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China: The Next Space Superpower
the_newsbeagle writes "'As 2014 dawns, China has the most active and ambitious space program in the world,' says this article. While it's true that the Chinese space agency is just now reaching milestones that the U.S. and Russia reached 40 years ago (its first lunar rover landed in December), the Chinese government's strong support for space exploration means that it's catching up fast. On the agenda for the next decade: A space station to rival the ISS, a new spaceport, new heavy-lift rockets, a global satellite navigation system to rival GPS, and China's first space science satellites."
It is unavoidable. Hopefully the U.S.A. can tone down their aggressiveness and be content to defend their own borders, otherwise we have an inescapable course to WWIII and the world will pay a heavy price.
Now, will the James Bond script writers use this for inspiration for some Sean Conery era type of Bond films?
shWhat? The shChinese have a shspace shtation?
Ah, the good old days of Bond films!
Didn't everyone speak Chinese? :)
..don't panic
Well ... That does sound like a world dominance agenda. International trade is already at the mercy of China in some ways. Space exploration just adds to this.
Redundancy is good. What's more, the US-controlled GPS system can be crippled at will by the US military - and was for the longest time, until fairly recently. Do you trust the US to provide service with full accuracy to the entire world forever? Do you trust the US to have the capacity to replace failing GPS satellites? Heck, the US isn't even capable of keeping enough essential weather satellites up there anymore...
The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Superpower in might and size and economy. Republicanism will be the blame.
Unlike the USSR and America, China has not had the benefit of of German rocket scientists to develop and run their space programme.
They may have a few stolen blue prints, and without doubt the calculations and knowledge that the USSR still knows and America is fast forgetting, but they have also walked a long distance on their own feet, and they have done this in quite a short time.
Sure, you Americans can trumpet "Pppthhhffff the Moon, been there, done that" but I do need to ask: When China and India have bases on the moon and men on Mars. More importantly, when you as a nation have lost the ability to launch your own rockets, and you can only rent payload from communist states -
Whatever did happen to your once great ambitions?
Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
Just where did you go wrong?
A totalitarian regime would have an easier time developing manned spaced flights and perhaps colonies off the blue marble.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Until someone blows up a satellite, there's no "power" in space. You can launch from essentially anywhere, there's no way to monopolize the field.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
That time traveler in the documentary "Looper" was right .. I should learn Chinese.
I am Slashdot. Are you Slashdot as well?
We're building the world's largest bureaucracy and collection of Ship B people.
America still has people literally shitting in the streets. It's a super-shithole super-power, but that doesn't stop Americans from shitting on the rest of the world too.
Nothing seems to get goverments spending money on space like any kind of race. Just a shame China don't just say "Mars would look great in China Red", that would soon get the budgets for NASA and to a smaller extent ESA raised a bit.
Rather co-operation on this, I know there is some. A Chinese moon base? Like America would let that stand!
Until someone blows up a satellite, there's no "power" in space.
Both the US and China have blown up satellites in space from the ground within the past few years using missiles. I'm quite sure Russia could manage the trick as well if they felt like it.
China's space program differs from those of other nations in part because of the nation's political structure: A single-party government with a bevy of strong state-owned enterprises can get a lot done.
if we're talking 'superpowers' then no its not. Russia, sent the first man into orbit and the first robot to the moon through state owned enterprise.
the United States operates in much the same way. lockheed martin and northrup grumman would cease to exist if not for US taxpayer subsidy in the pursuit of our space program. their product is defined largely by US policy, and their sales controlled by it as well. theyre 'free enterprise' only in so far as it privatizes its profits.
Good people go to bed earlier.
Let's have another one with China versus Europe, and America is the Third World this time around.
... because what the world is ANOTHER FREAKING SET OF NAVIGATIONAL SATELLITES!
I'll launch my own too, can't trust any government. Maybe we should found a set for each of us together through Kickstarter?
More junk in the nearby space place!
And pass both the US and Russia quickly.
Why? Technology is 40 years newer. Materials science has changed, automation, manufacturing techniques and a slew of other core technologies important for space flight have changed as much in the last 40 years as computing technology has. They're going to be able to do more with less the same as other up-starts like SpaceX can do -- but they're going to invest national levels of resources into it, with SpaceX levels of innovation and dramatically less of a "defense contractor welfare" bloat that drags down NASA.
