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Shenzhou 9 Sparks Renewed Debate On Space Race With China
MarkWhittington writes "With the flight of the Shenzhou 9, which includes the first docking between a Chinese spacecraft and a prototype space station module, a renewed debate has arisen over the implications of Chinese space feats. China is planning a large space station by the end of this decade. It has expressed the desire to land people on the moon sometime in the next decade. Scientists, foreign policy experts and journalists debate whether China has supplanted the U.S. as a space power and whether that matters. 'In reality, the implications of China's move could be a much cooler third option: a new space race between the Chinese government and U.S. startups. While China is 50 years behind the U.S. government, they are much more comparable to U.S. companies. It was only a couple of weeks ago that SpaceX made history by becoming the first private company to successfully dock a space module to a station in orbit. This means they are roughly 10-15 years behind the Chinese government, but they could gain fast.'"
China will land a man on the moon first, but SpaceX will win the race to Mars.
China had wanted to cooperate with the world in the space venture
China had wanted to join the ISS
The United States of America objected, and barred the Chinese from ever stepping into the ISS
That left China with no other alternative but to construct their own space station
In other words, the space "RACE" has become a race because that's what USA had always wanted
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
"While China is 50 years behind the U.S. government..."
Um. No they aren't. The US government did these same things 50 years ago, but is no longer capable of easily repeating its past feats. The first US moon landing program took less than 10 years from conceptual announcement to a giant leap for mankind. How long would it take for the US to do the same thing again? I'm not confident we even could. I'm not sure we could even replicate China's docking-to-a-station performance in 10 years, now that we've abandoned all of our previously successful manned spaceflight programs.
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Well, no. Not really. A couple of pundits and usual suspects lobbing blog entries back and forth at each other, and an article from a third string news service (Yahoo!) does not a renewed debate make... Most because the pundits and usual suspects have never shut up in the first place. If they weren't "debating" China, they'd be "debating" commercial space, or Mars missions, or something else they have no power to influence.
It's a bunch of sound and fury signifying nothing.
If it's anything like the last space race (a bunch of sterile stunts), I can't see why anyone with any sense would think it was cool. Not that China has shown any interest in such a race, or in any other manner of giving wood to the space fanboy crowd.
The United States of America objected, and barred the Chinese from ever stepping into the ISS
I was about to put a "[citation needed]".
Then, changed my mind and went after the info myself (is posting it "karma whoring"?)
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
OK, real issues... Will China ever create a television show as good as "Star Trek: The Next Generation"?
Because, if not, nobody will care about their manned space program.
I do mind. I seriously think China will get up there and stay before the US unless the US pimp it up as a face saver. China will do it for a tiny proportion of the budget with less fanfare and make it work. Eventually. 'To infinity and beyond'
In 2012, the perceived risk to a relatively few individuals dominates. The Shuttle disasters were nothing compared to the number of people killed on the roads, but were high profile. The result is that any manned expeditions have a huge safety overhead not present in the past, making them more expensive and harder to carry out. The Chinese government won't care. Their internal propaganda still has lots of stories of heroic cadres killed spreading Communism, and the like. A few dozen deaths getting to the Moon will not matter compared to the national prestige.
Incidentally I think we are right. Prestige is not worth killing people for. The Mars rovers and the probes sent to outer planets are in reality a far greater achievement than putting people on the Moon, and there is a point to them; for instance, we are now aware of the dangers of asteroid/cometary collisions and are starting to think seriously about averting them, and the ability to study weather and geology on other planets has huge implications for climate modeling. It may not be practical to get the human race off this rock (I happen to think the economics are completely against it), but what we are learning about the rest of the Solar System could have a huge impact on how long we are able to keep inhabiting it.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
What gets me is, the article claims the Chinese are going to build a 'big space station'. Actually, the current plans are to have a 60 ton station in orbit by 2020. The ISS, on the other tentacle, weighs approximately 450 tons.
Understanding the scope of the problem is the first step on the path to true panic.
