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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."
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
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?
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.
We're building the world's largest bureaucracy and collection of Ship B people.
China has no direct access to the Pacific.
Back when you were in school, you got your lunch money taken a lot didn't you?
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.
And the Chinese will have even bigger satellites watching those satellites...
No sig today...
... 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.
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
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
http://rhk111smilitaryandarmspage.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/unrestricted-access-to-the-pacific-ocean-what-china-wants-part-one/
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!
Yep, and it really worked great for the Russians! You can't point a telescope anywhere in the sky these days without spotting a Russian space colony!
#naabhaprzrag, #sverubfr-000, #agi-fcbafberq, negvpyr[pynff*=' negvpyr-ary-'] { qvfcynl: abar !vzcbegnag; }
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.
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.
Now that's a scary thought. The Empire of Japan's spurious belief it needed to militarily secure access to Southeast Asia to be a viable economic power led them to attack Pearl Harbor. Once they dug themselves out from the hole they'd dug themselves into, that belief was proved spectacularly wrong.
The Chinese regime has shown some of the same worrying signs of jingoistic paranoia.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
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.
Well, with one small twist: China has (at least for millennia) been quite content to consider themselves the center-point between Heaven and Earth (culturally, that's how they'd considered themselves all this time.) With I think like one or two exceptions (one of which involved a Mongol leader wanting a piece of Japan), they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
It'll be damned hard to break that kind of ingrained culture - not saying it'll never happen, just that it'll take a lot to overcome the cultural inertia.
Now Space may whet their appetites a bit for it, but I think it'll be just to move out in that direction, which honestly I'm completely okay with - so long as they don't keep anyone else from migrating skyward...
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
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.
they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
Yes, but within that region - which is certainly not exclusively populated by Han Chinese - they've never been shy about aggressively claiming territories that were once independent, or are held by other nations. And under the Manchus, at least, any nation wishing to do business with China had to essentially pay tribute to the emperor, which resulted in basically every European colonial power being officially considered a vassal state. China's current brand of imperialism is a big reason why the Vietnamese, who have every reason to hate us, are on surprisingly good terms with the US right now.
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.
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.
Hopefully the U.S.A. can tone down their aggressiveness
All the current disputes with China (Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Parcel Islands, Spratley Islands, Scarborough shoals, Socotra Rock, etc) are a result of Chinese, not American, aggressiveness.
and be content to defend their own borders
If America withdrew from the Pacific then Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would all develop nuclear weapons within six months. Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines would follow as soon as they were able.
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....
The Pacific Ocean is the private pond of the USA from Guam to California, and Alaska to Samoa. Anything which happens inside of that rough box including up to the Kármán line and down to the mantle of the Earth is justifiably seen as a direct threat to the United States of America and would be seen clearly as casus belli. The U.S. Navy still rules supreme in that part of the world. China can certainly "practice war games" and do other crap in "international waters", but that part of the Pacific Ocean will never be under Chinese influence except in the most transitory fashion.
BTW, this part of the Pacific would clearly be considered "defending their own borders" on the part of the USA as well. That China might carve out a smaller niche part of the Pacific from the North Korean border south to Thailand is no doubt something they would equally consider important, but that is about as far in the Pacific that China will ever really control as a part of the Pacific. China certainly isn't going to do something dumbass like invading the Philippines, or for that matter even Taiwan or South Korea without sparking another world war.
China will certainly not "rule the Pacific" as you are asserting.