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Chinese Space Official Seems Unimpressed With NASA's Lunar Gateway (arstechnica.com)
schwit1 shares a report from Behind The Black: At a science workshop in Europe this week, Chinese space officials made it clear that they found the concept of NASA Lunar Orbiting Platform-Gateway (LOP-G) to be unimpressive and uninteresting. Moreover, they said that while it appears we will be delaying our landings on the Moon for at least a decade because of LOP-G, they will be focused on getting and building a research station on the surface, right off the bat.
[From a report via Ars Technica:] "Overall, [Pei Zhaoyu, who is deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration], does not appear to be a fan of NASA's plan to build a deep space gateway, formally known as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, at a near-rectilinear halo orbit. Whereas NASA will focus its activities on this gateway away from the Moon, Pei said China will focus on a 'lunar scientific research station.' Another slide from Pei offered some thoughts on the gateway concept, which NASA intends to build out during the 2020s, delaying a human landing on the Moon until the end of the decade at the earliest. Pei does not appear to be certain about the scientific objectives of such a station, and the deputy director concludes that, from a cost-benefit standpoint, the gateway would have 'lost cost-effectiveness.'"
[From a report via Ars Technica:] "Overall, [Pei Zhaoyu, who is deputy director of the Lunar Exploration and Space Program Center of the China National Space Administration], does not appear to be a fan of NASA's plan to build a deep space gateway, formally known as the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway, at a near-rectilinear halo orbit. Whereas NASA will focus its activities on this gateway away from the Moon, Pei said China will focus on a 'lunar scientific research station.' Another slide from Pei offered some thoughts on the gateway concept, which NASA intends to build out during the 2020s, delaying a human landing on the Moon until the end of the decade at the earliest. Pei does not appear to be certain about the scientific objectives of such a station, and the deputy director concludes that, from a cost-benefit standpoint, the gateway would have 'lost cost-effectiveness.'"
Actually, their longest so far is 33 days, during the Shenzhou 11 mission in 2916.
The mission you link to, Shenzhou 5, was their first crewed mission - they have orbited two space station since then, with multiple crewed missions.
Of course, I spot the time travelling mistake the moment I hit "submit"...
You'll be waiting a long time if your e petting them to moon land using "1960s technology". They've got a noonlanding with modern tech to get out the way first.
And don't deluded yourself. Whether the Americans , Russians or Chinese hit lunar soil first, the bulk of that ships gonna be Chinese tech anyway
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Goddamn it iphone keyboard. Stop doing this to me
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
We are in the year 2018, why would they use 1960's rocket tech?
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
And don't deluded yourself. Whether the Americans , Russians or Chinese hit lunar soil first, the bulk of that ships gonna be Chinese tech anyway
If you mean "Chinese manufactured tech", sure.
And don't deluded yourself. Whether the Americans , Russians or Chinese hit lunar soil first, the bulk of that ships gonna be Chinese tech anyway
Funny, I didn't realise Boing, SoaceX, Lockheed Martin, etc. were Chinese companies. I guess they weren't satisfied with stealing western tech; now they're stealing western names too!
There's a world of difference in materials and manufacturing now too. SpaceX has proven that the biggest budgets are no longer needed to enter space ... and, maybe more importantly, that action can be rapid if objectives don't keep changing every 8 years.
Goddamn it iphone keyboard. Stop doing this to me
The bulk of that phone is Chinese tech.
The mistake was the typo or reveal to public they can time travel? Maybe this is the reason why they're unimpressed :D
BE-4 is ORSC, but the US has always been more interested in making their engines reliable first and high performance second. The NK33, while impressive, ultimately didn't beat the gas generator F-1's to the moon did they? And how exactly is the YF100 impressive as a first stage engine? The SSME is 2 decades older and has higher ISP at sea level than the YF100 has in vacuum all while having double the thrust and being reusable, is oxidizer rich really intrinsically better? ORSC is also old news, the cool new stuff is full flow staged combustion like the Raptor. That and liquid methane seems to be the way of the future.
It works. The design can be sold, imported and used. The skilled people at a factory can read and understand the list of materials needed.
Generations of skilled workers with decades of "working" with the needed materials can understand the design and work flow.
The steps for any advanced industrial nation is not a generation of skills beyond their industrial education.
Once a nation gets dependant on another nation for its science, that other nation can say no more.
China found that out with its early nuclear design work with the Soviet Union. China had to work around when the Soviet Union stopped its support.
The UK found that with its early space work and its Skynet project https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... The UK was forced to buy into an all US rocket system.
