Slashdot Mirror
China Plans To Reach Mars by 2020 and Eventually Build a Moon Base (techinsider.io)
Rebecca Harrington, writing for Tech Insider: China has plans to orbit the moon, land people on it, and eventually settle a moon colony. But that's just part of the nation's vision for space exploration: China intends to get a spacecraft to Mars by 2020. "Our long-term goal is to explore, land, and settle [on the moon]," Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's moon and Mars missions, told the BBC. "We want a manned lunar landing to stay for longer periods and establish a research base." Weiren didn't specify when the country plans to accomplish these goals, but he did say they will "check out" the far side of the moon before attempting to land astronauts there. This mission already has concrete plans. He also said China wants to reach Mars by 2020, and implied that the country has finally settled on a mission to send a rover to the Red Planet. "We will orbit Mars, land and deploy a rover -- all in one mission," Weiren told the BBC.
Roll over and play dead?
Then go do it.
Talk is cheap, bitches.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
This is what you get when your manned space program is driven by actually having achievable goals than by nostalgia and keeping the government pork flowing. Oh I have no doubt there will be a lot of flag waving and such, but I'll take my hat off to them when they pull off a sustainable colony on the moon. Which event will come long before NASA even manages its publicity stunt manned flight to Mars. Manned space flight is still risky, and you will lose people eventually. NASA has largely decided that the risk of losing people is unacceptable to Americans and they will keep manned projects in design indefinitely to avoid it. Just wait and see. One thing the Chinese have going for them, they won't let loss of life knock their program on its ass. Those lost will be rightly called heroes and will inspire, not terrify, others to follow.
Seriously, the causal racism on Slashdot these days is getting way out of hand and really really old (as you probably are)
I expect the sun to rise tomorrow; mind you, no one promised anything of the sort but still... I hold out hope. ;)
Honestly, it's my personal opinion that the US needs someone else to beat us to a major milestone in space. We've fallen into a bit of a winners dilemma. We've beaten everyone else, why do we need to keep trying? I think if China beats the US to Mars, you'll see the political will materialize around the space program again.
So that was why the Chinese guy was arrested for political critique when he said he is displeased with the inadequate erections?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Seriously, the causal racism on Slashdot these days is getting way out of hand and really really old (as you probably are)
Seriously, anonymous complaints are white noise.
It is already started. SpaceX is building rockets that are cheaper than China's to launch (and that is with China's money manipulation).
In addition, we have Blue Origin which will have cheap orbital rockets by 2020.
Then we have Bigelow Aerospace, that is making for space stations, and even lunar/mars bases to be cheap.
Finally, NASA is hard at work helping build up a number of companies that will want to go to the moon around 2020. And Spacex will be going around 2027 to Mars. Chances are, that SpaceX's BFR will be used to go to the moon as well since we are talking 150-250 tonnes into orbit around 2020, and for a costs of less than 500M. That will be hard to ignore.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
They have't started shit. So far, they're just TALKING shit.
Well yes and no. They did land a rover on the moon recently. It croaked during the first lunar night, but it worked up until then. So they are building hardware and successfully soft-landing it places that aren't Earth. They aren't random space nutters wishing out loud. They're engineers with a proven track record, orbiting multiple humans and landing a moon rover. Western media carefully forgets that China has engineers and astronauts with orbital experience, not just sub-orbital.
Unfortunately SpaceX is screwing the American taxpayers right now, being incapable of getting even 10 tonnes into orbit for 133M with its CRS flights.
You do realize that SpaceX just sent a CRS payload into orbit this past week, and the capsule is still up on the ISS attached to the station as I'm writing this reply?
I don't know what you are complaining about, other than a big oops happened with the CRS-7 flight. Those issues (at least the cause of that incident) have been resolved and the Falcon 9 has gone back into service with what I have seen as one of the fastest turn around times of any launch provider after a complete catastrophic failure of their primary launch vehicle.
The only people complaining are folks who are clueless about rocket science.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against.
For the record, I wasn't railing about "space nutters". I was preempting the usual Slashdot complainers.
They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature.
I'm not seeing what they're missing. The rover landed. Building anything on the lunar surface is, for the time being, just more of the same. Land a bunch of pieces and make sure at least one has the wheels and the lifting capacity to trundle around and collect all the pieces and set them next to each other.
I strongly suspect that the US notion of a lunar base and the Chinese notion of a lunar base are very different. We're not talking buried domes with grass and trees inside them. We're talking ISS-style tin cans, except on the ground. The first thing an arriving astronaut will have to do is trudge across a lunar maria dragging a set of jumper cables to manually hook up the solar array. Which will be deployed from another tin can using a wrench and a goddamn hand crank. (I suspect there are plenty of US astronauts who would be delighted with such a simple design, instead of the usual baroque NASA fare.) I'm quite certain that Chinese engineers have the necessary skills and experience to make that happen. Especially with a thorough and complete data dump of the ISS designs to start from, which I am certain has been in their possession for years.
My largest complaint about the Chinese astronaut corps though is the lack of an operational tempo where those astronauts definitely are not getting the experience needed in space to actually perform the tasks that are going to be needed when the going gets tough.
I agree they're relatively inexperienced. I think their engineers are going to attempt to make up as much of that shortfall as they possibly can with automation. For the rest, they'll get it the same way the US did: trying to do stuff. And are they really that inexperienced? They performed their first manned docking procedure 4 years ago. On the first try.
Before I toss out my own number, I'll note one other thing that also hasn't filtered into Western media very well. Their publicly announced plan is to build a base on the moon by 2020. In the very next breath, they also announced that said base will not be occupied by a human for up to a decade afterwards. They'll build a base, but it won't be occupied for years, until their extremely timid testing is completed to their satisfaction.
So, I agree they won't be done by 2020. But I'm not nearly as pessimistic about their operational temp. I predict it will take 10 years to get the various chunks landed on the moon and shuffle them into proximity to each other. And I predict it will be 2030 before a human cracks a hatch and climbs into it.