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Chinese Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover On Its Way After Successful Launch
savuporo writes "The Chang'e-3 lunar probe, which includes the Yutu or Jade Rabbit buggy, blasted off on board an enhanced Long March-3B carrier rocket from the Xichang Satellite Launch Center at 1:30 a.m. (12.30 p.m. EDT). Landing is expected on December 14, at a landing site called Sinus Iridium (the Bay of Rainbows), a relic of a huge crater 258 km in diameter. Coverage of the launch was carried live on CCTV, with youtube copies available."
While it is true that Asian countries (especially China and India) are playing catch up in the space race, they are catching up pretty quickly.
It is very very true that what India and China are doing the West (and Russia) had done some decades ago.
It is also true that what China is doing (and what India is doing also) is nothing new in the Western standard, one shouldn't stay put just because one's opponents are just beginning to do the "old stuff", or else, one day, the opponent may just have passed you by.
To India and China, congratulation of what you guys are doing !
To the West, please wake the fuck up !
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The more you count on the failings of others, the less you count on your own successes.
At least China are interested in the moon. America are only interested in Iraq and Afghanistan. I hope that China land men on the moon and send back photos and video of the lunar lander. That would shut up the conspiracy theorists.
liberare massarum ex ignorantia, clausa descendit molestie.
...Foxconn will open a new factory in a yet undisclosed location, according to chinese official.
I hope it go crashes after going a km up. Fuck their tiny 1cm peni.
I was gone from Slashdot for almost a year and this is what I'm greeted to. It's a shame things are continuing their downward spiral.
Anyone can pick arbitrary milestones to make a point, but that doesn't make it meaningful.
I think the more informative numbers would be the cost (in inflation adjusted dollars) for the various projects. I don't know what they are, but I suspect China and India are doing their missions for a fraction of what it cost the US to do it, which means they will probably be doing more in the near future.
The biggest differentiating factor does not come with a number attached.
What India and China have, and what the West is sorely lacking, is the DETERMINATION to make their country more technologically advance.
England used to be one of the top country in the world in term of technology, and what happened ?
They taught their children how to use Microsoft Word in school, rather than how to program.
America is still (one of the) top country (countries) in the world in term of technology, but technology is far from being what the average American is interested in.
The Americans are wasting their time debating the never-ending pro and anti-abortion issue.
The Americans prefer to watch Netflix, to vote for their next American Idol, than to encourage and lead their children towards learning the how-tos in technology.
In other words, the Indians and the Chinese have much more curiosity than the people in the Western countries, and their curiosities are propelling onwards in strengthening themselves and their respective countries in Science and Technology, while the West, still sitting in their comfortable Lazy-Boy watching the latest flix from Hollywood.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Chinese government officially announces that the Moon is not made of cheese!
If you could reason with religious people, there would be no religious people
It's a frosty piss, what has ever been different?
Let's hope this was sufficient to keep you out at least another year.
The amount we spend on space is a tiny fraction of government spending.
Are you so sure that space colonization is impossible? No new science is required. We can easily imagine most of the engineering that is needed. It would be fantastically expensive - but even at say $10T, (something like 100X apollo) that is only 10 years wasted healthcare money in the US.
As an aside, I believe the goal of space IS space, not somehow enriching lives on earth. To ridiculous precision everything in the universe is not on earth - the goal is everything.
Maybe we will fail, but isn't it worth it to try?
I was gone from Slashdot for almost a year and this is what I'm greeted to. It's a shame things are continuing their downward spiral.
I'm sure you weren't greeted by that particular comment. According to your posting history, you made your latest comment a couple of months ago.
Apollo 16 brought a UV telescope along with them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectrograph
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The amount we spend on space is a tiny fraction of government spending.
If you take the non-defense discretionary spending slice, its actually not tiny at all. In fact, compared to budgets of NIH or NSF for example, NASA budget is disproportionally large.
http://validator.w3.org/check?uri=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.slashdot.org Errors found while checking this document as HTML5!
The Latin for rainbow is "iris"; "iridum" is the genitive plural ("of rainbows"). "Iridium" is a shiny metal whose name also derives from "iris". And just to make sure you're still paying attention, heterochromia iridum is Kiefer Sutherland's eye condition.
[My captcha is "furious". RIP Paul Walker.]
