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Europe and China Will Team Up For a Robotic Space Mission
Taco Cowboy writes with this excerpt from Space.com: On Monday (Jan. 19), the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) and the European Space Agency (ESA) issued a call for proposals for a robotic space mission that the two organizations will develop jointly. "The goal of the present Call is to define a scientific space mission to be implemented by ESA and CAS as a cooperative endeavor between the European and Chinese scientific communities," ESA officials wrote in a statement Monday. "The mission selected as an outcome of the present Joint Call will follow a collaborative approach through all the phases: study, definition, implementation, operations and scientific exploitation." The call envisions a low-budget mission, saying that ESA and CAS are each prepared to contribute about 53 million euros (U.S. $61.5 million at current exchange rates). The spacecraft must weigh less than 661 lbs. (300 kilograms) at launch and be designed to operate for at least two to three years, ESA officials wrote in the call for proposals. All proposals are due by March 16, and the peer-review process will start in April. Mission selection is expected to occur in late 2015, followed by six years of development, with a launch in 2021.
I, for one, welcome our new marijuana overlords.
We Europeans have been trying to weed them out of our economy but apparently we need to approach it in an entirely different way, since we've only managed to hash it up so far. We'll now try to potshot them.
Ezekiel 23:20
You guys are beyond hopeless, man
Whenever there is something about the Chinese you guys sure to crawl out form the woodworks and heap baseless accusations on the Chinese
So you think you are better than those Chinese?
300 kg ( 661 imperial pounds)
That's the goal of the call for proposal. Something like "Dear scientist, we have a budget of 300kg and 50 millions euros (out of which x% must be kept for the platform). What do you want to do?"
We Europeans have been trying to weed them out of our economy but apparently we need to approach it in an entirely different way, since we've only managed to hash it up so far. We'll now try to potshot them.
You must be high. We've nothing to fear from those dopes. For some, the grass is always greener on the other side.
Yes of course valuable ESA technologies, because USA isn't producing anything of value.
Pretty sure NASA has been relegated to the status of "service provider" for SpaceX.
Perhaps the EU scientists see China as being a future significant space science / engineering power and is exploring potential future relationships. Maybe EU space scientists don't see the USA and Russia as the only major players in town. Given that that Chinese are one of the two nations that are capable of launching humans successfully into space at present it would seem fair enough to take them seriously and work with them.