China Eager To Send Its Own Mission To Mars In the Wake of Mangalyaan

MarkWhittington writes The recent arrival into Mars orbit of both NASA's MAVEN and India's Mangalyaan Mars Orbiter Mission has not escaped the notice of China. The achievement of its Asian rival has especially proven galling to the Chinese. China has yet to successfully send a space probe beyond the moon. The development has elicited calls in Beijing to accelerate China's Mars program. China currently plans to send a rover to Mars in 2020 and, perhaps, do a Mars sample return mission in 2030. However, it feels that India, which China regards as its rival in an Asian space race, has stolen the spotlight and has left the Chinese behind. China is now keen to try to play catchup with its own Mars mission. One of the hold ups for a Chinese interplanetary exploration program is the delays surrounding the development of the Long March 5 rocket, which will be roughly the equivalent of the America Delta IV in its capabilities. The Chinese launch vehicle unveiling has slipped to at least 2015 because of the technological challenges it faces. The Long March 5 is also needed to launch the 20 ton modules of the Chinese space station, currently planned for later this decade.

Comments

Step one

[Anonymous Coward]

Steal the design, source code and production plans.

Conversion issues

[tomhath]

One of the hold ups for a Chinese interplanetary exploration program is the delays surrounding the development of the Long March 5 rocket, which will be roughly the equivalent of the America Delta IV in its capabilities

They're not used to working from blueprints that use feet, inches, and pounds.

How about giving Tibet back to the Tibetans?

[gtall]

Hey Chinese leaders, want to make your manhood look bigger? Give Tibet its freedom back. Renounce your insane claims to all of the S. China Sea, and stop threatening Taiwan. Until that happens, no amount of space funnies is going to make men out of you.

Re:How about giving Tibet back to the Tibetans?

[crunchygranola]

Tibet is strategically important to China, and I don't foresee them just giving it up because some hippies are holding protests. Tibet holds a huge supply of freshwater that flows into China. It has nothing to do with religion or politics, just natural resources...

Because unless they subjugate Tibetans, imprison and torture them, and try to eliminate their culture the water won't flow into China anymore?

Imperialists (and their apologists) always have these "reasons", even when they are tissue thin fig leaves.

China could pull of Tibet entirely, and they would still get their water. If the Tibetans tried to cut it off in some way, for some god-knows-why reason, China could shut the project down with one short military operation, and make the Tibetans regret ever trying it.

No need for maintaining a brutal occupation.

Whip 'em out

[GameboyRMH]

It's time to measure SPACE DICKS again!

Re:they can do it for lesd

[cavreader]

China is quintessential corporatism in action. The total merger of state and corporate power controlled by a board of directors commonly called the "Party". The country has not been communist for a long time and there are strong arguments supporting idea that they truly were never communist in the first place. The Chinese citizens have absolutely no way of influencing any government policies and decisions. Even simple non-violent protesting is frowned upon and suppressed by the government if it threatens the status quo . The government programs aimed at benefiting it's citizens do just enough to keep a lid on dissent and mass protests, and China definitely contains a lot of mass. China built it's economy on cheap labor and a fair amount of currency manipulation instead of adding their currency to the international basket of currencies and allowed to float in relation to other economies. Theses two pillars of economic policy are not sustainable. There are other countries capable of providing low cost labor. The Chinese citizens uplifted by the economic gains are starting to demand higher pay and benefits which is a well established principle in nationalistic economy model. The country may have risen up to be a world economic power but their Per capita statistics are still far behind countries such as Japan and the US. It is possible for a state to have a high GDP but if that success doesn't translate down to the average citizens it is a pretty meaningless metric.