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China Completes Its First Lunar Return Mission
China's Chang'e 5-T1 mission to the moon has not only taken some beautiful pictures of the Earth from the craft's perspective (hat tip to reader Taco Cowboy) but as of Friday evening (continental U.S. time) returned a capsule to Earth. (The capsule landed in Inner Mongolia.) From the linked article: Prior to re-entering the Earths atmosphere, the unnamed probe was travelling at 11.2 kilometres per second (25,000 miles per hour), a speed that can generate temperatures of more than 1,500 degrees Celsius (2,700 degrees Fahrenheit), the news agency reported. To slow it down, scientists let the craft "bounce" off Earths atmosphere before re-entering again and landing. ... The module would have been 413,000 kilometres from Earth at its furthest point on the mission, SASTIND said at the time. The mission was launched to test technology to be used in the Change-5, Chinas fourth lunar probe, which aims to gather samples from the moons surface and will be launched around 2017, SASTIND previously said.
How curious that this comes in the same week the Americans lost two space vehicles in one week.
The future of space belongs to China. They are the ones with the cajones to do it. They'll be the first manned mission to Mars too because they'll just fucking do it. They won't be crippled with fear and pork.
China 2014 = USA 1960.
China can get humans in to space today... and the USA cannot.
I think that points to the direction... not what happened 50 years ago.
US has never had an unmanned sample return mission from the moon. Soviets did, though, in the early 70's.
They can spin it, "US sucks, they have to send up humans because their robots are too dumb."
Table-ized A.I.
I think we can actually pin the blame on Korolev here. He died in 1966, and without him Soviet space program lost their main driver.
And without stiff and successful competition he provided, US didn't use the same resources as before on space exploration after clawing their one victory after series of losses. A very smart thing to do considering the costs of the program and the fact that people only remember your last victory, not the string of losses that came before it.
AFAIK, today, even the US is back to the pre-1970 era. IIRC, NASA has lost knowledge about the Saturn's engine. Even in the nuclear domain, the industrial knowledge on how to produce some critical element of nuclear warhead has been lost.
> China 2014 = USA 1960.
Oh shut up. They've managed to do something we did in the 1970's.
Well, he/she does have a point, as you actually manage to say yourself. When the US did this, they were in a massive, economic upturn, as is China now; and we in the West were in the grip of a massive, if somewhat naive, optimism - remember the Hippies? It was in the 60es and 70es that we shook of the post-WWII gloom and started believing that we could achieve anything and everything. Unfortunately we also managed to squander much of it - my personal opinion is that it is consumerism more than anything that's to blame, and unless China reins in a bit, they will too. So it goes in the world, but when that time comes, perhaps we will be ready again.