China Reveals Its Space Plans Up To 2016

PolygamousRanchKid writes "China plans to launch space labs and manned ships and prepare to build space stations over the next five years, according to a plan released Thursday that shows the country's space program is gathering momentum. China's space program has already made major breakthroughs in a relatively short time, although it lags far behind the United States and Russia in space technology and experience. The country will continue exploring the moon using probes, start gathering samples of the moon's surface, and 'push forward its exploration of planets, asteroids and the sun.' Some elements of China's program, notably the firing of a ground-based missile into one of its dead satellites four years ago, have alarmed American officials and others who say such moves could set off a race to militarize space. That the program is run by the military has made the U.S. reluctant to cooperate with China in space, even though the latter insists its program is purely for peaceful ends."

Comments

Re:The final frontier

[murdocj]

Right... the Chinese are almost up to where the USA was 50 years ago, so they must be ahead.

Re:Uh, yeah

[x_man]

Everyone has forgotten that NASA landed a probe on frickin' Titan just a few years ago! That's a motherfuckin' moon way the hell out there orbiting motherfuckin' Saturn and we set a probe down on the motherfuckin' surface and took some pics in the process.

And China has put a person in orbit. How nice.

Hmm

[lightknight]

You know, it does occur to me that part of the reason they are releasing this information is as a ruse. They know the American economy is in a bad spot, and they are also aware that Americans are disastrously bad at math. So, we demand improvements / money allocated to a space program to chase after a phantom or exaggerated threat, and we blow up our economy in the process. It would be something like what happened to Russia with Reagan and the SDI program, with the US playing the part of Russia in this contrived scenario (why not, we've been implementing sooooo many of the USSR's failed policies lately, one more can't sink this ship!). .

And our Congressmen appear stupid enough to totally go for it. It's a jobs program, right? And we own our currency printing press, right? If it's a disaster, we can just inflate away the damage, like Russia did with the Ruble.