the sidelines and watch the Chinese flush billions of dollars down the toilet to do what we've already done.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[mangu]

the original space race was only prompted by the U.S. realization that the USSR was WAY ahead of us in astronautics

That was the perception at the time, but it was probably not correct. There was the missile gap that turned out to be just a political ploy. Also, the US had plans to launch a satellite at least a year before the Soviets launched the first Sputnik, but president Eisenhower didn't approve it.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Abstrackt]

the original space race was only prompted by the U.S. realization that the USSR was WAY ahead of us in astronautics

Also, the US had plans to launch a satellite at least a year before the Soviets launched the first Sputnik, but president Eisenhower didn't approve it.

People remember what you did a lot better than what you could have done. Based on the link you provided, I get the impression the Eisenhower administration didn't want to escalate the cold war by launching what could be interpreted as a military missile.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[DerekLyons]

Yes, that's *exactly* what we need - another expensive and pointless race to prove who has the biggest penile substitute.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[SuricouRaven]

How? There simply isn't that much to do up there. There are a few manufacturing advantages (You can grow absolutly perfect silicon crystals - might up the yield on semicondunctor manufacture), but not enough to justify the huge expense of getting things up and down. There are only enough idle rich to support a very small tourist industry. The only way you're going to see a profit on human space travel is some revolutionary new technology to bring the price down. That's why public and academic funding is so important. Do it for science!

Re:Space Race v2.0

[SuricouRaven]

That, and do you really want to share a planet with the rest of humanity? Because they really don't make good neighbours.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[SuricouRaven]

Plus you can use them as a deniable weapons system. Nothing but a power supply in peacetime, but come war it's a matter of minutes to retarget and refocus the beams.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[SuricouRaven]

Somewhere out there is a giant hunk of rock, and it's heading our way.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Anonymous Coward]

The other way to potentially see profit there is if rare metals that are useful catalysts in manufacturing are found in abundance on the metallic asteroids. Every reason to expect platinum rich asteroids to be out there, for example. There exist technologies even today that we are unable to mass produce due to the rarity of platinum.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[whereiswaldo]

Instead of looking at it as a challenge to be there first, start bidding on components to build their space station. A good way to bring money back into our Western pockets, no? That's assuming they need our technology.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[gnick]

If fusion plants became the energy source of choice, a tritium mine may be financially solid. Of course, not many countries are currently powering their cities with large fusion plants as of yet. Still have some kinks to work out.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Ol Biscuitbarrel]

Global Positioning System (GPS), a satellite-based navigation system developed by the U.S. Department of Defense, provides a consistent and accurate method of simplifying navigation. It provides flexibility of positioning for surveying, navigation and Geographic Information System (GIS) data capture. With the increasing use of mobile location technologies in automotive and consumer applications, it is expected that mobile location technologies market will grow at a CAGR of about 20% to cross US$ 70 Billion by 2013, says “World GPS Market Forecast to 2013”, a new market research report by RNCOS.

World GPS Market Forecast to 2013 by RNCOS in Global, Global Positioning Systems, Satellites & Space

Re:Space Race v2.0

[elrous0]

If only "could have," "might have," and "should have" counted instead of "did."

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Richard_at_work]

What Wikipedia doesn't reveal is that Redstone was known to be unreliable at the time (the shift to the Mercury programme saw a huge number of changes to the Redstone rocket to improve reliability and safety). Any satellite shot using the pre-Mercury booster would have been a crap shoot with the big money on a failure.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[LifesABeach]

Given the overall Chinese Aviation Creativity, it might kind of cool to see Sky Lab 2.0

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Snarky McButtface]

There will not be much to do up there until we need the resources, particularly iron. When we finally get to the point where humanity wants more resources than are available on the planet, there will finally be some real breakthroughs in space travel.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[slick7]

That is only near-earth, unmanned space flight. What is the commercial motive for a manned mission to another planetary body (even if it is as close as the moon)?

Fuel, high tech products that would benefit from available vacuum, more unpolluted land to trash, land grab without displacing an indigenous people, a test bed for a truly free or totally controlled population, a new dumping ground for Earth's trash or unwanted people. the ultimate high level maximum security prison/Gitmo, Biodome 3.0, etc etc so forth and so on.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[CharlieHedlin]

If handheld GPS costs $100 and in vehicle navigation costs $2500, it is possible. at 6.5% (sales tax on vehicles, goes to the state, not fed) a family of 4 with one of each has paid $156 is sales taxes alone on stuff that wouldn't exist otherwise. That beats the $35 / resident, but barely.

If you count income taxes on that money it would be over $400, but that money likely would have been spent on something else if the GPS systems weren't there.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[moonbender]

In-vehicle navigation costs 2500 USD? That's crazy! Isn't is essentially the same thing as a standalone GPS system? I guess car owners are just happy being fleeced.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[bev_tech_rob]

Space won't have a killer app until science hurries up and invents FTL travel.......if that is even possible.....(I hope it is!!)

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Lanteran]

Not many countries are currently powering their cities with large fusion plants? Which ones are?

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

I'll be impressed when the Chinese do a manned in-orbit rendezvous, essentially reproducing the efforts of Gemini 8. Yes, I admit that only NASA and the Russian Space Agency are the only people who have attempted this effort, but I would think it is sort of essential if you are planning on some sort of space station.

Mars? I'm setting my sights a bit lower to the Earth first. The Chinese really aren't all that advanced, and it is going to take a whole lot more to impress me first. Spaceflight is hard, and the Chinese don't have the operational tempo necessary to make it to the Moon, much less Mars.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[rahvin112]

The moon is rather rich in the nice expensive and rare minerals such as Platinum, Palladium and Iridium. At a price of $1800 an ounce for Platinum that could be quite lucrative. It's also a material with massive industrial uses that people don't use because of it's cost. Bring the cost down and you will see it used a lot more in industry. Lunar miners also wouldn't need to worry about pesky environmental rules, they have easy solar power access with high power output and could probably even refine with solar furnaces.

I expect that Lunar mining will occur in my lifetime and probably before I retire in 2033. There are simply far to many valuable minerals near the surface and easily accessible. The beauty is that the moons gravity is so low that once you get the equipment up and running producing and delivering the product to the earth could be done quite cheaply as long as you build the base with proper water processing facilities negating the need to deliver water. Once you are there you can mine not only the most valuable minerals but some of the more common but plentiful surface minerals that are difficult to mine on the earth. And as others have noted you would be in a position to mine all that helium3 if it's ever needed.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[gnick]

I said "not many". Actually I can count the number on one hand. Without even using any fingers. It was just a soft attempt at light humor.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[lennier]

Fuel

(for spacecraft), which is only useful if you already have somewhere in space to go to. If you're looking for fuel on earth, then bringing it down the well from space would add enormously to the cost.

So fuel, in itself, is not a viable reason to go to space. It's a subsidary industry once you already have a reason.

vacuum

Yes, space has a lot of hard vacuum. It's rather its defining feature. But how many compelling industrial uses for hard vacuum are there? And is it cheaper to lift payload to orbit and down again on giant cans of explosive, or to install some vacuum pumps in a mineshaft?

more unpolluted land to trash

If by 'land' you mean 'metallic rock and gas', certainly. But not equivalent to the New World, unless you have an urgent need for bulk mega-industrial quantities of aluminium oxide, pig-iron, sulphur and hydrogen, but no urgent need to drink or breathe in the foreseeable future.

What industries would that make sense for?

without displacing an indigenous people

Certainly the lack of indigenous lifeforms, after the vacuum, is the second most important characteristic of space. It's all about the lack of stuff.

a test bed for a truly free or totally controlled population

Not really 'free' if you're going to have to ship even your oxygen up from Earth at millions of dollars per launch. Very very controlled, yes. But much more expensive than building a dome in a salt mine or a base in Antarctica.

a new dumping ground for Earth's trash or unwanted people. the ultimate high level maximum security prison/Gitmo

Good grief, no. If you have people you despise so much you don't even want them on Earth, you're going to give them millions of dollars of astronaut training apiece and ship them up on expensive rockets they can sabotage and turn into weapons of mass destruction - all at taxpayer expense? In what world does that even begin to make sense?

A tyrannical government in that position would just execute its undesirables for the cost of one bullet each, and recycle the organs. It's only in squeamish family-friendly TV sci-fi that they 'ship them to space'.

so forth and so on.

Still waiting for even one good use case for space to 'so forth' from.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

If you can find a way to profitably ship finished "investment grade" platinum bars from the Moon to the Earth for less than $1800 per ounce, perhaps you have a point. That is the real trick, isn't it? That is assuming the bars are simply sitting on the surface of the Moon already refined, assayed, and prepared for shipment with no other costs involved in their preparation to get them to that point (which takes some effort). Add on top of that the expense of shipping mining equipment to the Moon that presumably will have to be built on the Earth and that cost will somehow have to be amortized by the activities on the Moon, and even platinum doesn't seem to work out very well unless you can ship stuff to LEO for about $10/kg. Well, maybe $50/kg if you are pushing it.

Helium-3 is a better case, as it is currently purchased and sold for $4000 per gram, or about $100,000 per ounce. The problem with He-3 is that the market at the moment is so small that any significant quantities of the stuff would drive the price down. In small quantities (something an astronaut could hand-carry for a return trip from the Moon) perhaps you could set up a pilot project just to test extraction techniques and make some sort of celebration of the fact that you have mined something valuable that would be difficult to do on the Earth, but that is a bit of a stretch to suggest a profitable mining effort could still happen on the Moon for an extended period of time.

About the only thing I've seen suggested on the Moon that would have value and is being legitimately suggested for a lunar mining operation is ordinary water. For shipment to the Earth, that is about the most cruel joke I could imagine, as I can get a ton of that stuff delivered to my kitchen for just a few dollars using extraction methods already common here on the Earth. As something useful for deep space exploration, the business case is much better but even that requires an infrastructure in space that doesn't exist yet and won't cheaply be put together either. Yes, I'm aware that a private mining group has proposed the idea of doing lunar resource extraction.... but at the moment that is pure vaporware to me until they actually get equipment into space for at least a pilot project.