And good for them. For the sake of every living thing that's fought entropy for the last three billion years on Earth, it doesn't matter who is working towards getting life off this rock, it just matters that someone is.
This is typical authoritarian bravado. China invests heavily in a field that generates PR for nationalistic pride (with a dual military purpose.) Meanwhile, they don't even have a postal address system. Don't be fooled by the hype. Yes, their economy will be the largest, simply due to their numbers. (If the Chinese simply earned per capita one third of the US average income, they'd be a larger economy than the US.)
I'm not sure if that's just racism or lack of knowledge... but China has more people living in a US-level middle class than the US has people.
And, strangely, I've never had an issue mailing something to China. You don't just scribble a name on it, and someone walks along an asks 1.2 billion people if that happens to be them, after all.
You do realize that the US is a totalitarian regime, I hope? In a capitalist system, the totalitarian dictators are the banks.
The banks may not kill and torture you physically, but they'll take all your possessions and leave you destitute -- certainly a form of torture. And if you understand Fractional Reserve Banking, you already know that they operate everyone in society as labor slaves in a perpetual system of debt that by design cannot be paid off.
You're right about totalitarian regimes being efficient, and ours certainly is. A democratic one would be far less so, but admittedly a nicer place to live.
Wake me up when one of these budding super powers no longer has people shitting in the streets. China and India are third world shit holes who waste money like this, when they should really be working to help their people.
It may not be obvious to people who haven't spent any time traveling the world ... but the rich in China make the rich in the US look poor ... the middle class in China is living as well as the US, and is 6x the size ... and the poor in China don't live in anywhere near the squalor that the poor in the American Southeast live in. Visit rural China and rural West Virginia ... your eyes may be opened a bit.
TFA says it perfectly: "...Johnson-Freese put it more bluntly: âoeIn terms of technology, are the Chinese at a peer level or more advanced than us? No, absolutely not. What they have that we donâ(TM)t is political will.â"
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
-Styopa
really? turning a discussion about Chinese space efforts into a rant about Obamacare? Guess being that I'm British I dont have to worry about such things. UK space program is barely worth calling a program :)
They've got something on the moon and can get people into orbit this year. The US is years away from being able to put anyone in orbit without buying a ticket on a Russian rocket.
...for a country that cries about being poor when it comes to cutting their greenhouse gas emissions.
The old paradigm of "developing" and "developed" countries is being challenged, to say the least, by China and India. This is an issue and source of growing friction we'll have to deal with for many decades, and not just in the thorny area of climate change.
To be honest, I fail to see how invading two countries is internal spending.
"It's such a fine line between stupid and clever" -- David St. Hubbins, Spinal Tap
The US can still beat them in Eve Online, can't we?
How many times did I hear from tech pundits that the New Virtual Economy made the brick and mortar world less important? Isn't this the same?
Oh wait. There was that little thing called the dot com crash. Guess the real world capabilities still matter.
No big deal. Guess I'll just get a beer and go back to playing Kerbal Space Program, then. It's what made America great. ;)
As someone who normally tries to counterbalance the inaccuracies regarding China i think you might be mistaken.
I was in china a few years ago and went out of my way to visit Rural areas and they are literally "dirt poor". Granted i have never been in the southeast but its hard to imagine anyone still living like that in north america.
Next time you are in China drive a few hours out of any city and stop by to visit the locals in the area.
You've been paying too much attention to Mitt Romney and not enough to the facts. The war in Iraq alone would have been enough to put men on Mars ten times over.If that didn't suffice tax breaks to millionaires and corporations alone would too.
Yet, your proposal to put men on Mars is to remove health insurance from the sick. Boy has his country ever lost its way!
Money spent invading two countries: ~$1T over ten years.
Money spent on SSA/Medicare/Medicaid in the same period: ~$16T. At the Federal level. Medicaid is partly funded by the States, so the total would be slightly higher
Does tend to look like our internal spending is considerably greater than the cost of those two wars, doesn't it?
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
What's more, the US-controlled GPS system can be crippled at will by the US military - and was for the longest time, until fairly recently.
Although Selective Availability was turned off (in reality, the random offset was set to zero), don't believe for a moment that the US military has given up that capability, or that they don't have similar backdoor capabilities on other satnav systems.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
From Wikipedia:
USA NASA annual budget: $17.7 billion, and that is just the NASA budget, the US Air Force Space budget is another $8 billion.
