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China Looks To Deep Space Missions, Including More Lunar Landings and Robot Ants (xinhuanet.com)
MarkWhittington writes: China has already landed a rover on the moon and has launched numerous crewed space missions in low-Earth orbit. It is looking ahead to building a space station and landing more probes on the moon, including the lunar farside. According to a story in Xinhua, the Chinese are already looking beyond to deep space missions to destinations including the moon, Mars, and asteroids. The idea is that China will not be a respected space power until it starts accomplishing things in space that no other country has done before.
China has zero military bases outside of their country, they are spending their money more wisely (well, except maybe those ghost cities they built).
A brain is a terrible thing to waste... Mind? That's debatable.
You can see bubbles rising from their helmets. It is difficult to remove all the trapped air in their suits' crevices when they go on "spacewalks" (dives), so sometimes the air escapes and they have nothing to say about the discrepancy.
I think I'm beginning to understand the "Moooo" comments, at least, if they're only on NASA threads. (And yes, I know that guy outed himself a few weeks back.)
I feel fantastic, and I'm still alive.
"The idea is that China will not be a respected space power until it starts accomplishing things in space that no other country has done before."
Just remove "in space" and then control and eliminate your pollution and reduce your population and you will have all the respect the World could ever give you.
What happens in space... not too many people really care, but down here on Earth, taking care of the massive pollution and population you've created is the real challenge.
Not "ants on the moon".
"If any question why we died, Tell them because our fathers lied."
I guess Derick Zoolander was onto something when he talked about a school for ants.
https://www.bing.com/search?q=...
..and also that they don't trash the place like they've done to China.
I think you just proved China's point. They don't want to just follow in America's footsteps. That being said, yes, America has done a few things in space but America is laughable too. We've barely scratched the surface of mars but compared to the other planets and moons, mars is well covered. China has plenty of places where they can be first. How about a Venus rover, or a Europa rover or any of the other interesting planets and moons out there that we've barely explored.
Where did the US leave off? It has missions to the Kuiper Belt, several planets, and many in Earth orbit today. The decision to reduce or eliminate manned spaceflight makes perfect sense now that semi-autonomous satellites and landers are available.
Really, can the US put a person into space?
Whoops. Too late.
At least it appears they've seen the errors of their ways... now that their own missions are in danger of being hit by it, of course.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
They have all that excess manpower.
Take a few hundred "undesirables" at a time, stick them in shoddily built rockets and fire them on an outbound trajectory.
Food? Oxygen reserves? Sealed containers so the air stays in and the vacuum stays out?
Who has time for that? And a budget! Nonono!
Problem solved.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
As an American I support China going to the moon. This would hopefully bring about another "space race" like we saw decades ago, and bring with it a boost to our economy.
I also think that the Chinese space agency is only slightly ahead of that of North Korea, another Communist country with a habit of lying to the public over their technical capability. I recall China wanting to mine the moon for helium-3, to use it as fuel in fusion reactors. Either they know something about fusion power that we don't or they are fooling themselves on the viability of fusion power. Whatever happens to be true us here in the USA can only gain from this. If they fail then we know what doesn't work, if they succeed then we know what does.
I am armed because I am free. I am free because I am armed.
Sure, we started these missions off a decade or more ago, and they're finally coming to fruition. But meanwhile we're struggling to get the next generation of kids vaccinated - basic technology that's two hundred years old. And we might dream of sending up the Webb Telescope, but now we can't even build a terrestrial instrument in Hawaii.
As Chairboy used to say.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
LOL.
The Hawaii scope is blocked by locals. Considering that it is THEIR land, we have to work with them, not just beat them over the head.
Webb scope is on-track, except for the fact that the GOP had us in a recession. Now, that is over and the webb is again on track.
But, to equate these is a joke. Hell, NASA has OCO2 up in the sky plotting out the CO2 that is produced on this planet (with some MAJOR surprises due around Xmas; here is a preview of what is to come ).
We are about to have multiple companies that deliver humans to space, and currently have 3 separate companies that deliver goods to space.
With the next SpaceX launch to ISS, they will get a Bigelow unit, which is a further testing of the transhab/BA space modules for a new space station.
All in all, other than CONgress fucking with things, NASA is doing just fine.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
science is the exploration of new edges and changes in them. Putting up these missions is NOT about science, but about advancing their engineering and manufacturing. And it is not much different than America's push on having multiple private space companies doing the same thing.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
The TMT is not being blocked by "locals" acting alone but by out-of-state Green organizations who have flocked in to fluff up long-standing local bad feeling over "colonialism" in the state's founding. The mainland puppet masters running the protest "movement" are using a script they tested unsuccessfully in Arizona during the Nineties (http://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-94-010-0049-9_6#page-1). Though Greens have long opposed engineering applications like nuclear power and GMOs, the Arizona effort was their first move against scientific research itself. In their TMT effort, they have used social media to add weight to their campaign, and we're letting them get away with it without putting up much of a fight. Astronomers are the kind of people who have spent their lives responding to bullies by hiding out in study hall until the school bell rings, so they're not going to defend themselves in any meaningful way.
Look forward another decade: while California fights a full-blown polio epidemic as it vainly tries to prevent its remaining desalination plants from being blown up by suicide bombers, will anyone notice the decaying ISS fall out of orbit? Will anyone notice that JPL's deep space mission pipeline has quietly dried up over the intervening years?
But the US is not the world. Consider that China is one of the partners in TMT, and has a strong interest in seeing it built. If we could relocate the build to the Qinghai Plateau, where the seeing is equally good and the Greens have no power to infiltrate, the construction could proceed as soon as new local contractors were signed.