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Chang'e-3 Lunar Rover Landing Slated For 13:40 UTC Saturday
savuporo writes "The Chinese Chang'e-3 probe will be landing on the moon [Saturday], 13:40 UTC. CCTV is likely to carry the event live as they did for initial launch. According to technical overview of the mission scenario and instruments, the landing will be fully autonomous with active landing hazard avoidance, which is the first time this has been attempted on any planetary landing. More real-time updates can be found on Twitter with ChangE3 hash tag and NASASpaceFlight forums live event section."
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
Place your bets on something going wrong. Cause you know, China is known for things that explode or catch fire that shouldn't.
I hoping them the best, sry.
I hope that the fruit of human space exploration would be share to all countries in the world.
It makes no sense to play politics in space.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There's some good live coverage of it here as of right now: http://english.cntv.cn/live/p2p/index.shtml
The landing has been successful! Yeah, humans!
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit.
CCTV's live coverage showed a textbook landing and solar array deployment, including some very shiny live pictures from the descent imager. Next steps are self-testing, instrument deployment and releasing the rover, which they've said will take up to 24 hours. Although I'd imagine that they'll release images from the panoramic mast camera as soon as possible.
An historical analogy is deep ocean sailing. It was pioneered by several different societies over several thousand years. There were numerous starts and stops as the technology improved and as the business case became clearer (no money, no mission, even for the religious guys). The Portuguese (Magellan) punched the Europe to Pacific routes out but could not hold onto any sort of monopoly for several reasons. The oceans are huge, Portugal went into an economic decline just about the time Magellan was sinking most of his fleet. Spain and Europe quickly copied the technology and had some extra money to toss at intrepid explorers.
So, it's not surprising that the countries that pioneered space exploration (the US and USSR) might lose their hegemony in the future. That's been the topic of Science Fiction for many years. And will likely turn in to fact at some point in the near future.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
There are lots of other minor issues - bureaucracy, risk aversion, aging workforce.
I may be an American citizen but I came from China. I still keep track of what's going on inside China.
From what I know, all the problems that you've outlined above China also got them.
Bureaucracy
You just couldn't imagine how bureaucratic the Chinese system is
Risk Aversion
Do you know why China's space program schedule is limited to one-spaceship every year ?
You guess it, risk aversion
Aging workforce
All the leading scientists in Chinese space programs are in their 60's, and older. That is because China practically lost an entire generation of scientist due to the social upheaval during the 1950's to the 1970's.
Yes, a new generation of young scientists are growing up, but they are still seriously lacking in practical experiences.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
Good points with the historical analogy to ocean-going explorations and later commerce. CCTV was talking about the implications of the China landing as I started to write this, and putting it into the context of past efforts by other countries like the USA and USSR. But they are making a big point about how nothing much has landed for 37 years that could do local experimented and take local high-definition images,,,
They are just ending their live coverage it seems...Nice to see a recap of the landing video as I was posting on slashdot while listening, and didn't realize how quick it was going to happen after the final deceleration burn, and missed seeing the actual video of the moment of landing at the time... The headline said the landing would happen about twenty minutes or so later than it did so I thought it would take longer...
The next CCTV show is up and talking more about the historical context right now... They are talking about how US President Carter gave China one gram of moon rock and they used half of it for research...
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
Great example; the same is true of people living in harsh climates like snowy areas -- or even, like on slashdot of people giving each other technological advice yet probably working in competing companies. One might even see that in a marriage -- with spouses working together when a child is sick yet also squabbling over housework... Life is at the interface of fire and ice, meshwork and hierarchy, competition and cooperation...
Politics is a process of resource allocation by discussion (backed ultimately by violence and also gift-giving or its withdrawal), as opposed to, say, mainstream US capitalist/consumer economics which is about resource allocation by moving the digital equivalent of pieces of artificially-scarce green paper around (within a larger US political context, as above backed by violence and gift-giving or its withdrawal). Yet, there is no reasons those communications and currencies could not be emails and IRC chats and bug tracker pstings, like coordinates much of Debian GNU/Linux.
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/08/04/14/1349202/study-reports-on-debian-governance-social-organization
So, it is not unreasonable to say that wherever human go, they will take some aspects of all that along. My father travelled the world as a merchant marine sailor for about twenty years, and one of his favorite sayings was a variation on "wherever you go, you take yourself along".
Yet. I think there is a deeper issue like mentioned in my sig. China has demonstrated new technologies of abundance by putting a robot on the moon powered by solar and nuclear technologies. Those technologies could produce physical abundance for all by today's standards -- even for trillions of people via self-replicating space habitats. That is a new truth. It can be a new truth even if probably humans may always find things to squabble about, like two kids in a room filled with toys can fight over the same one for whatever reasons of the moment.
Yet, such new technologies in a way make the world a smaller place, like the how the US space program to put a man on the moon in the 1960s was seen in US government as only justified in getting lots of funding in order to show the USSR that the USA was capable of landing a nuclear missile on Red Square. So many technologies can make the world smaller and smaller relative to our capacity to use such technologies to cause harm, like I write about here:
http://www.pdfernhout.net/recognizing-irony-is-a-key-to-transcending-militarism.html
"There is a fundamental mismatch between 21st century reality and 20th century security thinking. Those "security" agencies are using those tools of abundance, cooperation, and sharing mainly from a mindset of scarcity, competition, and secrecy. Given the power of 21st century technology as an amplifier (including as weapons of mass destruction), a scarcity-based approach to using such technology ultimately is just making us all insecure. Such powerful technologies of abundance, designed, organized, and used from a mindset of scarcity could well ironically doom us all whether through military robots, nukes, plagues, propaganda, or whatever else... Or alternatively, as Bucky Fuller and others have suggested, we could use such technologies to build a world that is abundant and secure for all."
We may always have competition between people for various reasons (the mating dance?), yet our society can still figure out ways to structure that competition in healthier ways.
"No contest: the case against competition"
http://www.shareintl.org/archives/cooperation/co_nocontest.htm
----
"We need competition in order to survive."
"Life is boring without competition."
"It is competition that gives us meaning in life."
These word
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
They intentionally landed quite a long way from any of the Apollo sites, in case something went wrong during descent. They didn't want to effectively bomb one of those sites, even by accident.
It remains to be seen what the longevity of the rover will be. It is solar powered, so if they're patient and it was constructed very very well to keep the lunar dust out of moving parts, in theory they could drive that far. They would set a roving distance record if they did. Possibly a very LONG record, since there are no roads and the crater rims make for very rough terrain. Even finding a navigable route that far would be tough.
UTC is the time in Greenwich, which is in England. You can't really get any *more* English.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'