China CNSA annual budget: $1.3 billion.
Total pending by all national space agencies: $40.6 billion.
So the NASA budget is over 10 times that of CNSA and almost as much as all the other nations' programs put together. Considering that the US GDP is only about twice that of China's, then the NASA budget is a far larger percentage of the US GDP than the proportion that CNSA is of China's.
"the poor in China don't live in anywhere near the squalor that the poor in the American Southeast live in"
You have no idea what you're talking about.
I'm not sure if that's just racism or lack of knowledge... but China has more people living in a US-level middle class than the US has people.
Both what you said and what the GP post said are true.
China may have more middle class, but they have a huge amount of population in poverty as well.
On a per capita basis, if they matched the US, their economy would be about 3 times larger than ours. The do not have that yet.
The US banned NASA from cooperating with Chinese space program, especially the ISS, due to China's tendency to steal technology. Much space technology has military applications. There was an embarassing incident this year when Chinese scientists were temprarily banned from a US exoplanet conference because NASA was involved.
But its time to do joint government science projects now. Two groups together can accomplish more together than separately.
Hope their space ship works better than their ice breaker ship.. Did we not already learn that chineese laborors don't particularly care about quality? *sigh* I sure hope the astronauts are not volentold as well..
"A mind reader? That sounds like sci fi." "Honey, we live on a space ship"
The rich in China do make the rich in the US look poor. But there's two reasons for that: they've gotten where they are by exploiting the weak. Today's rich Chinese should be compared to the Rockafellers and Carnegies of the 1900s. Those men were so fabulously wealthy in comparison to their peers--and they got there by paying men $1 a day for 14 hours of backbreaking labor that led to life expectancies under 60. Today's Chinese moguls are doing exactly the same thing.
The cost of food and other daily supplies is low in China. When you're rich, you have money to blow on status symbols, like Louis Vuitton bags and Bentleys. Plus, the concept of "saving for retirement" or setting aside money for a child's college funds are nonexistent in China. When you get to spend all the money you make, you'd be amazed what you can buy.
and the poor in China don't live in anywhere near the squalor that the poor in the American Southeast live in. Visit rural China and rural West Virginia ... your eyes may be opened a bit.
I don't know what part of China you visited, but I've never seen a place in the US without running water and electricity. I've seen some really awful conditions on Indian Reservations in the US SE...the rural areas of China are from another century. Indoor plumbing, law, electricity...those are not items every Chinese has yet.
maybe thats the tokamak's containment failing.. After all, what could possibly go wrong?
"A mind reader? That sounds like sci fi." "Honey, we live on a space ship"
I've seen the thousands of people used to monitor space launches run by government programs. Like all government programs, they become public works projects. My son works for SpaceX in Torrance California. Their last successful launch of the Falcon 9 had 39 guys monitoring the launch. 39! I am doubtful China can match SpaceX. I can't wait till the manned Dragon capsule launch.I hope SpaceX eats everybody else's lunch. I confident they will too. :-)
Oh, yeah! Wise guy, huh? Woob woob woob woob! Nyuk! Nyuk!
To take an opposing view to 99% of the posts here, China is not as big and scary as it seemed to be. Remember, at the end of the 80's early 90's everyone thought Japan was going to overtake the US, and look where they are now; they haven't recovered yet from their market collapse 20 years ago.
China is in a similar crisis; the Party is good at hiding it but when you look at the signs they are there. Unemployment is rising in China. Profits are dwindling. Layoffs are occasionally happening. None of this should happen in a so called "Communist" state. This is mostly due to the fact that their middle class is getting more wealthy and demanding better rates and better living conditions while at the same time most of what built the Chinese economic model was cheap labor. Most of the cheap labor demand is moving to Southeast Asia and away from China as China is actually getting too expensive. I know several companies that have brought manufacturing back to the US and Mexico because it's cheaper, higher quality, and North America is easier to work with than China.
Why do I say that? Because an active and aggressive space program requires a robust and sturdy economy. The first steps in a space program are a huge money pit to get going, and China's economy is starting to show the cracks in their model. They will struggle to maintain this when other priorities take shape, such as dumping more funding into the economy to maintain employment or shoring up their banks to maintain the shrinking credit market there.
