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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."
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
We're building the world's largest bureaucracy and collection of Ship B people.
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.
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
Just where did you go wrong?
The answer is easy. They went wrong just after WW2 when the US decided that they didn't need to transition to a peacetime economy. The whole military industrial complex is a result of that thinking. Mind you, the US military resources are many times more than needed to defend the country. Eisenhower was the first to recognise the dangers of the military industrial complex over 6 decades ago, and it seems nobody listened. The US is a country perpetually at war, when there isn't one they create one, either outside their borders or inside. Gotta continue to feed those "defense" consultant companies.
Everything else is window dressing. The patriotism, the american exceptionalism, the american dream all vaporware. The military has ruled the US since the end of WW2. And it continues to do so.
http://rhk111smilitaryandarmspage.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/unrestricted-access-to-the-pacific-ocean-what-china-wants-part-one/
Short time? It's taken them 43 years to go from first satellite launched to a lunar lander. Which is about 35 years more than either the US or USSR took to do the same thing. Hell, the US managed a MARS rover in only 36 years, much less a Lunar rover.
I'm not trying to denigrate the Chinese effort. It's making steady progress in a difficult field. But it's NOT making this progress in "quite a short time"....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
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.
No, there's no Chinese Edward Snowden.
Before the whole NSA thing blew open, we were worried about the Chinese government working with Chinese companies to make sure their backdoors were inserted in all of the networked equipment they sold to us.
Just because the NSA fiasco currently overshadows that doesn't mean that the Chinese haven't been and aren't still doing it.
The second-worst thing about the NSA fiasco is that it has taken everyone's eyes off of the other balls.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
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.
The father of the Chinese space program was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion == rockets. The U.S. government hounded him so much for being Chinese, and possibly a spy, he eventually returned home to China and built a space program there.
The rest of your thesis is deeply flawed and NOT insightful. The U.S. space program is alive and well at JPL, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and a number of other private companies.
The only thing that went wrong was letting a series of U.S. Presidents, Congress and NASA completely screw it up for a few decades. Space programs need to be run by visionaries with a plan, laser focus, sufficient resources and the capacity to stick with it even when its hard, so they acheive their goals. Von Braun was the visionary who made Apollo happen. Musk is the most likely visionary to get the U.S. to Mars first.
The space program as run by the U.S. government and NASA is doomed, if for no other reason than they completely change the strategy every 4 to 8 years, and their strategic decisions are based on how many jobs will be created in the districts of powerful Congressmen, not sound or rational engineering or whether a project is worth doing. As a result NASA seldom ever finishes anything (outside of JPL and observatories).
NASA is also never held accountable for failure to finish anything, partially because politcians always cancel the programs half way through right before they actually have to build and do something. NASA's staff need to propose projects that are well engineered and worth doing, tell Congress to fund them at a sufficient and sustained level to finish them, and if Congress and President wont they need to threaten to mass resign. If NASA can't do programs like that they should all mass resign, shutter the failed parts of the organization and put the money directly in to places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
@de_machina
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.