Will China Beat the United States Back to the Moon?

MarkWhittington writes "During an address on the space economy to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of the start of the space age, NASA Administrator Michael Griffin made the assertion that China would beat the United States back to the Moon. 'Americans will not like it, but they will just have to not like it. I think we will see, as we have seen with China's introductory manned space flights so far, we will see again that nations look up to other nations that appear to be at the top of the technical pyramid, and they want to do deals with those nations. It's one of the things that made us the world's greatest economic power. So I think we'll be reinstructed in that lesson in the coming years and I hope that Americans will take that instruction positively and react to it by investing in those things that are the leading edge of what's possible."'"

Re:They SHOULD...

[wilstrup]

Actually Americans have all their money. The US has been running a huge trade deficit for years, and it's all been financed through loans from other countries. China is one of the leading providers of capital on the international market, due to their enormous trade surplus.

Re:Moonbase Alpha

[JohnBailey]

Apart from Yasuko Nagazumi you mean..

Maybe. But it would be irrelevant.

[damneinstien]

NASA, and the United States in general, can see no benefit in a manned mission to the moon without a specific purpose. Seriously, what would be the point? To show that the U.S. can do it? Well, the U.S. already has, wayback in 1969.

What NASA is more interested in at the moment is the possibility of using the moon as a launching point for missions to Mars; perhaps building a lunar base of some kind and also to explore the moon and Mars using automated methods. Just look at the NASA SBIR (Small Business Innovation Research) requirements http://sbir.gsfc.nasa.gov/SBIR/sbirsttr2007/solicitation/Chapter_912.html [nasa.gov] and look at the topics. Exploration systems and space operations are a huge topic of interest, far surpassing any need for a current manned mission.

(Disclosure: The author worked recently on a NASA SBIR Grant under the Exploration Systems category.)

Re:*back* to the moon?

[pedantic bore]

We went there first in the Apollo 11 mission.

Then we went back on Apollo missions 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. We would have been back for Apollo 13 also, but there were equipment problems that were not detected until after launch.

I calculate we've been back five times. You might have a different way of calculating.

Re:Does it really matter?

[kcbrown]

The key difference is that China is a sovereign state - doesn't make much difference to the people being abused, but it makes a difference to how you deal with it.

Or not, as is the case with China and the U.S.

U.S.: "Hey, China, you're violating human rights! Umm...but that's okay, because I want to grow up to be just like you! Here, let me show you what I've been doing ... (lists Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, etc.) ... What do you think? Cool, huh?"

:-(

Re:There's one major difference...

[BootNinja]

You say the left is for restricting freedom, but I'm afraid the facts are against you. It wasn't until we had a right wing congress sitting pretty next to a right wing president that we became a police state.

Re:That's great, but we need a better metric

[Iron Condor]

It would be much more useful if we knew how many Library's of Congress that would fund!

The budget request for FY 2008 (which starts in two weeks) was for a little over $M703 [loc.gov]- about 23.5 times the Google prize.