Meanwhile, the US's economy is not built on government agencies like NASA, it's built on entrepreneurship and private enterprise. The private sector historically has been more efficient than the government in almost every respect. The last 50+ years NASA poured money down the drain to get over the initial technical hurdles to get into space, but now that technology is robust. The next step into massive space exploration is not in building the next super advanced rocket that costs billions, which is what NASA is good at, it's in building a cheap reusable rocket that is cheap so we can increase the number of launches by orders of magnitude, historically that's what private enterprise is good at.
I mean, at this stage in space exploration, what's better? An ultra-advanced rocket that costs $100M to launch so you get 10 launches for $1B, or a cheap rocket that costs $1M to launch so you get 1,000 launches for the same money? Doing things like building a space base, a moon base, sending a mission to Mars, etc., are all technically feasible propositions, but they are not economically feasible. The next major hurdle is to make them economically feasible so we can do these things.
That's the transition going on right now in the US economy. NASA is evolving into a guiding force for the several private enterprises that are starting to come online, and the private enterprises are learning how to make launches cheap. China is still trying to get over the technical hurdles and the science stuff first. So right now it may look like China is ahead. In 10/15/20 years, it'll look like a vastly different story.
US, Russia, China, Europe, France, Japan, India... roughly that's all.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.
Citation on "dont even have a postal address system" or were you just to lazy to even look it up?
You mean like the US Zip, or enhanced zip+4 system?
Seems they use a similar system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_in_China
PSS :
The postal service in China can be dated back to the Shang Dynasty ( 1766 BC to 1122 BC)
Seems they may have addressed their "postal address system" in that time.
America still has people literally shitting in the streets.
As a resident of the Bay Area, I can attest to this.
I was going to type a longer response with links where I mention things that the "fear China" crowd ignores like China has absolutely ruined their environment (have you seen the news reports on the smog?) & human population w/ the 'one child policy'...blah blah blah
parent says it more succinctly...
Thank you Dave Raggett
More importantly, since there are multiple satellite constellations, why aren't there more multi-system receivers available?
The beauty of using the U.S., Russian, and Chinese GPS systems simultaneously is that your accuracy increases quite a bit. Imagine GPS being accurate to a few centimeters.
What do you mean? iPhone 4s and newer models supports GLONASS and GPS. Galileo or the Chinese one are not fully functional yet.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONASS_Navigation
Not that we need another space race but it's tragic that Americans don't even notice that it's something we no longer do.
Extinction-Level Event. We might want to survive as a species *when* Earth gets toasted.
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Quite a few already do! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONASS_Navigation That is just phones, but that is how a huge chunk of the population gets their sat-nav these days
md5sum
d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e
The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
Yes because we all know that neither the Russians nor the Chinese would ever under any circumstances manipulate such alternatives that they controlled if it suited their whims to do so and only the "evil" US would ever do such a terrible thing. Right....
Thats the point you may be 40 years ahead mow But its been 40 years of mostly treading water and scaling back on your ambitions.
Also as you americans all ways accuse them of stealing your tech it will only take 10 years for them to catch up
when i was a kid i loved going to the san diego air & space museum and tasting the dried out ice cream powder. maybe someday soon i can go a similar museum in shanghai and try some powered chicken feet! seems like a win to me.
Only if the nation doesn't go bankrupt, first. They already are spending beyond their GDP. This moon shot was a PR thing, not a science experiment. The rest is also PR.
Cranky educator.
There has frequently been good evidence that the US innovations were copied. Occasionally it has been shown that this was done using actual copies of some of the technical information.
OTOH, those who make that claim usually forget how the US got it's start: copying technology from Great Britain (then leading the industrial revolution). This was also often done using copied actual technology. (At that time technical documentation was less important than the actual mechanisms being available to study, and the theoretical work being available.)
Still, even give all the copying, at a certain stage in history it is common for many people in separate cultures to make the same invention independently. E.g., three or four people have equally good claims to have independently invented the telephone. IIRC two were US citizens and one was Russian or Swiss. I have only vague memories of there being a fourth. And several people have good claims to haveing invented powered flight independently. The Wright brothers won in court, but I'm afraid that I don't consider that much in the way of proving that the others didn't invent it independently, or even first.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
what the US did 40 years ago, but that's also what the US can no longer do at all
Oops
Really? Like what are you referring to here?
