China goes to space

Even with the funds, a lot or engineering has to be done. Close to starting from scratch.

Nail on the head. Building a rocket isn't really a copy-and-paste procedure. Nothing even close.

\/\/\/ Yup. Computers and materials, yes, but rocketry is still pretty much the same. No more interest in ICBMs and whatnot.
 
Good on China.

First maybe this will spur the US and other space agencies to look to go further and maybe even spur more funding from their governments for these agencies. Second even if it doesn't China will hopefully look to use this towards long term bases on the moon or deeper missions in space.

Some may say this is a prestige mission and is copying previous missions by NASA but how can China hope to build a base on the moon or perform human missions to Mars or near Earth Asteroids without first getting the basics right with the moon. I'm sure if it could China would look to make some of its own achievements however these steps need to be taken first before further and greater steps can be taken.

The way alot of people are acting here is like the US should never have worried about actually going into space in the first place given that the USSR had already done it by the time they did. I personally am glad that China is looking to get a bit more serious with Space exploration as well as hopefully long term colonisation and resource extraction. Such things can surely only benefit humanity in the long term.
 
They may make it. Waste of effort and money if they do, though. So have at it. :goodjob:

*sigh*

Well, I don't think costs that much compared to other things. The current Nasa budget is around 17 billion dollars. That's a drop in the ocean. Europe and the US need to be more agressive in their space exploration. We need really sexy missions to make people interested, not just probes that measure what kind of rocks asteroids are made of. At this rate manned missions will just be pushed forward and forward in time and suddenly the year is 2100 and we haven't even reached Mars.

Exactly. As much as the "let's send robots" camp wants it to be true, probes will never make people *humanly* interested in space exploration. Plus, as I said about BILLION times on this forum, robots still don't even approach human beings in their multi-functionality and ability to improvise on the spot and notice things a robot or its operation on Earth never would.

Scientific benefits as well. And there really aren't any.

Yes, there are. You not knowing about them doesn't mean there aren't any.

No, they didn't. Some fraktards were afraid that the shuttle wouldn't get funded if Apollo was a viable alternative, so the plans were "lost". :p

That is an urban myth. In any case, building Saturn V all over again would be a stupid idea, since it would be hopelessly obsolete by today's standards. In any case, the manufacturing capacity necessary to produce it is long gone.

Tell me when they do something worthy of note such as asteroid mining, orbital solar power,

If these things are worthy of note, I am the next King of England. Orbital solar power is total nonsense (on Earth anyway), and asteroid mining won't make sense until much later, because it requires a far more advanced space infrastructure. Today, even if we found an asteroid made of pure gold, it wouldn't be economical to mine it.

or a lunar base.

Which is a good first step to actually make human presence in space permanent. And the Chinese know that, and I am sure that if they decide to go to the Moon, they will stay. They tend to think more long-term than most Westerners.
 
The director for Chinas Space agency was talking about mining Helium 3 from the moon 3 years ago, maybe it is part of a larger plan. Once China has the means to go to the moon, the will be the only country that has the vehicle to return. USA will have a long while to reinvigorate their Apollo program.
 
The director for Chinas Space agency was talking about mining Helium 3 from the moon 3 years ago, maybe it is part of a larger plan. Once China has the means to go to the moon, the will be the only country that has the vehicle to return. USA will have a long while to reinvigorate their Apollo program.

Helium-3 mining is even more distant than mining asteroids for metals. It will be totally uneconomical for at least the end of this century, and then we'll have better places to get He-3 from, so I doubt it will ever happen.

Moon's most precious resource is water near the poles. This water can literally turn the Moon into a forward base in space, a re-fuelling station, and a jumping off point for missions to the rest of the Solar System. He who controls it will have an advantage over the others.
 
I have to say Ia gree with Winner and Arronax here. Being outward looking and open to exploration is always a good idea for a country that can afford it. History has shown this so many times. Probably no one has learnt the lesson as well as China, by the looks of things.
 
Will they make it to space? Yeah, I think they'll make it. Going to the moon isn't *that* hard, it just requires a lot of precision engineering. The Chinese are pretty good at that.

Regarding benefits of going to the moon. There will be hardly any economic benefits in the sense that it'll be economical do do certain things (harvest resources etc.) on the moon. The cost of going to the moon is just very high. The only thing I've heard about that has some chance of being useful is building a radio telescope (array) on the moon. But even that is mostly a pipe-dream right now.

There is a pretty good chance that the technological innovation needed to go to the moon can be applied usefully. People just need to stop thinking like this is a Civ-game, where you look in civilopedia to see what each technology will bring you. Technological innovation is very hard to predict and very much interdependent. Who would have guessed in the early '60s that the GPS system would develop into something used in almost every civilian car? On the other hand, people were predicting that flying cars would become feasible.
 
One could also argue that no one explicitly benefits economically from commercials, but would it be smart?

Landing and bringing guys back from the moon would be a huge success for China. It would of course be costly, but there would be huge benefits to it also, even economical.

China would be the only power to have this capability if they succeed and the shift of power would be apparent in this event.
 
Regarding benefits of going to the moon. There will be hardly any economic benefits in the sense that it'll be economical do do certain things (harvest resources etc.) on the moon. The cost of going to the moon is just very high. The only thing I've heard about that has some chance of being useful is building a radio telescope (array) on the moon. But even that is mostly a pipe-dream right now.

Why just radio telescopes? Near the poles, at the bottoms of craters which rarely see sunlight, you can install range interferometric infra-red telescopes that could achieve resolutions not only to find Earth-like planets around other stars, but possibly to image them. At the same time, their installation and maintenance would be simpler than if you deployed them in "free floating" formations in space.