It is a dumb statement that china is supposedly 50 years behind with respect to the US. It is an irrelevant statement. Much more important is the fact that China's development is rising rapidly while the development of the US is in decline.
If the average Chinese person is smaller than the average American person, it could be argued that the average Taikonaut is smaller than the average Astronaut - so while the station may be physically smaller, it will appear bigger!
uhm, or not...
That left China with no other alternative but to construct their own space station
With blackjack. And hookers.
What gets me is, the article claims the Chinese are going to build a 'big space station'. Actually, the current plans are to have a 60 ton station in orbit by 2020. The ISS, on the other tentacle, weighs approximately 450 tons.
Consider the tone of TFA, and then consider the real aim of TFA, and you can understand all the necessary exaggerations
I won't be surprised if those behind TFA has something to do with the defence industrial complex - after all, it's the defence industrial complex stands to gain the most if the people scared enough to demand their congress representative to "revive our space program before the Chinese overtakes us"
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Seriously?
Futurama.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I think that's what most of us wanted, considering China is a communist country
Umm ... Last time I checked Russia is a communist country too
How come there was no similar battle cry over Russia (and the previous USSR) involvement in the ISS?
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Nasa is not a provider of real jobs, .
This would qualify as either totally dumb (the poster didn't know better) or flamebait/troll (that is: ignoring on purpose the reality for the sake of controversy).
Poe's law would offer an explanation why the mods chose the second.
Questions raise, answers kill. Raise questions to stay alive.
When the Japanese sent their spacecraft to a comet, collected some comet dusts, and then brought those space dusts back to earth, I don't see CCP immediately sent their own spacecraft in doing the same thing
It's more likely that the CCP really does not care what others think - they just do whatever they do on their own schedule
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Umm ... Last time I checked Russia is a communist country too
It's clearly been a LONG time since you checked... it's been a Federal Republic with a multi-party representative democracy since the 25th of December 1991...
You could of course argue back and forth that they're not a very good democracy, but that's a matter of each person's own opinion.
My book about LSD and Self-Discovery
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They also like their propaganda, and beating the US to something this prestigious would do great things for national pride. Remember why the US went into the space race in the first place - because they couldn't let some bunch of dirty commies get there first.
This should put things in context: "We Stopped Dreaming"
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=6b4_1337136397
And despite all the criticisms of the details of NDT's claims, I strongly believe that the underlying theme remains valid. Americans did in fact stop dreaming. The pursuit of science, engineering, and technology, the VALUATION of these things as a foundation for a competitive, progressive, and forward-looking society, is now almost entirely lost upon the American public, replaced by willful superstition, fear, and ignorance. Replaced by doubts about man-made climate change, irrational religious fervor for creationism and other Biblical dogmas, and indeed, an active distrust and suspicion of scientific and critical thinking.
This is not about what China is doing, folks. This is about what America once did on the belief that anything was possible, and about what America no longer does because that attitude has been replaced by a sense of complacency.
Communism: * No capital (private, or state) -> Russia has state, has private capital. -> Russia isn't communist.
* No market (state planned or unregulated) -> Russia has a partially regulated market as most of modern capitalist countries, including the USA. -> Russia isn't communist.
* Private property (under private or institutional control) -> Russia has all the protection for private property, the right to buy, the right to sell, with the obvious exception (as in market regulation). Russia isn't communist.
* Wage work -> Vast majority of people in Russia are working for wage, for a minority that owns all the means of production (capitalist). -> Russia is definitely capitalist.
* Government and the state exist: No capital and private property could exist without a central (national) enforcement. -> Russia has a strong, nationalistic, government which upholds a law for the rich, bash the poor. In Russia there's also a widespread, highly organized criminal secondary rule, for the same reason.
* Capitalists are making profit, while the working class is exploited. -> While this is true all over the world, in Russia, due to the corruption of the state, many health and safety regulation is circumvented, and unions are threatened by criminal organizations, resulting one of the most unregulated capitalism in the world. -> Russia isn't just capitalist, but the social consequences of barely regulated exploitation are devastating.