Trying to import new tech from a nation that then says no is not a good policy with the cost of space projects.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Hmm, my post seems to have self-destructed. To summarize:
Less sunlight, but days the almost same length as Earths. Solar panels are already lighter and cheaper than the batteries to support an off-grid system on Earth. 2.3x as many panels, to compensate for the dimmer sunlight on Mars, is going to be radically lighter and cheaper than the 29.5x as many batteries needed for the longer nights on the Moon.
Dust storms would pose a problem though, since the most extreme ones can block out 99% of the sun at their worst. Some sort of back up power would be needed for those, but for most of them just doubling or quadrupling the amount of solar panels would compensate, and provide a huge surplus of power under normal circumstances. An the plus side, the low density of the air means that even the most ferocious Martian winds have less force behind them than a light breeze here, so visibility is really the only problem.
The atmosphere is plenty thick enough to be useful though - we've already developed prototype drones capable of flying on Mars, and a nigh-unlimited source of nearly-pure CO2 is an incredible resource source for producing air, food, and construction materials using little more than a greenhouse. I'm a big fan of low-tech solutions in space colonies - far less to go wrong.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
In the United States, we are bogged down by scientists at the expense of engineers. Even too many of our engineers are acting like scientists--telling of why we can't do this or that. If they were acting like engineers, they'd be focused on how we can. Scientists are necessarily skeptical, by profession. Engineers need heed the findings of scientists but remain optimistic, regardless. An engineer will work with what is known and around what is not to achieve objectives. The more time an engineer has, the better the solution he/she can derive.
There is plenty to criticize China's space program on but they are right that a lunar orbiter does nothing toward establishment of a lunar station. It can be helpful in testing of methods for mining asteroids, as proposed. It is great for miscellaneous NASA science projects. But overall, it's a financial sinkhole..
On the other hand, the Moon is also going to be a financial sinkhole in most ways. There are very few resources for survival on the Moon, much less exploitable profit. Perhaps, helium 3 if we can develop nuclear reactors for it. That is something China claims to be after. The costs of a Moon base are going to be difficult to justify. The regolith is extremely abrasive, quickly tearing through fabrics in space suites. The lack of dust makes working in the light/dark but no grey in between very difficult. And there is very scant water ice.. There is really nothing on the Moon that could assist man's movement farther into space.
In contrast, is very rich in water and other resources like CO2, nitrogen, argon, and many easily accessible metals. Kilometers deep fresh water glaciers strip just north and south of the equatorial region. The regolith is soft--not abrasive. There is both wind and solar power available. You can easily make oxygen, work outside, collect iron, nickel, and various other metal ores. You can make methane or pvc plastics (CO2, water, and salts in the regolith). And the salts in the regolith of both plentiful and oxygen rich, useful for welding, explosives, or rocket fuel. Start with an inflatable habitat, cover it with regolith. Then melt out a castle in the kilometers deep glacier below..
The Moon holds the advantage of being close, so we can provide assistance when necessary. Mars is far but assistance is far less likely to be necessary. The Moon will require everything continuously resupplied. Mars only needs a foothold but resupply of various technologies could be good business. For example, sending rockets into orbit from Mars with various materials would be far easier than from Earth -- metals, plastics, water, even food.
That's one of the biggest draws to a Mars or Moon colony - all the radiation shielding you could want is just lying around on the surface, you just have to scoop it up and pour it over your habitat. Or dig down into it. Or maybe get lucky and find some old lava tubes that you just have to make airtight.
The Moon is small and close enough that a colony, once it's reached sustainability, could start exporting fuel and radiation shielding to orbit for a tiny fraction of the cost to get it from Earth.
Meanwhile, there's no particular need for serious radiation shielding in short-range ships, nor for propulsion in long range ships on regular transportation routes such as between Earth and Mars. Thanks to the "Interplanetary Transport Network" (essentially gravitational slingshot navigation) once you're in space you can get pretty much anywhere in the solar system while spending almost no energy - just a little bit of navigation thrust to fine-tune your path. Find a small, resource-rich asteroid, and start mining it while nudging it into a Mars Cycler orbit. Turn the mining tunnels into habitats behind you, and use short-range ships to get from it to either planet when you're passing by. Even something relatively tiny, like 1km across could contain a truly huge amount of space - 300 times the size of Disneyland with generous 5m ceilings, and without gravity there's no difference between walls, floors, and ceilings, so the useful space would actually be quite a bit larger than that.
--- Most topics have many sides worth arguing, allow me to take one opposite you.
This frees up money, but more importantly, obviates the risk of having to stand there like Nixon praising Kennedy's moonshot initiative.
Whatever else Richard M. Nixon may have screwed up, his name and signature are on a plaque that will rest of the moon for (presumably) millions of years. Not Kennedy's. I'd say that's pretty sweet revenge.
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