This certainly isn't going to be a reason for China to get to the Moon, and their launch costs are currently insanely high.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[tehcyder]

You don't bring the raw materials up into space (that's just stupid, as you point out). You mine them in space, and drop them down.

It's a bit more complicated than chucking the lead off a church roof onto the ground below.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Solensean]

I'm wondering what would happen if we were to mine the moon enough so that there's a significant mass transfered from there to here.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[tehcyder]

a new dumping ground for Earth's trash or unwanted people. the ultimate high level maximum security prison/Gitmo

Good grief, no. If you have people you despise so much you don't even want them on Earth, you're going to give them millions of dollars of astronaut training apiece and ship them up on expensive rockets they can sabotage and turn into weapons of mass destruction - all at taxpayer expense? In what world does that even begin to make sense? A tyrannical government in that position would just execute its undesirables for the cost of one bullet each, and recycle the organs. It's only in squeamish family-friendly TV sci-fi that they 'ship them to space'.

I think the analogy you want is when we English shipped undesirables off to Australia. We didn't train them to be sailors, we didn't worry overmuch about their comfort and safety on the way, and ideally we got some "work" (slave labour) out of them at the other end. The ships were going there anyway to trade, we didn't charter special luxury liners for them.

NB I'm not saying it was a good thing.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

In-vehicle equipment has to survive a fairly hostile environment, including having to deal with a rather nasty electrical system that is primarily designed for one purpose: to operate spark plugs keeping an engine running. If you want to talk about line noise, I can't imagine anything harder to work around than the electrical system of an automobile.

Add on top of that the vibrations coming through the chassis, the sometimes extreme accelerations from within the automobile and then the wide range of expected operating temperatures (below freezing to well over 150 degrees Fahrenheit.... close to 100 Celsius). Essentially this is military grade electronics you are talking about for almost any automotive electrical device, so it shouldn't be too surprising that you are paying a premium for that kind of performance. That it costs $2500 is really a bargain. I promise that "standalone GPS system" would fall to pieces if mounted inside of a typical automobile for any length of time.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

Yeah, right. A microwave transmitter is going to be re-focused and re-tuned "in a matter of minutes" to become a weapon of some sort?

I'm not going to deny that such a device could be put to military purposes, but by far and away its most practical military purpose would be to act as a mobile power supply for advancing land forces. A divisional headquarters could throw up an antenna array in less than a day and could have that relocated in about the same length of time saving the need to set up a diesel generator truck.... and most importantly saving the need for a regular re-supply logistics to bring that fuel up to the HQ. If there are going to be fancy weapons tapping into that power supply, those are going to be on the ground and a part of that headquarters such as a rail gun or "laser turrets" that can tap into a high quality power supply.

That would make the power sat a military target in space, but its use as an actual weapon is rather dubious at best.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[tehcyder]

If only "could have," "might have," and "should have" counted instead of "did."

As my gran used to say "if ifs and ans were pots and pans, there'd be no need for tinkers".

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

I'm not going to be all that critical of military planners in America during the 1950's, as it was difficult or even impossible to really know what the Soviet Union was doing in terms of missile technology during the era except in hindsight using records that only now exist. I consider what happened there to be mostly a gut reaction to propaganda that the USSR was putting out, where "officially" the missile numbers were inflated for public consumption, but it was hard for military planners in America to dismiss the numbers as being too high.

It wasn't until reconnaissance satellites became common with skilled interpreters able to pick out real missiles from the fake ones that the actual numbers to be worried about could be planned for. By that time, the money spent on building up the American missile response had already taken place and the Soviet Union was mostly falling apart anyway as it eventually did.

Being an armchair quarterback for these events is all too easy unless you were actually there having to make these decisions.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

The real issue facing Eisenhower was the legal interpretation of what happened when a satellite flew over a country without permission. What he was hoping for (and what has become standard international practice) is that national territories don't apply to locations outside of the atmosphere.

Had America launched the first satellite, it is very likely that the USSR would have demanded the vehicle avoid "Soviet airspace" and asserted sovereignty to all of the space above their country. By permitting the first satellite to be a Soviet one, it established the precedence by flying over America so the opposite could also happen. That was a specific goal. That Yuri Gagarin became the first person into space was also something not really an accident for many of the same reaons, even though Alan Sheppard might have enjoyed that distinction.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[SuricouRaven]

Why not? It's got to have gyros on board to aim the thing anyway. All you've got to do is turn it off, reorientate and turn on. I wasn't thinking of a building-incinerating death ray, just something that would cause substations and telephone exchanges to fail and so could be used to disrupt communications. Not a lot of good against insurgents, but very useful in a conventional country-v-country war. All the economic disruption of bombing a capital city, with none of the direct casualties.

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Teancum]

Te reason it won't work as a weapon directly is a matter of physics. Transmitters have to be designed and antennas shaped into certain patterns to maximize the power needed for transmitting at a given frequency. For applications in space in particular, a space solar power satellite would require the antennas to be working at frequencies that normally are "harmless" for people and things on the ground. You can't have your cake and eat it too for these applications.

Maybe, and this is a huge maybe, the evil mastermind "Doctor No" has put onto the power satellite some additional module that includes the evil death ray machine that can do all of the damage you are talking about where it diverts the power to this death ray module from the regular power transmitter.. That is additional cost and otherwise dead mass for most of its operational lifetime. That is now how you design spacecraft, and it would also be caught by anybody watching the development of these devices. Turning something like a power sat into a weapon would make it a military target, which would also be incredibly easy to destroy and impossible to defend. Its use in this fashion would also be causus belli for nuclear warfare and total war. Who would be that stupid when other easier ways to wipe out a country like America would also be available?

Re:Space Race v2.0

[Phoghat]

To make a profit from humans

Isn't this what the Chinese are good at already?

Captain Henny Youngman says

[paiute]

I bet the orbit will take an hour - so they'll be back around as soon as you are hungry again.

The size is irrelevant

[damburger]

Not sure why every news source is banging on about the station being low mass; once the principle of on-orbit assembly is mastered the only real limits to mass are how many modules you choose to launch, and how much fuel you need for a reboost. Getting from 60-tonne station to 400-tonne station is a far smaller step than getting from nothing to a multi-modular station.

The fact China isn't going to build a very large station may indicate firm intentions to go to the Moon. If they are just using this to practice techniques for longer range exploration, there isn't much point making it huge.

Re:The size is irrelevant

[interkin3tic]

I didn't understand that about orbits, modules, or fuel, and I am ambivalent about the moon or mars, but I like -something- about your post.

Re:The size is irrelevant

[camperdave]

The ISS loses 2km of altitude per month due to atmospheric drag. It needs periodic boosts to keep it in orbit (this used to be done by the shuttle). The rate of drag is related to the mass of the station as well as its cross sectional area. The lighter the station, the quicker its orbit will decay (consider a ping pong ball vs a golf ball. They're about the same size, but drag will affect a ping pong ball more) . On the plus side, however, it will require less propellant to boost it back into its proper orbit.

Re:QC anyone?

[ColdWetDog]

With the what's been in the news in the past few years about Chinese manufactoring I would personally like to see some kind of oversight comittee on this project if they're going to be allowed to put a thousand pounds of "Grade A Chinese Steel" a few hundred miles above my head.

Orbital Mechanics. Newton's got you covered. Now, calm down.

Re:Knock-offs

[v1]

But it's going to cost them a lot more to get it into orbit, y'know, with all the lead in everything...

Re:Knock-offs

[$RANDOMLUSER]

That's easy to fix, just don't let US-taught MBAs from WalMart hammer them over the head for price.

Planning is not doing..

[pablo_max]

Just because China is planning to planning to build something does not mean they will. Remember we we planned to build that super mega particle smasher in Texas? I don't recall that plan working out.
Remember when the US planned to have colonies on the moon by now?
Remember when I planned to marry a super model when I was a teenager? I am sure you can guess how that worked out.

That aside, I hope they do it. It seems the world will only move forward with competition from an "evil" empire.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[damburger]

This is very true, but doesn't actually apply here. This space station is part of Project 921, which China has been working on since 1992.

The schedule has slipped by a year or two, but what they are doing now is pretty what they planned to be doing in the early 90s.

The US on the other hand has gotten into the habit of switching programs every 18 months or so. This is unlikely to change with a 'new space race' because the Chinese threat to US space dominance is boiling-frog slow, and the US public are decidedly lukewarm regarding such things these days - see the total non-response to Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment.

So my money is on the Chinese, as they are showing an ability to commit to long term projects in space. Guess its easier to stay the course when your leadership is totally unaccountable to anybody.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[CohibaVancouver]

Just because China is planning to planning to build something does not mean they will

Sure, but China's track record on executing on promised mega-projects is pretty good.

Men in orbit? Check.
High-speed Rail? Check.
Three-gorges dam? Check.
Hangzhou Bay Bridge? Check.

We could go on and on...

Meanwhile, all the USA seems able to produce any more is Obama's birth certificate.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[ljgshkg]

If a catching-up-country says they're going to do it, they're much more likely going to do it than the leading-country, which spent all their resources to support their army everywhere in the world.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[damburger]

That last comment is not unrelated. I would be interested in seeing the amount of advertising money made by right-wing hacks stirring up the birther movement etc. to the annual budget of NASA.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[medcalf]

Speaking of non-sequiturs.... Does this mean we should resurrect the old arguments comparting the cost of Apollo to the amount of money spent on makeup in the same period?

Re:Planning is not doing..

[vlm]

The US on the other hand has gotten into the habit of switching programs every 18 months or so. This is unlikely to change with a 'new space race' because the Chinese threat to US space dominance is boiling-frog slow, and the US public are decidedly lukewarm regarding such things these days - see the total non-response to Obama's "Sputnik Moment" comment.

No problem, we'll buy our lead and melamine laced Chinese made space station from Walmart.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[geekoid]

I think the point of the last statement is that people are more concerned with stupid shit, following their tea party masters, and FUD then any real progress. People completely emotionally tied up into some idealogical belief and refusing to look at and actually facts or think reasonably about anything thats counter to the tight held ignorant crap.

remember kids: If some counters you with actual facts and demands accountability in what you say, they are a no good liberal.

