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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."
I hope it go crashes after going a km up. Fuck their tiny 1cm peni.
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 !
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.
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 !
These 2 countries in particular have been losing the 'space race' for millenia. They used their land to support the growth of diverse populations, and they developed advanced astronomy, mathematics, medicine, biology and political organization while Europe was still in its infancy. But when europeans spurted ahead on the back of fossil fuel, steel and a more democratic approach to government, the little brown people fell behind. The modern space race is centered on global militarism and the tactical advantage of taking the high ground, so to speak. Whether any of this will benefit mankind in general remains to be seen.
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.
Devoting the mind power, technology and financial resources to dominating space, just to keep up with your political foes and promote the misguided belief that humans can colonize space or economically enrich our lives down here on Earth is just plain stupid.
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
Apollo 16 brought a UV telescope along with them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectrograph
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China's ultimate plan for their space missions is not for the benefit of humanity. The culmination of the knowledge and experience gained from their missions will end up being used to put orbiting weapon platforms in space that can be positioned above any country at will. These platforms will be able to threaten and subdue any country they require compliance from, because there will be no realistic method to counter it. China has a history of stamping down on dissidence and its enemies and will take that aggressiveness to the skies.
You might argue that the US would do exactly the same thing, and you'd be wrong. The US would probably want orbital weapon platforms as well, but only as weapons of war. They'd never risk the backlash from using it as a means of threatening a country, whereas China doesn't give a shit. Heck, even if I'm wrong and the US became more of an aggressor, I'll be perfectly frank and say that I'd rather a world run by the US than the Chinese (not due to racism, but due to what the eventual outcome would be).
Posting as AC due to not wanting to lose karma due to people who keep their eyes and ears closed.
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.]
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.
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/
Comment removed based on user account deletion
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.
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.
someone hasn't "fallen back"? i believe we are on god's time now.