But as I said earlier - WATER.
 
In any case it would be an obvious stepping stone to places that were of economic benefit. A forward base. Plenty of colonies weren't particularly important themselves but ended up being crucial because they allowed access to ones that were.
 
I think radio telescopes are much easier to build but need to be very large, so making a free floating radio telescope is hard.
I don't know if installing a telescope on the moon is easier than one in space. Besides, free floating telescopes can aim in every direction, while a moon telescope is limited by its position on the surface of the moon.
 
and I am sure that if they decide to go to the Moon, they will stay.

So tell me when they announce or do that. Your thoughts on the subject do not translate to Chinese policy, no matter how much you'd like it to be so.
 
In any case it would be an obvious stepping stone to places that were of economic benefit. A forward base. Plenty of colonies weren't particularly important themselves but ended up being crucial because they allowed access to ones that were.

Yes. We're lucky we even have the Moon, dead as it is. If we had no such natural stepping stone, I doubt we'd even have any space programme at all (assuming humanity developed as in OTL of course).

Having a re-fuelling station using the hydrogen/oxygen mined on the Moon would decrease the cost of interplanetary missions by a factor of ten (approximately), since propellant inevitably makes most of the mass of any interplanetary mission. Of course, when we're there, we'll likely find other uses for the lunar station - we could perhaps build the low-tech parts of space vehicles there (aluminium pressure hulls, solar panels, etc.) as well and thus save us money having to launch them from Earth, which is many times more energy-expensive than launching them from the Moon and assembling them together in, say, the Lagrange points.

Really, it irks me when people say nonsense like "the Moon is useless, there's no point in going there at all". It's based on utter ignorance of all the possibilities Luna offers to anyone who is bold, or forward-thinking enough, to take advantage of them.

And then there is Mars, of course, a world that could be made into a second home to humanity in a span of just a few centuries - probably in the same amount of time it took to turn a few colonies in the Americas into what they're now. As you said, all that could have been Chinese. Instead, it's western. Sometimes I wonder if the Chinese-speaking native Martians in 2500 will be equally amused when thinking about the mistakes the West did in early 2000s :crazyeye:

I think radio telescopes are much easier to build but need to be very large, so making a free floating radio telescope is hard.
I don't know if installing a telescope on the moon is easier than one in space. Besides, free floating telescopes can aim in every direction, while a moon telescope is limited by its position on the surface of the moon.

Free floating telescopes needed for exoplanet imaging will have to fly in very precise formations (we're talking nanometres precise) and be permanently shielded from the Sun to remain cool enough to be able to function. Turning them "in any direction" will be hard to say at least.

Having a stable rock underneath and the natural shade of crater walls (for most of the year) as well as astronauts nearby ready to replace damaged mirrors or burnt out motherboards would be of great advantage. True, such telescopes wouldn't be able to look at the whole of the sky, but that's not necessary. A set of identical telescopes on both Lunar poles would be able to look almost anywhere - not always, but since observations generally take a long time, it wouldn't matter.

So tell me when they announce or do that. Your thoughts on the subject do not translate to Chinese policy, no matter how much you'd like it to be so.

Which is why I include words like "if" :rolleyes: China's behaviour in space so far leads to this conclusion.
 
But what kind of benefits do you expect from going to the moon again? There needs to be some kind of benefit to justify spending money.

The main benefit is that having Moon-landing capability means that they'll have the infrastructure available to do anything else useful. Affecting asteroids is going to be cheaper than landing people on the Moon, and the group that affects asteroids first is going to be the group with the World's first trillionaires.

Oh we have the technology, plenty of technology.

What we're lacking is funds and an actual reason.

Agree that there's the technology. But I don't think the US has the capacity any more. They just cannot do it, just like they could not replicate something like the Hoover Dam or even rebuild the World Trade Center in a way that was more impressive than the originals.

The national focus is lost, the government neutered, and the population obese and only interested in television. I doubt even something amazing, like the discovery of ET life, could cause them to regain the ability to go to the Moon. At least, not within a generation.
 
The national focus is lost, the government neutered, and the population obese and only interested in television. I doubt even something amazing, like the discovery of ET life, could cause them to regain the ability to go to the Moon. At least, not within a generation.

Sad, but true. Decadence is a strange disease - you can't say when it began, and it feels good at first.
 
Free floating telescopes needed for exoplanet imaging will have to fly in very precise formations (we're talking nanometres precise) and be permanently shielded from the Sun to remain cool enough to be able to function. Turning them "in any direction" will be hard to say at least.

Having a stable rock underneath and the natural shade of crater walls (for most of the year) as well as astronauts nearby ready to replace damaged mirrors or burnt out motherboards would be of great advantage. True, such telescopes wouldn't be able to look at the whole of the sky, but that's not necessary. A set of identical telescopes on both Lunar poles would be able to look almost anywhere - not always, but since observations generally take a long time, it wouldn't matter.

That would be great, but it's quite far away. Building a small equivalent of LOFAR (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOFAR) on the moon is quite feasible within the next (two?) decades. The antennas are cheap and have no moving parts. Placing them on the moon is rather easy. You then need to connect these antennas (which could be quite challenging) to a central computer. This computer will analyse the data and send results to earth. All of that can be done with current technology.
 
Which is why I include words like "if" :rolleyes: China's behaviour in space so far leads to this conclusion.

I actually meant the second part of the phrase I quoted. Not interested in them going to the moon. I'm interested in when they do something new on it.
 
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