The polarization in this country will be the end of this country .

Re:Planning is not doing..

[alex67500]

Meanwhile, all the USA seems able to produce any more is Obama's birth certificate.

Sounds to me like that's all the Americans can afford.

Meanwhile the Chinese government decide they will stop spending its large surplus on American debt and start funding their own space program. Sounds sensible to me. I only wish any country in Europe could afford that...

Re:Planning is not doing..

[TheRaven64]

There was a comparison that I read recently that I found quite sobering. The total number of man-hours spent creating Wikipedia is approximately the same as the amount spent in the US watching television advertising. In one weekend.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[mangu]

Does this mean we should resurrect the old arguments comparing the cost of Apollo to the amount of money spent on makeup in the same period?

OK, if you want it, here it is: according to Wikipedia, the total cos of building, launching and operating the International Space Station for 30 years is US$160 billion, and the total turnover of the worldwide cosmetics industry was US$170 billion in 2006.

 

Re:Planning is not doing..

[ShavedOrangutan]

Would you consider it "stupid shit" if it were President Bush whose eligibility was in question?

Re:Planning is not doing..

[Binestar]

YES. The facts of this is that this information isn't new. The birth announcements have been reported on, the copy of the birth certificate was provided. The person in Hawaii who's job it is to keep track of the birth announcements said that she personally saw the original and in accordance to Hawaii LAW, she could say that she saw it and it proves he was born in hawaii, but she doesn't have the ability to give out copies or show it to anyone except Obama or Obama's appointed representative. This is debunked BS that has been debunked for YEARS.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[ShavedOrangutan]

I had to produce a birth certificate for my job, why shouldn't the president? I don't really care about a file clerk in Hawaii. The fact that President Obama kept this secret for so long certainly made me suspicious that he had something to hide. Then there's the fact that a "Constitutional Law Professor" would to blatantly brush off the U.S. Constitution's requirement that the president be a natural born citizen.

Anyways, as I understood it, the same questions existed regarding Mccain's citizenship status. If he'd won, the "Birthers" would be liberal democrats and it would be totally acceptable to question his birth certificate.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[Binestar]

But in both cases you are wrong. The president's "short" form birth certificate was provided. According to Hawaii Law both short and long form birth certificates are valid for any request of birth certificate. So if you think the Hawaii law is incorrect or interpreted incorrectly, show how. But don't say he didn't provide his birth certificate. He did. Hawaii did as well.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[guruevi]

But China is not held back by politicians that only want to do good for THEIR voters or the people that they get bribed from. They have less red tape to go through when doing stuff - they just use the debt we own to improve their country and they do it well. They're basically the US right after the Depression, they get access to unlimited funds to build stuff which in turn generates jobs and a flourishing economy because the value of their country goes up.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[ShavedOrangutan]

I had to look up the difference between the two documents. It seems if you request a birth certificate from Hawaii, they send you a short form. Which is what they did in 2007. The arguments that came up centered around it possibly being a fake, which sounds like a stretch. So it does sound like a vast right wing conspiracy, and I have to be reminded that the crooks are on both sides of the isle.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[murdocj]

He did NOT "keep it secret". When this all started Obama produced a "Certificate of Live Birth" which is, guess what,

        A BIRTH CERTIFICATE

I happened to be cleaning out my safety deposit box recently, glanced at MY birth certificate, and right at the top, it said "Certificate of Live Birth". By the "logic" of the esteemed leaders of Birthers (luminaries like Donald Trump), that means I was born in Kenya. In fact, I'm sure millions of Americans have that same type document as their birth certificate. I guess we're all from Kenya.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[Eravnrekaree]

I am pretty sure they will. Its China, not the US. There is one thing to say about their authoritarian government, when they want it done, they get it done. The US projects were derailed by all of the political haggling in the US. At times the divided nature of US politics just kills any progress at all. And extreme budget cutting to appease an ignorant, joe sixpack population who does not understand complex dynamics of a country adn buys into Republican/corporatist/christian reality distortion. They are leaving in ther own deluded reality. Everything is upside down for them. They asre the most antipatriotic people but they think they are patriotic. They are anti-patriotic in opposing taxes and the countries health care and public infrastructure efforts, letting the country fall into the hands of corporations ready to offshore the US to foreign control. They at the same time support the very things that are bankrupting the country, the endless wars and are basically destroying us in all ways by draining our resources to these useless wild goose hunts. Its ironic that Republicans worship the troops and think they are hereos when they are enablers bankrupting this country and causing the country to collapse as resoruces are diverted away from our science and infrastructure development into these black hole wars.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[Eravnrekaree]

Agreeed. The chinese will get the space stations done. It is quite symbolic that the US due to budget cuts may bring down the ISS, just as China is putting up theres. China in all ways is really the industrial superpower today and they certainly have the resources now. Its not the USA, and they dont have Republican asswipes to deal with. The US is a has been superpower. The writing is on the wall, the US has become a deindustrialised corpse which is becoming somethin g that exports little else than endless wars and bombs. The US has very little that the rest of the world really wants or needs anymore. This is due to the Republican conservative ideology which continues to attack the US middle class and give more tax breaks to the wealthy who offshore their jobs. Much of the good things about the US were done with altruistic systems often involving government science research funding. With Corporations reckless greed the US is mainly becoming a hollowed out consumer. Americans are kept in a state of idiotic reality distortion by constant right wing propoganda. Corporations are basically traitors who continue to sell out the US, they elect Republicans who bankrupt the country with wars, and they offshore jobs and rake in billions of profits, and keep tax rates on these rich scum low, the same wealthy elites who are basically offshoring the US economy and destroying our middle class. If the US wanted to be successful again it would raise taxes on t he rich and protect education, social security and implement universal health care, all pro middle class things. The US middle class are the those who keep things running and develop new technologies, not some wealthy elite sitting on a yacht.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[mywhitewolf]

That is a whole lot less than i thought. significantly less than the defense budget of most countries at least. (over 30 years, 5.6billion a year.)

Re:Planning is not doing..

[mywhitewolf]

Unfortunately, as your statement suggests that America isn't the be all and end all, you shall get moderated "troll".

i don't think many Americans can even comprehend whats happening to their country. when china becomes the authority i just hope their international policy is a lot "friendlier" than the American one.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[khallow]

While your argument is weakened by the fact that you probably wouldn't hear of projects which would be both promised and not delivered, it's worth looking at who is doing the promising. China space has a notorious problem with officials making all sorts of claims, promises, etc about space exploration and the like without any serious agreement from the Chinese government.

Here, we have what appears to be an official government agency (not just officials yucking it up) making the announcement. And it fits with known Chinese ambitions (they have previously announced a schedule that has a prototype space station launched around now and a more serious one launched later). Finally, a 60 ton station composed of three modules, the heaviest of which is 20-22 tonnes is consistent with Chinese future launch capabilities (once they get the CZ-5 flying from Hainan).

I think they will try. But it's riskier than these other projects you mention. With high speed rail or whatever, they just have to spend the money, exert the workforce, and presto, they have accomplished what they intend. There's no chance that the entire high speed rail project will have to be redone because of a small but fatal error.

With the space station, there are a number of places where things can fail, losing whatever parts of the project are currently up there. It remains to be seen whether the upper leadership of China can handle that sort of high profile risk in the long term.

Re:Planning is not doing..

[lennier]

Meanwhile, all the USA seems able to produce any more is Obama's birth certificate.

It took him that long to do it? Sheesh. I assumed he had to show it to someone way back when he got the Democratic nomination. How hard would it have been to go 'sure, here' four years ago?

Re:Planning is not doing..

[DerekLyons]

But China is not held back by politicians that only want to do good for THEIR voters or the people that they get bribed from.

No, they're held back by politicians who only want to do good for their supporters and those who bribe the, or the people they support or who they bribe. Seriously, what are you smoking that makes you think politicians are any different anywhere - especially in a Communist system where hewing the party line, and personal power/patronage politics dominates?

Re:Planning is not doing..

[murdocj]

Ironically today's Slashdot story is about how China is now investigating the construction of the high-speed rail system due to shoddy construction.

This idea that the Chinese have some brilliant planned society reminds me of the famous "I have seen the future and it works" remark. We all know how that turned out.

A very slow race

[mangu]

China first launched an astronaut in orbit eight years ago.

Seven years after the US launched its first astronaut in orbit, they had sent people to the moon.

Re:A very slow race

[IrquiM]

The incentive and willingness to spend huge amount of money on sending people to the moon, "just to be the first" is gone, and it looks like "just because you can" isn't enough either. Current US hasn't even managed to do what their fathers did over 30 years ago yet - they're even flying with over 30 year old hardware designs. Comparing NASA of the 60s with current China is just stupid.

Re:A very slow race

[gstoddart]

The incentive and willingness to spend huge amount of money on sending people to the moon, "just to be the first" is gone,

I don't think people went to the moon "just to be the first".

I seem to recall that one of the motivating factors of the space race was not falling behind the Soviets. Since rocket technology and missile technology are largely the same thing ... there was a perception that America could be losing a military advantage in not pursuing space technology.

Since the end of the Cold War, it doesn't seem to be perceived with as much importance. Tough to say if a China space station might impel the US back to caring about this or not.

I know a lot of us would like to see space being pursued a little more, but who knows what will happen. Space is a costly place to go.

Re:A very slow race

[jandersen]

Seven years after the US launched its first astronaut in orbit, they had sent people to the moon.

... in a thimble made of tin-foil. It still makes shiver, when I comtemplate how rudimentary the Apollo missions were in many ways. It was a great technical achievement, but it was dwarfed by the monumental bravery of the men that went up there. Unfortunately it was never meant to more than a bit of dick-waving - "We do it not because it is easy, but because it is hard", to paraphrase mr Kennedy.

