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China's First Lunar Lander To Launch Today; Manned Mission Planned By 2030
c0lo writes "A Chinese Long March rocket is scheduled to blast off to the Moon on Sunday evening at about 6pm UTC carrying a small robotic rover that will touch down on to the lunar surface in about two weeks' time – the first soft landing on the Earth's only natural satellite since 1976. China has been methodically and patiently building up the key elements needed for an advanced space programme — from launchers to manned missions in Earth orbit to unmanned planetary craft — and it is investing heavily. After only 10 years since it independently sent its first astronaut into space, China is forging ahead with a bold three-step programme beginning with the robotic exploration of possible landing sites for the first Chinese astronauts to set foot on lunar soil between 2025 and 2030. Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration and an adviser to the mission commented to the BBC on the scale of Chinese thinking about the Moon. He said the forthcoming venture would land in an ancient crater 400km wide called Sinus Iridum, thought to be relatively flat and clear of rocks, and explore its geology. China.org.cn promised live coverage of the event."
Good for them. I wish them the best of luck.
I kind of hope this kicks off another space race. That would be so much better then a battleship arms race (see WWI) or a nuclear arms race (see cold war).
I predict there will be dead Chinese Astronauts on the moon.
That permanent presence will back their territorial claim over the entire satellite, followed by a declared "defensive identification zone".
A race when an opponent has reached the finish line in friggin 1969?
The equation is different now. There are resources to be mined on the moon. It's not a matter of if we will exploit the moon's natural resources, it's when. China already holds the cards on many basic materials of technology, they would like to hold more.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
In the old days of Soviet Union and iron curtain, there was a joke about Russians painting Moon red and Americans putting up there Coca-Cola sign after.
Today it looks more like Moon will be China-red and Coca-Cola sign written by them too....
To make matters worse, they own most of our debt
That's not true in any sense. The US owns most of its debt. China owns the largest share of foreign held debt (though less than 1/4 of that). Altogether they hold less than 10% of the US debt.
And it may be that any new lunar lander should use a similarly capable computer. If the urge to use newer hardware takes over, it won't be long before some asshole suggests the next lander be controlled by software written in Java running on Android. Ask the astronauts about the laptops they were given to control ISS systems. But only if you're prepared for an earful.
Add to that the fact that modern low voltage, tiny feature size hardware is much more susceptible to the affects of cosmic rays than the old gear. Once you leave the Van Allen belts, you're getting pelted with a lot more crap, and it's much easier to flip a bit in modern RAM than it was in the older stuff. If you want radiation-hardened chips, suddenly you're talking about 4 or 5 generations back, if you're lucky. Didn't Intel say they were going to stop making their radiation-hardened gear at all? So now you have to provide external shielding, and preferably multiple redundant tell-me-three-times systems, so if one of them loses its feeble mind during operations, the other two can agree to ignore it and still get you landed in one piece.
The problem remains nontrivial and expensive simply because nobody has been doing it much. There are no economies of scale beyond LEO and there are only any economies of scale to LEO now because of SpaceX. It won't be easy, for China or anyone else.