Any question to elaborate further?
I find this astronaut, cosmonaut and taikonaut so embarrassing for fuck sake. It's the same fucking thing. A person is space (or anywhere for that matter) isn't defined by the nationality but what she/he does and in what quality.
I agree, if you broaden the definition of ROI to include the non-financial benefits of having a space program. For one thing, it's likely to be good propaganda in the future if the Party can brag to its citizens that they are in space, while the other guys aren't. It's also a great way to stress test military-grade hardware without the other countries raising a hoot. People would think differently of Iran and North Korean if these two supposed wannabees already have a space station in orbit or in the Moon.
Well even FOSS is primarily copying applications that existed firstly as proprietary ones. E.g. OpenOffice vs Microsoft Office, GIMP vs Photoshop, Scribus vs InDesign, etc... Even Gnome is ostensibly a copy of a windowed OS. Most of the first motivations of writing GCC was to provide a toolchain to replace and be better than the proprietary ones.
Plus FOSS has always claimed to be better (ethical, practical, whatever) than closed source.
Competetion is part of our nature, it works. It is sometimes called evolutionary pressure, survival of the fittest.
You're right and wrong at the same time.
Yes it's expensive. But chemical factories are expensive anyway. Don't forget that for example Shell have built a gas-to-liquid factory in Qatar at a price tag of 24 billion (google for Pearl GTL). And that's not for fancy minerals, but for ordinary liquid fuels.
Scale matters, and if you make your operation big enough, and you produce long enough, it will have a payback time.
The costs of using a Space Shuttle to get a kg of payload into LEO was around 5000 $/kg. So, for trillions of dollars, you can get 200,000 ton of material into LEO using Space Shuttles. China and SpaceX will do that for a fraction of the cost. And incidentally, a full scale chemical factory will be heavy, but not that heavy.
So, I conclude that you're exaggerating the costs of getting stuff into space and/or on the moon. And I also conclude that you're underestimating the scale and costs of chemical processes.
(But I admit that it's probably not yet economically feasible to do some moon based asteroid mining).
If you ask me, I don't refer to China as a communist place (note that being a communist country is a contradiction), but as a state-capitalist country, meaning that the state is the major owner of the national resources and therefore the biggest capitalist of them all. Never the less, you can see how the Chinese capitalism is compatible with the "Western" version of it, given that China is bailing out the EU, also developed private industry and so on.
Capital can be concentrated or highly distributed, but as long as the society runs on the principles of market available property (public or private does not matter, since if nobody else, Chinese government can sell national assets), on the internal mechanism of investment, exploitation and market valorization, than we're still talking about the roughly the same social organisation, that is, capitalism.
Monopolization is a natural process within capitalism, so even the so called free markets lasts only as long as the state power regulates the economy (anti-trust laws, anyone?). But as political and economical power always tend to merge because people with considerable wealth are commanding over larger amount of economy, hence they rule over larger proportion of people, directly or indirectly, the state is always central to the capitalist system, either in the framework of the western style indirect market manipulation, or with being in charge directly over the economy, like in China. These are different politico-economic management styles, not entirely opposite social organisations. Monopolization can take charge through economic power, or political. But the end-result is the same. As an anecdotal side note, I'm from a country, which was considered as socialist/communist for 40 years, until 22 years ago. I've seen both management styles, through the transition and now living in the west, and I have to tell you, that the ideological differences are just rather covering up the converging features of the two political and economical management, than actually creating differences on a social level.
1. "Nasa is not a provider of real jobs" -> Flame bait. Presenting a highly debatable statement, like this needs argument. You know, extraordinary claim needs extraordinary evidence. Now, he did not provide a tiny bit of argument here, so he is clearly ideological troll. Since NASA do have products, somebody has to work there, thus NASA provides jobs where people do real work.