You listed the countries that currently (or soon) could put one up. You didn't justify them as necessary.
Personally I think it should be three or four, but five would probably be safer. That way you could always trust SOMEONE to be providing service. Hopefully they'd all use similar (i.e., easily switchable) protocols. The reason for five is that someone is likely to come up with a was to "lock-in" the users, and you want to be able to avoid them.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Sure they can, but unless Russia, China, and the US all coordinate to do this bullshit at the same time in the same places, then it doesn't matter.
That's literally what redundancy means.
I don't know about in this decade, but a few decades ago there were people in the US living essentially on a non-cash economy. I'll grant that they held possession of their own property...but I can't say they owned it, as I don't believe they ever paid taxes, so they probably couldn't hold a deed. I think they must have got by on, maybe, $500/year. They probably weren't on the census roles. They used someone else's mailbox when they needed to mail (I don't know if they ever did). They lived on garden and chickens. Many of them had a goat for milk. But they didn't consider themselves poor the way people in a city on welfare do.
I suspect that such people have now been forced off "their" land, but I don't know it. The land wasn't that good. It was too hilly to be good for mechanized farming. So maybe nobody wants it yet. Soon, though, they'll be forced out and into real poverty...where they're dependent on strangers for survival and a place to sleep.
Being poor isn't not having money, it's not being able to dependably get food and a place to sleep. If you don't need money, then lacking it doesn't make you poor.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
The rich in China ...'ve gotten where they are by exploiting the weak
Not being offensive here, but... how do you think the rich in the US have gotten where they are? By sincere and honest hard work?
It's a decent answer, but I'm not really sure that a planet is the right answer. Asteroids have a lot going for them if you can beat the "closed ecosystem" problem, and if you can't, then you can't live on Mars. (Granted, Mars is probably a slightly easier version of the problem, but that's not sure.) Asteroids let you distribute the risk, and don't impose much penalty when you want to ship stuff home. (Well, around half as much of a acceleration penalty, but you can apply it slowly, which makes things like ion rockets and solar sails practical. They'll never get you off a planet, but they can let you land cargo on one without reaction mass.)
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Wake me up when one of these budding super powers no longer has people shitting in the streets.
You've apparently never been in a city after their team wins the Superbowl / NBA Finals / World Series / Stanley Cup / etc.
"Made in China" can be quality stuff, as good as anything you get in US. It just costs more than the usual junk. Given how the switch was driven by cost in the first place, it makes sense that most of "Made in China" is junk that is 20x cheaper, not decent goods that are 5x cheaper.
Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
Just where did you go wrong?
American Idol, NFL, NBA, etc.. When we decided it was more fun to watch others than to do it ourselves. Lazy fuckers.
Actually it's more like Halliburton, Chase Manhattan, Mosanto, Walmart, Eli Lily, Microsoft, and the rest of the commercial giants that have dug American in.
Instead of bravely go to where no one has gone before, the Americans have been slaving for whoever sign their paychecks for the past 40 odd years without any clue what their country is heading.
It's the American greediness that has killed the American spirit.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
The problem with putting men on mars is: why? Why go there? Why spend $1T to send a few guys to their deaths on Mars
Something people wondered about the war in Iraq too.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
The problem is that Mars makes a terrible lifeboat. It will absorb all resources from other HSF (as Mars research is increasingly doing to planetary exploration at NASA). And it can provide no resources back to other settlement or exploration. And it'd be a century or more of dependence on Earth, at minimum, before it could survive the loss of Earth.
OTOH, by "colonising" asteroids (and moons) and associated space-stations, you scatter your people around the entire solar system. Each step outwards provides resources for further exploration. (Even for later Mars settlement.) In the beginning, providing say air/water/fuel, expanding into raw materials for construction, eventually entire settlements. Meaning that they can be profit centres; and, once established, expansion becomes largely commercially driven rather than entirely funded and resourced by governments.
Each asteroid "settlement" is too small to survive, but collectively they create sufficient resilience to survive losses (eventually including the loss of Earth), require less funding to establish, and will expand more organically. A thousand small self-funding caches, rather than one big expensive cache.
Science is all about firing a drunk pig out of a cannon just to see what happens.
I hope you realized the main purpose of Global Position System was sadly military related. These 7 entities are those who need/want to have their own GPS system for the military advantage.
There is a spark in every single flame bait point.