Now that we have the tools to understand just what we're doing to Earth and its troposphere, you'll have to pry my belie, that man should be more focused on global ecology and the environmental problems we face here on earth from my cold, dead mind, before I concede that such space race should take precedence over the human condition or that of the evolutionary and genetic diversity we are wasting down here.
I don't want to pry your belie (at least I think I don't), but you seem not to realize that "the tools to understand just what we're doing to Earth and its troposphere" are primarily in space. As for the human condition, internet access in rural areas, timely and accurate hurricane warnings, and GPS are just a few of the direct benefits of investment in space technologies. There have been indirect ones, too, such as the development of integrated circuits. Anybody using those?
Here in Australia we dont't have a space program and we don't want one. We are happy to just spy on the Asians and report back to the American and UK overlords.
A quick check seems to show the NASA budget as 1/2 the NIH budget. Then remember that NASA represents the majority of the space budget, NIH only represents a small fraction of healthcare spending (>2T/year last I checked). Of course it all depends on your priorities and how you want to count things.
I don't disagree with your idea that China wants power, but I don't think orbital weapons are particularly useful in modern warfare. We (and several other countries) have enough raw firepower to utterly destroy any enemy. The problem is that for us (and China) our enemies are mixed with our friends. Nuclear weapons are completely useless against groups like Al-qaeda. Information collection and analysis is far better, and the US and China are both pushing very hard on that.
I don't think money going towards healthcare is wasted and I don't think you can argue convincingly that even though we will eventually colonise space and that the goal of space is space, that there are not other benefits to life on earth that come from the technology developed to get around the issues of going to space. Say you spend $10T to get people on Mars. This is less than what is currently US military spending over the course of Afghanistan and Iraq wars. Say you spend this amount on healthcare, again, less than spent on wars. People who are healthier can spend time learning and inventing rather than being sick. Likewise, the technology for say, habitable space environments requires sciences that can be used to make people healthier. Even the gravity;ess enviroment of the ISS can teach us about how these things interact with the human body, such as bone density, a very big issue with aging population who are more likely to get osteoporosis. What did the wars teach us other than killing? More money to space agencies and medicine, less to the war machine, I say. In all said and done, China has done a great thing today, advancements even aside, it is still a technical marvel to have what appears to have been a flawless launch toward the moon, and, even though many of us were born after US and Soviets got there first, it is still very awesome. Well done China.
Are you so sure that space colonization is impossible?
Not impossible, but not nearly as practical and high-paying as colonisation of Alaska, the Australian desert, or the Pacific seabed. Ever wonder why we don't see a constant stream of high-tech utopian communes setting up greenhouses and submersible cities in out of the way places? Because if we wanted to do that, it's right there, you can use English and Anglosphere common law already, there's no launch-to-orbit fee, the land is cheap, and you get oxygen (and sometimes even water) for free. So where are all the techno-dissident libertarians living in plastic tents near Alice Springs bootstrapping themselves and their prototype 3D printers into godhood?
It's just going to be easier to do that wearing a rebreather on Olympos Mons because spaaaaace, is that the argument?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
Then remember that NASA represents the majority of the space budget
Hmm. Are you sure? What are the US Army, Navy, Air Force, NRO and NOAA space budgets? NASA isn't the only government department with launchpads; I'm not even sure they're the only one with man-rated stuff. Certainly in the 1980s at the height of Star Wars the USAF had a lot of dreams of flying their own space fighters, and of course their own Shuttle pad at Vandenberg. Heck, the Shuttle was the weird hybrid t was because it was built to their specifications and with their money, wasn't it?
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC
LOL and the US and Soviet Union/Russia world "probably" never think of orbital weapons AC? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_weapon#Orbital_bombardment
China has a history of allowing its students to learn, bringing back a world of skills to China and then to export the same products from China at great prices.
Russia likes to get into political, press, education, mil, energy sales and aid, turning a country into been 'pro' Russia.
The US opens a trade deal, gets "invited" to share a mil 'base' and your small country is just a beholden as to a China or Russia.
Different methods, optics, trade - same national "win" for a Russia, China or USA.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I'm afraid Spaaaaace IS the argument - just think of it as religion.
Also though, Alaska, the Australian outback etc are all part of the Earth's overloaded ecosystem - one of the big advantages of space is that you don't need to worry about trashing it.