2. "Especially during times where many tax-payers are feeling the impact of the economic crisis". Well, there's already a false presumption when somebody talks about "tax-payers" in general. There's no general interest between citizens, tax-payers or whatever. Some tax-payers want to disarm the enormous offensive capacity of the USA, and some want to invest even more money in to it. The military budget is magnitude greater than the NASA budget all together, and remember that NASA isn't only works on space missions, but there are other aeronautical, technological projects running along with the space tech. NASA had its budgets slashed since the space race. The military spending however... you know the money that governments invest in order to spy on, and kill other people, and destroy their stuff. Any space agency could do miracles with even the half of that money. So much for the crisis. Not to mention the bailout of banks, and other stupid shit.
This isn't about technology. It's about national will. To quote Londo Mollari in Babylon 5, we've become decadent, obsessed with arts and trinkets. Gone is Kennedy's "Ask not what your country can do for you" too. The USA is a nation of pussies now. Everyone wants a handout, and no one wants to contribute to an endeavor greater than themselves. It's all, gimme gimme gimme. We could've been on Mars by 1980 easily. Instead now we can't even get to low Earth orbit. It isn't because we don't know how. It's because our own navels are much more interesting. Yes, I'm disgusted.
find this astronaut, cosmonaut and taikonaut so embarrassing for fuck sake. It's the same fucking thing.
Me too. So let's call all of them cosmonauts from now on, as that notation clearly was the first in use (applied to Juri Gagarin).
Communism is an economic system, whereas democracy is a political system.
SSC
kirk is better
A few problems with your little theory.
Hmm, current record for a stay in space...437.7 days. Seems a bit longer than the eight months to Mars.
And that's ignoring that there are ways to provide spin gravity that are currently feasible.
Seems to me that the transhab (which was designed for a Mars mission) used water as radiation shielding. And since you're carrying water along anyway, why not use it as shielding?
etc...
Yah, you have to take a lot of stuff with you. On the order of 10-15 kg per man-day. Which adds up to somewhere around 50 tons for a free-return trajectory for six men.
Assuming that you don't find some way to recycle - perhaps hydroponics to make oxygen and some of the food, as an example.
Note that you don't actually need to carry all the supplies with you for the entire mission. Supply shots can be delivered to Mars orbit in advance of the mission, along with things like the lander(s), ground base, that sort of thing.
500 years ago, they were saying the same sorts of things about sailing around the world.
There are NO insurmountable technical obstacles to going to Mars. It's just a matter of putting enough stuff in orbit, and assembling an assortment of space vehicles there for the trip to Mars.
The only question is how much it will cost, and who is going to pay for it.
Note also that getting launch costs down will make it easier or cheaper or both - we can build the same expensive spacecraft and loft them cheaper, or we can build cheaper spacecraft that have more mass, or some combination.
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Communism is an economic system, whereas democracy is a political system.
Not in parrochial American lingo, it is not. Here we proudly chew a blade of grass or wheat and with clenched teeth we call communist whatever doesn't fit our simpleton pick-up truck world view. Why do you use sound logic and bring up historically accurate hippy facts? Why do you hate America?
The US had plenty of good reasons for barring China from the ISS, the most conspicuous of these being that China would likely not contribute much, if anything, to the program and would end up trying to steal as much technology as they could for their own benefit.
Learning for their own benefit is fine. NASA is very open to helping others learn. The specific reason that China was not allowed into the project, though, is because there are laws in place since the Tiananmen Square massacre that prevent exporting military technology and arms to China. Space technology very much helps the military, and there are very good reasons why most western countries still do not arm China with the most advanced weapons and rocket technology on Earth.
Ok, you can survive 437.7 days in microgravity. You do realize they have to land on Mars and it has gravity. They will be in no shape to land or do anything after that long without having been in a gravity environment along the way. The other problem is lets suppose they use water. Water isn't exactly light and for the same amount of protection, you will probably have to put up 15 times as much water as lead making the vehicle even bigger. Also, your estimate that the vehicle would be 50 tons is ridiculous. Anything with rotating sections, a large radiation shield, and the fuel alone is going many times heavier (probably on the order of 1,000 tons). It is a simple fact this is all purely science fiction and nobody will go to Mars in our lifetimes.