The Chinese take it more seriously - they may not be blind to the fact that it makes the ordinary Chinese feel good, but they want to achieve something more sustainable; they don't want to waste lives and resources on a boast. So they do it at a sensible pace.

Re:A very slow race

[Daniel Dvorkin]

China first launched an astronaut in orbit eight years ago.

Seven years after the US launched its first astronaut in orbit, they had sent people to the moon.

And seven years after that, we were stuck back in low Earth orbit, where we've been ever since. Actually we're about to lose that capability too. I have the strong feeling that when China does eventually get to the Moon, they'll do so in way that won't leave them unable to return seven (or forty-two!) years later.

Re:A very slow race

[PFI_Optix]

Wow. Some people REALLY can't recognize a joke when they see one.

Re:A very slow race

[cusco]

thimble made of tin-foil

Indeed. An electrician working inside the LM dropped a screwdriver, which landed point-first. Punched a hole in the floor. Really.

Re:A very slow race

[torgis]

... in a thimble made of tin-foil. It still makes shiver, when I comtemplate how rudimentary the Apollo missions were in many ways. It was a great technical achievement, but it was dwarfed by the monumental bravery of the men that went up there.

Indeed. If you've ever been to a space museum where they have actual or replicas of the capsules used in this era, you'd understand. I get claustrophobic just standing outside of one. I could not for the life of me imagine being packed inside and shot across 250,000 miles of nothingness and back. That's a type of bravery I just don't possess. But I do have a healthy respect and gratitude for those that do. Those guys had balls of solid rock.

Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[jandrese]

9 years to go from "we put a few guys in orbit" to "fully manned and fully operational space station" is a staggeringly optimistic schedule. If China is able to pull it off, I will tip my hat to them.

I wonder if they'll also be just as fast in discovering that manned space stations are generally a waste of time and money?

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[Wyatt Earp]

The US went from a few guys in orbit to a small space station in 9 years. So did the Soviets.

You don't remember Skylab and the Salyuts?

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[geekoid]

No it's not. If the China government says they want it, it is completely achievable. Now, you add elected officials, scientifically illiterate people making key the decisions, stupid libertarian think the private sector can do it, and people who seem to be general angry at all progress, and then no, 9 years is not possible.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[IrquiM]

Who cares if it's militarised or not as long as they don't use it? People kill people, not laser weapons in space!

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[jandrese]

Technically 10 years and 12 years from Gagarin to Salyut 1 and Skylab respectively. Those were pretty optimistic schedules too, and those guys on Salyut 1 didn't survive.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[jgtg32a]

NASA put a man on the moon 8 years after putting one in orbit.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[Wyatt Earp]

Yea, like the PRC's schedule will stick.

Skylab was originally Manned Orbital Lab and was going to be up right after Gemini, or during late Gemini in what, 66 or 67? Then it slipped and slipped and slipped.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[WrongMonkey]

But did they have a space station? In a lot of ways, having a permanent space station is a harder task that putting someone on the moon.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[gad_zuki!]

Skylab 1973. 4 years after the moon landing.

I really dont think its a tougher task. Its just throwing junk into LEO and calling it a day. A flight to the moon is a whole different ballgame.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[Richard_at_work]

The question shouldn't be one of how quickly it was done, but rather how cost effectively was it done and how long was the technology viable for? The US has consistently thrown money at space projects that are short term, expensive jaunts and called them successes.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[cusco]

Ten and twelve years spent mostly doing basic research, inventing new materials and manufacturing processes, and engineering starting at zero. The Chinese have half a century of other people's research and experience to draw on, they're not going to reinvent the wheel. If they (or we, or the Russians, or the ESA) really wanted to the launch date could be moved up by years. They're going to take nine years because that's what they figure it will take to do it right the first time without spending ridiculous amounts of resources in the process.

Re:Wow, that's an ambitious schedule

[lennier]

"fully manned and fully operational space station"

Your friends at Tranquility Base are walking into a trap. An entire legion of my best iPod assembly line technicians await them.

Chinese GDP

[Slur]

Look for a video called "China's Ghost Towns" to see how China is inflating their GDP by building cities that no one can afford to live in. It's freaky to see all these empty supermalls and highrise apartment buildings. When China's bubble explodes it's going to be a whole new disaster for the world economy.

Re:Chinese GDP

[geekoid]

Bubble? do you know how China manages their money?

Only in America can someone look at a country that is actually thinking forward and say it's a bubble.

Re:Chinese GDP

[Anonymous Coward]

The US has a lot of work to do its own economy, so this isn't meant to downplay anything about that. It's also not meant as anything negative about China--bubbles happen everywhere.

Having said that...

The idea of a China bubble isn't too far-fetched, and is on the radar of a lot of economists. It's not just about China either, but all of the emerging-economy nations that have seen recent rapid growth.

E.g., http://www.economist.com/node/18560195

Re:Chinese GDP

[alex67500]

Yep, if the Chinese government have 400B USD leftover at the end of the year and they're tired of buying everyone else's debt, I see no wrong in building luxurious council estates. It's their money, they can spend it as they see fit (and that includes a space station and a Mars mission).

It's the People Republic of China. Wether we judge it to be right or wrong, they do it with what they think is their people's best interest at heart.

Re:Chinese GDP

[cavreader]

Chinas sole advantage in the global economy was their low labor costs which let them undercut other countries in the export arena. They are not exactly known for new innovations or quality workmanship. However their labor costs are rising along with inflation which increase the price of their exports. They went from reportiing a huge trade surplus to reporting a negative surplus in the first quarter of this year. Economies fluctuate, rapid growth can sometimes create more problems than a stagnant economy. Especially an economy totally controlled by the state where workers start realizing they have been underpaid and treated almost like slaves.

Re:Chinese GDP

[DynamoJoe]

I'd add another advantage they "enjoy": lax environmental regulations and oversight.

Re:Chinese GDP

[DigiShaman]

Geekoid, you are seriously ignorant and obstinate with regards to knowing what's brewing in China. Shanghai has such a nasty real estate bubble brewing, it makes ours in the US pale in comparison. It's large enough to throw the entire world into a great world-wide depression (yes, worse than it is now) via domino effect of defaulting debts. It was only a month ago that people are become more optimistic that it's manageable than back in August. But this situation is definitely worth watching closely.

Just google china real estate bubble and read for yourself.

Re:Chinese GDP

[damburger]

I googled it. Nice to learn something new each day. However, from what I read the bubble isn't the kind of threat it is in western countries.

In a western democracy, the response to a bubble is usually to keep feeding it, claim you are an economic genius for providing so much growth, and pray to god it bursts on the next guys watch, where you can tut about reckless mismanagement from the opposition side.

China, on the other hand, doesn't have have anybody they can hand a ticking timebomb of an economy over to. They are in it for the long haul, they know it, and they are willing to interrupt a bubble before it blows up in their faces. This at least gives them a *possibility* of a soft landing.

Re:Chinese GDP

[kesuki]

not new. 'if you build it they will come' the thought that you can get people to live in cities simply by building them is an old thought.

when hoover dam was built they diverted the water made a temporary river and lake formed then a city was built (only the roads though not whole empty cities)

i am sure the pattern of doing this is old, it even made into Robert Jordan's wheel of time where a half built city was just left there empty.

Re:Chinese GDP

[DigiShaman]

China, on the other hand, doesn't have have anybody they can hand a ticking timebomb of an economy over to. They are in it for the long haul, they know it, and they are willing to interrupt a bubble before it blows up in their faces

No, not really. What you say about western politics is true between parties. They play the game of hot-potato quite a bit. In China however, it's not about party politics for obvious reasons (though I'm sure there's a lot of in-fighting among CCP members) in so much as an US vs THEM mentality. US = CCP members while THEM = civilians. Essentially what you have is a lot of corruption at the individual level. As long as the members are fat n' happy with a unified goal of enriching themselves, they will have stability. But once the apple cart gets shaky, the whole system will fall apart. Everything from the raiding of banks to seizer of property at an unprecedented scale would happen.

If there's one thing the world values as much as their money, is a nation stable enough to protect their investments. China is *not* one of those nations.

Re:Chinese GDP

[sdguero]

Seeing first hand what happened in Thailand during the late 1990s after a brief economic boom, I understand what the original poster is saying. There are literally hundreds of rusting hulks structures just east of Bangkok, along an abandoned double decker highway project that has remained half finished for over a decade now. It was all abandoned to waste away after the currency scare in 1997 when financing went away. Things railroaded quickly and now it is too expensive to tear it down so these old rusting hulks just sit out there providing shelter to squatters.

If you build something that isn't needed right away, there is certainly a chance it will never be needed. Empty buildings age much more quickly than ones with people living in them. China may face some very serious problems economically in the next 5 years. Rising oil prices hurts them more than USA for a lot of reasons. Some American companies are pulling out because of the corruption. Quality is still not there on Chinese products, even for companies with strict QA practices. There have been a lot of failures with high tech endeavors in the past from China, even when they are simply reverse engineering something and copying it. In my experience. Chinese culture doesn't understand guilt the way Westerners do, and it produces engineers that will often cut corners to help out the bottom line. The attitude of the Chinese I work with is really one of arrogance, much like Americans used to be. They assume they are taking over the world, and I think it may be creating a sense apathy towards the low quality of their output. Kind of a shrug and assumption that it will improve. I'm definitely not counting China out, but I'm not sure the lofty goals they are setting right now are as achievable as the nationalistic populace likes to think. We will see...

Re:Chinese GDP

[cyfer2000]

Look for a book called "The Coming Collapse of China" by Gordon G. Chang to see how China has collapsed in 2006.

Re:Chinese GDP

[MightyYar]

Yep, if the Chinese government have 400B USD leftover at the end of the year and they're tired of buying everyone else's debt, I see no wrong in building luxurious council estates

You seem to think that they have a choice, or that they are just being prudent with their balance sheet. In reality, they HAVE to buy that debt to inflate their currency. Otherwise their currency would get strong, and - uh, oh, Western companies might go elsewhere for cheap labor.

Re:Chinese GDP

[TheSync]

It's large enough to throw the entire world into a great world-wide depression (yes, worse than it is now) via domino effect of defaulting debts.