Chang'e-3 is not playing catch up.While it is true that Asian countries (especially China and India) are playing catch up in the space race, they are catching up pretty quickly. http://www.mvwotches.com/
http://www.mvwotches.com/
Savuporo specified "the non-defense discretionary spending slice". NASA doesn't have "man-rated stuff" any more, and the Pentagon never has (not that this would make them hesitate a moment at stuffing some poor grunt into a nose cone). "and with their money" isn't really correct. They had to please the Pentagram in order to get the congresscritters like Arlen "Magic Bullet" Specter to approve any money at all for the Shuttle. Thus you ended up with a craft designed by lawyers and generals, not rocket scientists.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
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I also hope this will be a wake up call for the West. Telerobotics is routinely used for sea bed operations (e.g. titanic), remote surgery e.g. famous case of doctor n US operating on patient in France and so on. With modern equipment on the Moon operating a rover there will be hugely different from experiences in the Apollo era. It will be almost like being there. Also of course hugely different from Mars missions where the time delays mean that normally you download images one day and use it to plan everything for the next day and real time operation from Earth is impossible. Also there is much of interest on the Moon. We know almost nothing about its surface, know more probably about Mars than the Moon, since the only samples we have were collected nearly 50 years ago, and most except for the last mission were collected by jet fighter pilots with a few weeks training in geology, and scientists on Earth couldn't see clearly what they were collecting with the low quality video feed. So there may be many interesting rocks that were missed even in the sites already visited by humans. And they only landed in safe places too. Things we could find are - first - the polar deposits of ice, in the permanently dark craters where you can't see them optically. Know hardly anything about what is there, and it may have layered deposits of ice and organics from the ancient solar system. Meteorites on the surface from billions of years old Earth, Venus and Mars. They should be there, only thing is, are they on the surface, or buried deep so you have to dig to find them. They would be uncontaminated by present day Earth life, so could tell us a lot about early solar system. To find out more about lunar geology of course. And I very much hope, experience of telerobotic operation on the Moon may alert Nasa to the huge difference telerobotic exploration could make on Mars. With all the emphasis on human missions to the surface, the idea of exploring it telerobotically from orbit around Mars gets hardly any attention. Yet, studies show that humans in orbit around Mars could do the same amount of exploration as at least 3 parties on the surface, for of course vastly less cost. It makes no sense at all to send humans to the surface for exploration, no financial sense, because humans on the surface in their clumsy gloves and spacesuits won't be able to do much anyway is going to be much more effective to work via telerobotics. And there is no way human missions to the surface can be sterilized to teh same levels as an unmanned rover, so surely greatly increased risk of contaminating Mars, and so confusing our sensitive experiments which are so sensitive they can e.g. detect a single amino acid in a gram of soil (that's the astrobionibbler, not yet flown but hopefully will on some future mission). Plus DNA seequencers ditto able to detect a single DNA molecule in a sample, and so on.
You rarely find libertarians of any type "bootstrapping themselves" anywhere. Mostly they like to live in places where they can rely on the infrastructure the rest of us pay for while complaining that the government can't do anything right. Perhaps most importantly, in space the libertarian fantasy fails absolutely. Everyone has to work together or everyone dies.
No one said that it was going to be easier to colonize space, pretty much everyone clearly says that it's going to be more difficult. **BUT**, once you've done it you know how to do it pretty much everywhere. A colony near Alice Springs is going to be constructed in a completely different manner than one near Point Barrow, but one built in Lunar orbit isn't going to differ dramatically from one in the asteroid belt. On-planet your access to resources are limited to what you can purchase from others and you can only expand to the point where you impinge on neighbors, in space your resources are infinite and there is no limit on your expansion.
And yes, "because Space" is a large part of the argument. Because it really **IS** the ultimate frontier and the ultimate adventure.
"Think about how stupid the average person is. Now, realise that half of them are dumber than that." - George Carlin
Really ... will you believe any imagery coming from a supposed Chinese moon rover? Remember the Olympics? And they were faking something that was totally easy to do.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Well, 1cm or 6cm indicates size isn't important: they are about 20% of world population (1,300,000,000 people just IN China)!
someone hasn't "fallen back"? i believe we are on god's time now.
But the men are only 10%.
It was a long couple of months. Seemed like a year.
"Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart, he dreams himself your master."