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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 !
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.
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 !
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?
Apollo 16 brought a UV telescope along with them...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Far_Ultraviolet_Camera/Spectrograph
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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.]
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.
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
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