My understanding is that few foreign banks have been allowed to widely play in China, thus most of the losses will be limited to the country's own (typically state-owned) banks. The contagion will be minimal. Compare with the US bubble pop, where financial institutions from all over the world were invested in US mortgage-backed securities.

Now if China decided to stop purchasing additional US Federal debt because of their crash, that would mean something for the US government, but not the world.

Re:Chinese GDP

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Chinese culture doesn't understand guilt the way Westerners do, and it produces engineers that will often cut corners to help out the bottom line. The attitude of the Chinese I work with is really one of arrogance, much like Americans used to be. They assume they are taking over the world, and I think it may be creating a sense apathy towards the low quality of their output.

The second and third sentences there make a lot more sense than the first. The idea that Asians don't "understand guilt the way Westerners do" is an ancient line of crap that smells strongly of racism. Guilt is a universal human emotion. OTOH, so is greed, and it's entirely true that people in countries which perceive themselves as being on the way up are often willing to pass off shoddy work in the (unfortunately, often justified) belief that their customers won't care. During the 19th century, Americans did this too -- there was a stereotype, with some basis in fact, that if you wanted high-quality products you bought European-made, but if you just wanted something cheap you bought American-made. The economic explanation is entirely sufficient.

Re:Chinese GDP

[mywhitewolf]

don't forget the shear quantity of labor available, that's a pretty big advantage too.

Re:Chinese GDP

[sdguero]

Dude, its a cultural thing not a race thing. A Chinese person that grows up in the states doesn't have issues. It's about a guilt society vs a shame society. Japanese act similarly, they might go farther with underhanded things to get ahead, but then if it is unveiled publicly they actually suffer more shame than westerners would. Its just a different approach. The Western way is more focused on the individual, the eastern way is more focused on the group. Sure there are lots of exceptions, everyone is different, but in my experience, Chinese engineers tend to fudge things to give managers what they want to hear a LOT more than American engineers.

Hell, I'm about to review 3 test reports from Beijing this evening. I go over several every week. Some of the engineers over there are better than others, but on average they are overly optimistic compared to test reports form our American engineers. Are they capabke of learning and improving? Certainly. I see it first hand. But when the short comings get pointed out in a conference call, we have to tread very carefully because they get so butt hurt by criticism in front of their peers we are afraid someone is going to start crying or do something drastic. The director we have over there lived in the States for 20 years. He is very helpful in bridging the gap between the two different cultures...

Anyway, I'm just trying to say that I'm extremely open of other cultures and ways of life. If anything I'm strongly anti-racist. But that doesn't mean I cannot recognize cultural differences that can dramatically impact performance when it comes to building and testing complex systems. China faces some serious challenges, political and cultural. It will be very interesting to see what happens over the next 20 years or so, but I still expect them to rise above all other nations to become the next true global hegemony.

Re:Chinese GDP

[gnud]

See, the fun thing about a centralized government is that they can decide to lower prices on those buildings, to minimize losses. I guess you already know about most of the not-so-fun-things, so I won't list them all here :)

How?

[Sla$hPot]

But seriously! In nine years?
Uhmm?
Well maybe if the Higgs really has been discovered and the Chinese know how to use it to surconvent gravity, then maybe.
Nah!

Re:How?

[elrous0]

That will be 17 years from their first manned space launch. That's more time that it took the Soviets, and they had to do it from SCRATCH.

Re:How?

[alex67500]

You'd be amazed at what 400B USD of surplus in a state's budget every year can buy...

Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

For whatever reason, the Chinese may indeed commit the colossally stupid act of setting up a manned space station. It is a moronic waste of money, which presents competitors with an opportunity: set up a network of completely robotic space stations that will do vastly more at far lower cost and generate more advances in robotics. Let the Chinese put little red stars on their shirt collars so that mommy can see what good little boys they are. Nations that have already seen that it is a financial black hole that produces practically nothing of value need not accompany them.

Actually, it is wishful thinking to believe the Chinese are that stupid. 2020 is still a ways off, and they will likely see that for many reasons robotics is the way to go. They have the potential to dominate the nascent robotics boom if they avoid idiotic distractions like this one. Let's hope those of us in the US are up to the challenge.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[geekoid]

" Nations that have already seen that it is a financial black hole that produces practically nothing of value need not accompany them."

no, short sighted politician, and ignorant SOB don't see any value.

The Manned space program has paid for it's self many times over. It's a fantastic practical RnD resource. They have a unique need, private industry fills it, and then take what they learned to make other products they sell. They get taxed and the money goes around.

god damn it, how stupid are people not to be able to take the simple steps to figure that out? This isn't wishful thinking, it's documented fact. But no, narrow minded SOBs like you can't think past 'it cost money' to actually look at the revenue is generates, the value to our future.

Fuck, I wish you people would either learn to think of just die... preferable in a fire.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[vlm]

financial black hole that produces practically nothing of value

A manned station can be useful.

On the other hand, what if you do the ISS thing and take plans for a very useful manned station, and cut cut cut cut budgets until the only thing left is the hotel load? That's how you end up with a "financial black hole that produces practically nothing of value".

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Arlet]

The question is not if the manned space program has had benefits in other areas. That's quite obvious.

The question is: could you have spend the same money on something else, and get an even better return on your investment ?

For instance, we could have spend more on robotic missions, getting better robot technology as a result.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

The Manned space program has paid for it's self many times over... This isn't wishful thinking, it's documented fact... can't think past 'it cost money' to actually look at the revenue is generates, the value to our future

"Documented fact," eh? That should make it easier for you to prove it and not just insult people with empty platitudes. Show us credible numbers and lists of technologies that have, for example, paid for the cost of the ISS "many times over." They do not exist. It is a false claim. It is simple-minded superstition, sci fi space-adventure magical-religious cultism. The starry-eyed myths and legends of childhood.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Wiarumas]

Just to name a few products that came out of space exploration related projects - most of which were to assist humans while in space: cat scans, microchips, cordless tools, ear thermometer, frozen food, insulation, invisible braces, memory foam, GPS, scratch resistant lenses, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, and water filters.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Arlet]

I'm pretty sure all these products would have been invented/produced even without a manned space program, and on a lower budget.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

Frozen food? Insulation, GPS, scratch resistant lenses, shoe insoles, smoke detectors, and water filters? Dude, I hope you can back that up. The claims of what came out of the space program seem to be wildly exaggerated, and this list is no exception. You really need some credible documentation, otherwise it just doesn't cut it. Some of this stuff was probably invented in the early 20th century.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[orient]

"better return on your investment"? That's what you expect? You cannot predict the return on an investment for more than 5 years. I guess that the Chinese that invented money or gun powder or rockets didn't really think of the ROI. Or Tziolkovsky, or Gauss or Ampere, they weren't expecting ROI, either, but still they managed to advance the human race more than any ROI craving investor ever did.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Arlet]

Obviously you can't predict the exact ROI for a certain research program, but you'll still have to make a choice what you're going to do with a certain budget.

The ISS costs about 100x as much as the Spirit/Opportunity rovers on Mars, but I don't think it returned 100x as much in scientific or engineering value. In fact, I've heard more interesting stuff come out of the Mars rovers than from the entire operation of the ISS.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

Note that I am claiming that manned space exploration generates essentially nothing of value. Also, your claim that the transistor is a by-product of space exploration is inconsistent with history. I assume you are repeating something from hazy memory.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

Hear, hear! I suspect he meant freeze-dried food rather than frozen, but he'd still be mistaken.

Sc-fi space-adventure magical-religious cultism, pure and simple.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[JockTroll]

I'm pretty sure the Internet would have eventually been invented in Central Africa a couple of centuries from now and maybe on a lower budget. I suggest you turn your modem off until then.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

Please document your claims.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[R3d M3rcury]

The question is: could you have spend the same money on something else, and get an even better return on your investment ?

Good question. Now let me throw a question back at you: How would you go about answering your question?

First, you have to define "better." Some space research has helped in treatments for osteoporosis. Lots of people have this affliction--especially as they get older. So, I'm sure they would believe that it was "better" to do this research rather than robotics research.

Second, what are you trying to return? In my above example, we've come up with ways to treat osteoporosis. If that was switched to robotics, you wouldn't have that treatment. But you might have robotic limbs which could take the place of human limbs that have been weakened by the disease.

Third, you'd have to compare the same missions. The only example I can give is that the Apollo missions returned something like 1000x the weight of moon-material as the Soviet missions.

In my opinion, the question is mostly FUD. "We might get a better return if we did something else."

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[cusco]

Reminds me of a salescritter where I work. He was complaining about the cost of a local mass transit project and declared, "It cost $300 in tax dollars for each person who rides, and it's almost empty!" I asked him how long he was amortizing the cost of the project and he mumbled something indistinct, then admitted it was three years. Today, four years later, the trolley is packed every day and the city has managed to avoid building parking structures that would have been necessary for the developments that are going up in that area. In ten years the project will have paid for itself, and it's just maintenance after that.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Un pobre guey]

And uh...you're questioning GPS being developed by space travel? Seriously?

Why yes, now that you mention it. The development of GPS had nothing whatever to do with manned space travel. Why do you ask?

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[lennier]

They have a unique need, private industry fills it, and then take what they learned to make other products they sell.

Quite. And the result is a lot of American aerospace defense contractors who know in precise and exacting detail how to make O-rings for Space Shuttle boosters and ballistic missile guidance computers and nuclear warheads.... which are all extremely useful in the civiian market, am I right?

Satellites are useful in peacetime, sure. And SAGE and Apollo and Minuteman did help promote the development of computers. But on the whole, the parent poster was right. If the money spent on 'priming the pump' through space and defense (two sides of the same booster really- just different payloads on top) was spent on directly funding research aimed at non-defense applications... it seems like it would be orders of magnitude more effective at generating commercial spinoffs, rather than making endless black world classified special-purpose bomb and rocket tech that can't be readily transferred.

