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China Launches New Heavy-Lift Long March 5 Rocket For First Time (space.com)
hackingbear writes from a report via Space.com: China launched its second new rocket in the year. The Long March 5 rocket, lifted off from the Wenchang launch center on Hainan Island, off China's southern coast, at 8:43 a.m. EDT (1000 GMT; 8:43 p.m. Beijing time), carrying to orbit an experimental satellite called Shijian-17, which is designed to test electric-propulsion technology. Capable of a 25 metric ton payload to low-Earth orbit (LEO), Long March 5 is among the most powerful rockets in service. Besides the scheduled launch of China's upcoming space station, the Long March 5 will also loft Chang'e-5, a robotic sample-return mission to the moon. Chang'e-5 is currently scheduled to lift off sometime next year, Chinese space officials have said.
The full launch-to-orbit sequence has been posted on YouTube.
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I think what is so remarkable about this is not so much China's individual achievements, but the fact that they clearly follow a long-term plan. Not to belittle American and Russian achievements, but they basically made it up as they went, and it did go much further than getting a bloke to the Moon and back again. NASA's scientists have always kept pushing for more exploration and shown great leadership, but the necessary, political will has been missing, and that is what the Chinese have. I think more or less everybody now agrees that China are definitely going to build one or more spacestations, and then go on to build a base on the Moon - and dare we hope, on to Mars? They have taken the lead, simple as that, and the rest of the world will follow. It feels good.
Since the US has obviously taken a backseat on space exploration it is good another nation is willing to step up.
Care to back that assertion up with any actual data? The US has more active deep space probes than anyone. The US has more orbital launches than anyone else and that is despite temporarily lacking human rated launch vehicles. Heck, SpaceX alone has more orbital launches than every country except for China and Russia. US Astronauts logged more EVA time in 2016 than astronauts from all other countries combined. The US has the most active spaceport in the world (Cape Canaveral).
While I'd agree that the US isn't doing as much as it could in space, the US space program isn't second to anyone at the moment by most objective measures.
The U.S. didn't lack long term plans for space in the 60's but an economic wake-up call in 1973 rendered most of them financially unreachable.
The only thing that hurt the space program was a lack of political will to support it. Despite what many believe even at the height of the Apollo program during the 1960s the space program had plenty of detractors. There was never at any time a lack of available funds if we had cared to devote them to the space program. Our "fearless" leaders decided they wanted to prioritize other things but at no time was the actual ability of the US government to fund NASA in question. Funding dropped around 1973 to roughly current levels as the Apollo program was shut down. Adjusting for inflation NASA's budget today is roughly identical to the budget it had in 1973. Funding for NASA's budget as a percent of the federal budget was already being cut long before 1973 to roughly the amount.
Everyone agrees that China plans their space missions such that they learn the maximum from the current one before planning the next one. The lessons are learned and applied before moving on the next step, hence the result that they are learning the same things on much smaller budgets.
What I am amazed is that the Russians managed to achieve what they did despite the very incompetent political leadership. One highly incompetent (and mostly illiterate) politician used to sit close to the rockets during launches to prove to the engineers that they had nothing to fear, and that they should trust the wisdom of the party.
During the height of the space race with NASA, the Russian engineers were simply informed by the politicians when the next launch will take place, typically on some politically important date. They rarely had more than 2 years to prepare and therefore had to cut a lot of corners to meet the deadline.
It is remarkable that they had so few accidents.