But you couldn't sell that program to Congress as 'protecting Merican Values from the Islamofascist Commies'. It'd be damned as socialism in an instant.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[lennier]

GPS

GPS is the only directly space-derived technology in this list (in that, it literally could not exist without space). You could have added satellite phones, satellite radio, and satellite TV. Those are clear benefits of launch capability with clear commercial markets as products in themselves. However, manned

The others - I'm not convinced they were actually developed for the space program, and even to the extent that they were partially funded by NASA money, they are still side projects, not the bulk of what was bought and paid for.

What NASA primarily bought was rockets, photos and bootprints on the Moon. The first one was to make the generals happy and give the A-bomb a delivery mechanism. The second was to make the spies happy (and the scientists as spinoffs, on the off chance they might discover the supernova bomb or a cure for cancer or something useful). The third one was a propaganda stunt to make the whole world love America rather than the USSR - and it worked brilliantly.

Now that those jobs are all done? It's not clear what else manned space is useful for, other than keeping bored Russian missile scientists from selling their toys to the next highest bidder.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[lennier]

In reality however, they weren't. We're talking about reality.

No, we're talking about the small subset of reality which was the consequence of funding decisions made in the 1950s.

It is entirely possible that, in the same reality, different decisions could lead to different outcomes.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[Arlet]

The Internet wasn't a product of the manned space program.

Re:Dumb Idea, Potential Opportunity

[JockTroll]

Re-read your statement: "I'm pretty sure all these products would have been invented/produced even without a manned space program, and on a lower budget." This can be applied to everything from jet engines, radar and all that jazz (thank WW2), but the point is they were developed earlier. The Internet is an offshoot of the Cold War. Would there have been an Internet without the Cold War? Maybe, but it would have taken longer and it may be it would have never have been what we have today. It could also be that it would have never been developed at all. You cannot be sure one invention will occure lacking the need for it, and thinking otherwise means ignoring the basic facts of research and being a fat, smelly child-molesting POS who furiously masturbates to kiddie scat bestiality porn.

Great...

[bradgoodman]

Space travel - yet another thing we'll be outsourcing to China...

Re:Great...

[damburger]

Why not? In six months, you will have completely outsourced it to Russia...

Re:Great...

[c6gunner]

Space travel - yet another thing we'll be outsourcing to China...

China has already admitted that they can't do it as cheaply as SpaceX. Now, it's possible that SpaceX is producing unrealistic cost estimates, but for the time being it looks as if private industry could at the very least compete with the Chinese space program, if not surpass them in cost-effectiveness. If that changes, yeah, we might have to outsource to them, but there's no reason to be such a pessimist yet.

Re:Great...

[tm2b]

I totally know the Civilization strategy. While the other great civilization spends all of its resources on its military, they spend all their resources on first population growth (while collecting all of the other civilizations' technology) and then jump ahead via new technology development.

In the game, another civilization would have declared war and conquered their cities, but real world politics don't work that way. They are totally getting to Alpha Centari before we do.

well...

[geekoid]

at lease someon is going. Good luck China.

BTW, Manned Space Programs are what countries get for have appropriate eye on science and the longevity of a country.

It's also what you loose when all focus is on money spent now and constantly cutting.

But hey, let keep lowering taxes and butcher all our assets. It's the libertarian way...to 3rd world status.

Re:well...

[MaWeiTao]

It's the libertarian way? How about the liberal and conservative way? Everyone in the United States is at fault in some way or another.

The liberals want to cut programs like these because they're incapable of seeing the benefits provided. They don't realize they should be thanking the space program for their precious iPhones. They're the ones claiming that the money should be directed towards every little social entitlement program.

The conservatives are more likely to support these kinds of programs but fail to realize their ideology makes it an impossible goal. You can't have a robust space program with a small government and low taxes. Compounding the problem is their eagerness to waste money on a bloated defense program and a lack of accountability for corporations.

Like anything, too much of any one approach is a very bad thing. And the problems certainly are more complex that what I've presented. Just look at the American educational system.

Re:well...

[lennier]

they should be thanking the space program for their precious iPhones.

Yes, that would be why manned space missions use off-the-shelf consumer technology and not specialist, space-rated, radiation-hardened gear purpose-built by defense contractors for the unique challenges of zero-gravity environments which are ten times as expensive and useless on Earth.

have had plans for a while

[peter303]

The wiki page lists an eleven launch, partially completed program to a permanent station. Sounds a bit like Skylab or Mir.

Re:QC anyone?

[elrous0]

China is under no obligation to recognize any "oversight committee." Unless you want to go to war with them, I'm pretty sure they, as a sovereign country, can send whatever they damn well please into space.

Re:Knock-offs

[elrous0]

but inside there is a lot of plastic, bad/cheap soldering jobs, cheap components that break easily, duct tape, and a lot of empty unused space.

Well in that case, it is *definitely* a knock-off of the ISS.

Space Station Funding

[agw]

"China Plans Space Station By 2020"
In other news:
"FBI Says Wire Fraud Scam Sending Millions To China"
"77 Million Accounts Stolen From Playstation Network"

Re:Space Station Funding

[alex67500]

No need, they've got all the cash they need, and no debt to hinder their development...

Re:We might have a space station for sale

[bored]

'Low' Mileage, Great Location...

Isn't "Great Location" one of the problems with the ISS? The orbit was a compromise between what the shuttle was capable of, what the soyuz was capable of, and an orbit not already full of junk? The end result being a fairly crappy orbit for everyone involved?

They have the money and they want to do it...

[h-alpha]

So good for them! Nothing like a little friendly competition (and hopefully collaboration) to reignite the space race. Mars or Bust!

waiting for our designs...

[schlachter]

Perhaps they are waiting for us to finalize our designs for our Back to the Moon missions so that they can finally start building their ships. I doubt they want to replicate our Apollo Era technology at this point.

So What?

[ZonkerWilliam]

This is good for China, but whats much, much more impressive is a private company has started making plans on putting a man on Mars within 10-20 years (SpaceX). Its one thing for a government to commit to space travel, but its amazing for a private company to do that! SpaceX is already do amazing things with their launch capabilities.

Re:So What?

[damburger]

The difference is, China actually has the capability to do it. Musk only has one bit of technology, and the hope that the US gov. will buy it.

Re:So What?

[ZonkerWilliam]

China doesn't, yet, right now things are so dicey with heir economy, as they are trying to slow it due to inflation. My bet still on Musk, it's not only about the U.S Government to do it.

Re:So What?

[mywhitewolf]

much more impressive is a private company has started making plans on putting a man on Mars within 10-20 years (SpaceX). I

no, what is much more impressive is that I have started making plans to go to Jupiter in the next 10 years, beat that Space X.

plans are rubbish, especially by elected officials or companies trying to turn a profit, they will say whatever they want you to believe.

Re:So What?

[ZonkerWilliam]

I'm basing on their track record so far, which is impressive. I believe they can do it, it's not about words this time.

Re:Debris

[c6gunner]

Well, they are pretty good at ping-pong, you know ...

Re:Big Ambitions

[cusco]

Why? All they have to do is stop buying our debt and the country implodes, without the certainty of MAD. Besides, why would they need a space station for that? One of the dumbest posts I've seen all day.

Re:Not "astronauts"

[kevinNCSU]

US spacefarers are astronauts. Russian spacefarers are cosmonauts. Chinese spacefarers are taikonauts.

You do of course realize the stupidity in inventing a new English word for people doing the exact same profession but in a different country? We don't have 100 different terms for scientist either, that's the whole damn point of having your own language. Astronaut is more then acceptable general term for spacefarers from all nations when speaking in English. Not to mention official texts from China when written in English use the term astronaut.

Re:Knock-offs

[Steauengeglase]

I hope my Chinese made sarcasm detector is just off today, because I'm not sure if that was a joke or not. The crap they sell you is cheap, because frankly you keep buying it and they don't care what you do with it; they aren't investing in you. A space station on the other hand, is something they are interested in investing in, an investment in themselves (or at least an investment in sabre rattling).

Unless Beijing wants to start spewing propaganda that they invented space travel, have had it since the beginning of time, but graciously let the west ungratefully steal it from them, I can think of better places to use my stereotyping.

Re:Big Ambitions

[morgauxo]

Well... that was a major motivation of the US/USSR space race. The scientists had the military convinced that they needed assets in space, on the moon even and they would have an advantage at bombing each other. It worked great until they finally realized they were just flying further and farther away from the people that they wanted to blow up. Then the funding went away and we've been stuck in low earth orbit ever since.

Maybe the same is happening in China now?

Re:QC anyone?

[SuricouRaven]

The only way it's coming down is intentionally. China would have to get rather desperate to drop a space station as a weapon though, and I imagine every country with a telescope will be watching for the installation of anything that looks like an aerodynamically shaped rod.

Re:Knock-offs

[SuricouRaven]

It probably would be cheaper, for another reason. Both NASA and the ISS are very, very careful with the safety of their astronauts. Everything is triply-redundant or more. Everything has a procedure. Every last bolt is tested and retested, and then tested again by someone else. China, though... well, they'd probably consider their people a bit more expendable. If the rocket crashes, just send up another. Plenty more crew where those came from, and with their media control and non-democratic government they don't have to worry so much about public outrage.

They DO realize...

[argStyopa]

They DO realize that really, to build a space station, it has to be in SPACE - you know, where people can see it?

Not, for example, in a pool.

I'm just sayin'.

Look to the oceans

[huzur79]

We should be looking towards the oceans. What other environment on this planet is protected from storms, quakes and fires. Underwater cities over the deep ocean would make for great homes. Can also grow a lot of food near the surface in underwater green houses. So much space in the oceans for us to expand to. Does not need to be very deep. Would also learn how to live in such environments which would further our ability to live in space.

Re:QC anyone?

[cusco]

De-orbiting Mir was stupid. For (IIRC) ten percent more they could have boosted it into a higher parking orbit and left it there as a museum or for future cannibalization. We preserve log cabins, which are not unique and rarely significant historically, but burn up Skylab and Mir so that "the enemy" can't somehow learn our secrets from them. Fucking stupid.

Re:Big Ambitions

[cusco]

No, the Chinese space program has been formed in the sustainable 'slow but steady progress' mode, rather than the unsustainable 'boom and bust' mode that the US and USSR followed. Their manned launches up to this point haven't really been oriented towards proving anything, like Apollo and Mir, but just as sanity checks to make sure that stuff really did work the way they thought it would. Someone above mentioned that this is part of a 'Plan 921' which started in 1992 and is still continuing. I'm going to have to check out now. That's one of the advantages of a stable political system, the ability to carry out a multi-decade or even multi-generational program. Our governmental/societal attention span is far too short for that.

Re:Chinese knockoff

[Samantha Wright]

It's not that dissimilar from the ISS, either. In The Real World, space stations are (mostly) lattices of flight modules.

Re:Egg baskets

[Un pobre guey]

This is rubbish, superstitious claptrap. Manned space exploration will have a negligible effect on the long term survivability of the human species. This tiresome insistence that we can avoid extermination due to an asteroid impact (or whatever) by maintaining some kind of manned space program is little more than sci fi space adventure magical religious cultism. The cost of moving more than a trivial number of people to some desolate, unsustainable off-planet outpost will never be overcome, at least not within the next several hundred years). I challenge you to calculate what it would cost to move 10 million people (about 0.15% of the current world population) to some off-planet location to save them from cataclysm, and support them for 100 years. It is a ridiculous concept. Forget about moving and sustaining a significant fraction of the population. Only a tiny number of people survive for a few years more than the rest of us in such a cataclysm. It is a meaningless false hope that is essentially identical to religious faith in some sort of eternal afterlife in a spiritual plane. It is for children.

Re:Knock-offs

[GodfatherofSoul]

The problem with that is you assume the Chinese are dumping crap off on us. You know those lead-painted (I think) toys we stopped from coming into our country? They kept them and sold them at home and in other countries. How about those woefully fragile Chinese vehicles we've all seen being obliterated in crash tests on YouTube? That's not the engineering of a country trying to exploit other countries with cheap crap while saving the goodies for themselves.

Re:Cool!

[Unkyjar]

I can imagine it now, you caught in a time loop...in an attempt to get more wishes, going back in time making your first two wishes and then repeating the loop forever.

Re:Big Ambitions

[superdave80]

...and their country will implode when we no longer have the money to buy the crap they manufacture. Lose-lose situation.

Re:Egg baskets

[JockTroll]

It is for children.

But you LOVE children, don't you? If you did not, why were you spotted jerking off near a kindergarten?

The High Frontier

[Gary W. Longsine]

An American physicist named Gerard K. O'Neill explored ways to boot strap an in-space economy and the notion is sometimes referred to as The High Frontier. A permanent presence in space, and an in-space industrial economy would be useful for many things.

Re:The High Frontier

[DerekLyons]

The problem with the plan outlined in The High Frontier is that it's "bootstrap" is essentially circular logic: "We need colonies in space to build the infrastructure in space to build colonies in space". He adds in "and build solar power satellites" in order to make it appear that his logic isn't circular - but any more-than-cursory examination of the economics involved shows how ludicrous that idea is. (Short version: it would be cheaper to burn the dollar bills directly for energy.)
 
The grandparent has it right - there's nothing to do there and little advantage to be gained by going there.

This is just one of the sideline project in China

[voidness]

China has plan to get nuclear energy resource from the Moon. Send spacecraft to the Mars (not new to US but who knows what is true motivation). Build the world biggest radio telescope in mountain. Build/divert a river from Tibet plateau to west desert... to name a few.

Skip that

[WindBourne]

Instead, we have commercial space already started. Now, we have to get the communist out of US CONgress (shelby, hutchinson, coffman, hatch, etc) and get new private space moving. The problem is that we have a number of old guards in CONgress that want to throw 10's of billions at various unworkable solutions. Constellation was a joke and a half, and was not funded during the 00's. And now SLS is the latest joke. WHen you have ppl like Shelby, Hutchinson, Coffman, and Hatch telling NASA how to build a rocket and who to use (oddly all of the companies were in these ppl's districts), then you know we have a command economy CONgress.

Re:Big Ambitions

[cusco]

They have a quarter of the world's population with an enormous pent-up demand. If they don't sell it to us they'll sell it to citizens of other countries for less, and to themselves for even less. Sure, it will mean a major economic readjustment, but China goes through those about once a generation anyway. The people are used to it, and even expect it. The US population on the other hand is woefully unprepared for an economic upset much worse than we just went through.

I lived in Peru during the hyperinflation of the late '80s, and while it was difficult people were able to adjust because they'd been through similar situations before. The US hasn't seen a major economic disruption since the 1930s, very few Americans are still alive who went through that. They're not going to adjust well when (not if) it happens.

You are right

[WindBourne]

We can not compare them. SpaceX has put up a capsule and returned it with only 7 years worth of work. They will in the next year or so, put up a rocket that will be 2.5 x the size of what China has done for the last 45 years. China has said that they can not approach the costs that SpaceX has. Bigelow will have a space station started in 3 years.

So, yeah, you are right. We should not compare CHina to America. It is not fair to China.

Re:You are right

[Teancum]

What concerns me most about China is their operational tempo. They haven't sent any people into space for a couple of years now, and they are being what I would call too cautious on doing stuff in space.

The largest problem that causes is the people involved in spaceflight simply don't have the experience necessary to do anything once they get up there. Skills people need to refine require regular flights and repeating activities over and over again to smooth over problem and not to keep making the same mistakes. You could argue this is the same problem facing the American spaceflight activities, but China takes that slow pace to another level entirely.

Unless China is willing to seriously invest into spaceflight and ramp up the number of spacecraft launched in a single year, this space station simply isn't going to be built.

By comparison, SpaceX is ramping up its operational tempo, as is Bigelow Aerospace. Both have expanded their factories and their production staff to have regular flight necessary. SpaceX is planning on launching on roughly a monthly basis with potentially having people being launched several times per year.... and they are leaving open the possibility to ramp up that production rate even more. To get that to work out properly, that would require several engines to be built every week, with perhaps an engine being produced every day over a pretty prolonged period of time. That in turn drops costs because it creates a genuine production line where repeating manufacturing skills pays off.

This is what NASA claimed they were going to be doing with the Space Shuttle program when they were trying to sell it to Congress back in the 1970's.... with the suggestion that a shuttle launch would be happening about twice a month or so when they "worked out the bugs". Of course that kind of flow rate never happened, but at least it was talked about and the need for that kind of operational tempo is also why the NASA astronaut corps numbered close to a hundred astronauts during the peak of the Shuttle program.

China isn't doing anything like this, and their astronaut corps is just a very small handful of people. Talk is big here, but until they start to really do stuff in space, I won't really be impressed. It doesn't have to be necessarily going to the Moon here either and they can be practical in terms of doing stuff in space, but they have to be up in space doing stuff or they can't really be taken seriously.

Re:Knock-offs

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that's a country building cheap shit because that's where the money is. They also built the great wall, so have some engineering ability. the thing about China is that the PRC doesn't care about environmental issues like we do. so its also likely that the Chinese government may create a nuclear powered rocket at some stage AND LAUNCH IT, which would be the real start of the space race v2 as that would allow us to send robots to other solar systems & people to Jupiter.

the future of space is commercial there is no point if we can't make money

words entrenched from a broke government with the wrong focus. If china starts a new space-race, expect America to go the way of the soviets, they are already almost broke to the point of collapse.

Re:Knock-offs

[hrvatska]

A space station on the other hand, is something they are interested in investing in, an investment in themselves (or at least an investment in sabre rattling).

I hope they do a better job with their space station than they did with their high speed rail system.

Re:Egg baskets

[cusco]

You apparently don't have the concept of a 'colony' down very well. I'm sure that there were some conservative nutters claiming that sending people to live in North America was absurd because there weren't enough ships in existence to move 0.15% of the English population and it would be outrageously expensive to support them for 100 years.

Colonies are founded in unsustainable places by people who don't intend to go back. Most of them die, sometimes all of them do. The next group that comes does better, feeds themselves and has a few children who manage to survive. The next group doubles the population over a generation and creates satellite communities. This is the historical pattern of the last few millenia, it's doubtful that it will be dramatically different in space than it has been on the Earth's surface.

I'd be very surprised if 500 years after colonization began the off-planet population didn't exceed the population of the countries sending them there.

Re:Big Ambitions

[mosb1000]

All they have to do is stop buying our debt and the country implodes

That's kind of like saying an alcoholic will die if you stop selling him alcohol. In reality they'd be doing us a favor because it would force us to deal with economic realities now instead of putting them off 'till later (when it will be worse). Of course, it would be nice if we would deal with it before it becomes an imminent problem. For the time being the Chinese seem to feel that our debt is the most sound investment they can make (and they're not the only ones who feel that way).

Re:Big Ambitions

[Kagura]

Let's increase our Presidential term limits to six years, with no reelections. Then we don't have to worry about ridiculous escapades such as Carter's battle against his own administration to withdraw all troops from South Korea, because it was the only major unbroken campaign promise he had left...

Yes, but was it sustainable?

[Chicken_Kickers]

True, the US sent men to the moon a few years after their first manned space flight. But, was it sustainable? Did the US followed through with a moon base and all that 2001 Space Odyssey dreams? Maybe the Chinese had studied the history of space exploration and decided not to repeat the US mistakes. Maybe they have a longer term and more sustainable plan for space exploration. You have to remember, the Chinese have more than 4000 years of advanced civilization behind them. This tends to make them more farsighted don't you think?

Re:Yes, but was it sustainable?

[Teancum]

The U.S. effort to go to the Moon was followed up by Skylab, a Shuttle program, and the construction of the International Space Station (of which clearly the American involvement was quite large). Arguably that aspect of manned spaceflight was sustainable and certainly has been maintained. Dozens of follow-up spacecraft designs to succeed the Shuttle program have also been worked on by NASA... and it has been political infighting that has mostly created the current situation where NASA really doesn't have any option but to use the Soyuz spacecraft to launch its astronauts to the ISS at the moment. And there certainly are some people very much concerned this has been happening.

So far, the Chinese haven't even launched somebody into orbit at all for a couple of years. The last flight was in September 2008, although they are planning on a flight perhaps later on this year. Their big task they want to accomplish this year? An in-orbit rendezvous similar to what Neil Armstrong (yes, that Neil Armstrong) and David Scott performed during Gemini 8. That sounds like they are making huge progress, but it still is a long way to go before the Chinese are even able to even think about the Moon, much less be able to do large scale construction in space like something comparable to the ISS.

Re:Big Ambitions

[khallow]

I'd bet the Chinese have plenty of big ambitions for their space station... like weaponizing it with missiles aimed downward at the USA.

And how are they going to protect it? We're already at the point where private actors can damage space assets up to and including geostationary orbit. If someone's satellite collides with an orbital nuclear weapons platform, is that an act of war?

Re:Egg baskets

[mywhitewolf]

The cost of moving more than a trivial number of people to some desolate, unsustainable off-planet outpost will never be overcome.

oh, pack your bags then boys, no point spending money on this "not being reliant solely on the earth" expedition, the cost will never be overcome, certainly not overcome with continued research and investment into the field... no no no, the future is robots and private enterprise, because they are cheaper and the government is broke and apparently space is about making money and no other country is wise to do things that lose value for possible long term, possibly non monetary gains.

Re:Egg baskets

[mywhitewolf]

Put it this way, Image is as important for China as it was for America, China Needs to appear much more confident then its biggest rivals (America), it needs to assert itself as a world power, what better way to show your prowess by doing something that the Americans can no longer do?

Re:Egg baskets

[Un pobre guey]

Ha ha! Yeah, that's funny! Dude, you are Joe Comedian! Comedy Central, watch out for this guy, he's hot! Not to mention him weaseling out of calculating what it would cost to move 10 million people to some off-planet location and support them for 100 years (whether on their own or dependent on earth) with his super-beyond-funny jokes! Wow, the guy's a genius! The whole thing just got explained away! With a joke, even!

Re:Egg baskets

[mywhitewolf]

so instead i should have just pointed out that the cost of moving 10 million people to an off-planet location and support them for 100 years isn't relevant to the cost/return profile of building a manned space station?

I calculated the cost to be $1,020,000,000,000,000 dollars at current market rates.

wonder how much it would have cost to have 10 million computers as powerful as the (then) leading super computer with 100 years worth of hardware support would cost in 1970? so how little relevence that has to ANYTHING!?!

40 years ago a supercomputer could process 100MFlops for $100,000. I believe i can get something 10x faster as a phone now days for 1/200 of the price. this isn't to prove that you can return money, (obviously cause the technology / limitations are different), but to not invest in manned space flight now is like not asking the cute receptionist out because she will probably say no. no one says you have to ask her out, but to criticize others for expending the energy is just poor form.

Re:Big Ambitions

[The Snowman]

For the time being the Chinese seem to feel that our debt is the most sound investment they can make (and they're not the only ones who feel that way).

I agree, but I don't think it's an "investment" in terms of "interest gained." Think of it as "China is loading the Titanic with lead blocks and making it sink faster." Then it will lose a whole bunch of capital, but emerge as a (the?) world superpower.

Good

[readin]

Perhaps with this kind of ego boost they won't feel they need to prove their worth by conquering neighboring countries like Taiwan or annexing parts of India.

Re:Knock-offs

[Steauengeglase]

Granted you hear stories (and see pictures) about Styrofoam bridges, but I can't help but think that something like their space program would, like the US, would be little less about the lowest bidder and a little more about national pride.

Re:Knock-offs

[TheThiefMaster]

We have used nuclear reactors on probes (e.g. all 5 interstellar probes), as well as tested ion drives which could be run from a nuclear reactor.

AFAIK, of all nuclear technologies, only nuclear pulse drive (repeated atomic explosions) could actually lift a rocket off of earth. There are reasons we don't use that one, we have quite enough nuclear fallout on our planet already. I doubt even the Chinese would launch one.

No reelections

[Solensean]

Actually, I think that's a very good idea - maybe not six years, but double the actual term limit : in eight years, the president gets to do what he wants (with the caveat of having the Congress on his side), and he doesn't have to worry about getting re-elected at the end. He can work on a project from the conception phase to the concretization without thinking about whether his electoral base will go for it. I don't see why it would be more dangerous to have a president for eight years instead of four. Can anybody?

Re:iphone 4 in space

[tehcyder]

I want to insert a white iphone 4 in my anus.

Will you help?

There are no mobile phones on Uranus.

Re:Knock-offs

[ex0duz]

the thing about China is that the PRC doesn't care about environmental issues like we do

You are right. The chinese don't care about environmental issues like you guys do(Americans), because they aren't like you. They are still a developing country, and of course they cannot currently afford to 'care' about the environment at the expense of their economy, and by extension, their national interests/security. With that said, on the flip side, China is also a world leader in green technologies. I believe that they also have the power to make everyone in China drive in a clean(er) electric car etc when the time is economically/politically/socially right..

So yeah. Their priorities are different to yours, and their level of caring about environmental issues is on a completely different level than yours. Isn't it nice when you have a competent government who gets shit done? It's sad that we don't expect anything from the US government anymore. They are also giving democracy a bad name. When you see the two party system, you can't help but wonder if they would be better off with just ONE COMPETENT government. Keywords here are one, AND competent. You would never see time being wasted on a debate on the birth place of the president.. That's just stupid and makes the whole country look bad, not just the politicians involved, but also the citizens because they are allowing them to get away with it too. Personally, i can't wait to see what China has to offer all of us in the nearby future. Le's hope it's something awesome. like some breakthrough green energy technology and/or something that will be of value to humanity..

Re:Big Ambitions

[superdave80]

...with an enormous pent-up demand

There is a reason it is 'pent-up'; most of their people are poor farmers.

If they don't sell it to us they'll sell it to citizens of other countries for less, and to themselves for even less.

...thereby making less money. How does that help them?

The US hasn't seen a major economic disruption since the 1930s

Ummmm.... read the news in the last few years? And we were also hit hard during the late 70's and early 90's. This isn't our first time going through this.

Re:Big Ambitions

[cusco]

You're an American and under 70 years old, aren't you? You have no real concept what a serious economic disruption is. Think for a moment about buying a $1 CocaCola on May 1, and by May 31 that same bottle costs $10. Think about going to 10 different grocery stores and none of them have meat, milk or eggs because no one is selling to them since they don't know what the replacement price is going to be next week. Think about eating cornmeal mush for breakfast, lunch and dinner for three months because there is no money to buy potatoes or rice even if you could find them. Think about buying water by the bucket from the neighbor three blocks away who has a well because the municipal water system is out of funds. Think about sleeping in line because the gas station is going to open tomorrow and you can buy up to five gallons until it's gone.

That's what most of the world's population has lived through at least once, and know that they will again at some point. When it happen here you're likely to be surprised by how many people have guns, since I don't expect our spoiled population to accept that they're actually going to have to live without any gasoline, or penicillin, or fire service, or meat for days/weeks/months at a time.

thereby making less money. How does that help them?

Did you forget that they're a communist country? That's a command economy, things can cost what the central government says they cost and funds can be moved from one part of the economy to another at will (at least in the short term). They'll come to a new point of stability over the course of a decade or maybe less, and if they're producing internally consumed widgets at then end of it rather than externally consumed gewgaws that's their decision.

Chinese Space Phish Station

[Theovon]

And they're funding the development from all the phishing scams.
http://feeds.arstechnica.com/~r/arstechnica/index/~3/RTjp4tv83B4/fbi-businesses-lost-11m-over-12-months-to-china-based-phishers.ars

Re:Big Ambitions

[superdave80]

Think for a moment about buying a $1 CocaCola on May 1, and by May 31 that same bottle costs $10. Think about going to 10 different grocery stores and none of them have meat, milk or eggs because no one is selling to them since they don't know what the replacement price is going to be next week.

THAT'S what you think is going to happen if China doesn't buy up our debt? We have TOO much food in this country, not a shortage of it. And why would you buy CocaCola for $10? It won't be that price because no one will buy it.

Did you forget that they're a communist country?

And they have become an economic force by moving towards capitalism. Going back to communism won't make them better. USSR anyone?

Re:Big Ambitions

[cusco]

Oh, cripes, you studied classical economics, didn't you? The price of a CocaCola was just an example of hyperinflation. Substitute bread, propane, welding rods, concrete, aluminum I-beams, electricity, 10w40 oil, whatever you want. If you get paid $1000 April 30 in this example you'd need $10,000 by May 31 to buy the same amount of products. I saw my salary go up by eight times one month, and was still behind inflation.

And the CocaCola would be that price, because if they sold it for less the replacement cost for their materials has risen and they'd be losing money. If they don't sell that bottle it will sit on the shelf until salaries catch up, because they don't have any choice.

You need to stop listening to the hallowed oracles of the Chicago School and see how things work in the real world.

Re:Big Ambitions

[superdave80]

Oh, cripes, you studied classical economics, didn't you?

No. What exactly do you mean by 'classical economics'? And why is that bad?

If you get paid $1000 April 30 in this example you'd need $10,000 by May 31 to buy the same amount of products.

...but the salaries in the US are stagnant. No company in the US is going to give 1,000% raises a month. Ever.

I saw my salary go up by eight times one month, and was still behind inflation.

So you lived in a country that had no idea how to handle their economy. Hyperinflation only happens if the government cranks out tons and tons of money to pump things up by several orders of magnitude. We aren't quite that stupid here.

If they don't sell that bottle it will sit on the shelf until salaries catch up, because they don't have any choice.

They will go out of business waiting for salaries to catch up. When gas prices shot up here a few years ago, people started using less gas. Guess what? Prices started to drop.

You need to stop listening to the hallowed oracles of the Chicago School and see how things work in the real world.

I have no idea what 'the hallowed oracles of the Chicago School' are (they only have one school in Chicago?) And I understand perfectly well how things work in the real world, thank you very much.