China's First Lunar Lander To Launch Today; Manned Mission Planned By 2030 137
c0lo writes "A Chinese Long March rocket is scheduled to blast off to the Moon on Sunday evening at about 6pm UTC carrying a small robotic rover that will touch down on to the lunar surface in about two weeks' time – the first soft landing on the Earth's only natural satellite since 1976. China has been methodically and patiently building up the key elements needed for an advanced space programme — from launchers to manned missions in Earth orbit to unmanned planetary craft — and it is investing heavily. After only 10 years since it independently sent its first astronaut into space, China is forging ahead with a bold three-step programme beginning with the robotic exploration of possible landing sites for the first Chinese astronauts to set foot on lunar soil between 2025 and 2030. Prof Ouyang Ziyuan of the department of lunar and deep space exploration and an adviser to the mission commented to the BBC on the scale of Chinese thinking about the Moon. He said the forthcoming venture would land in an ancient crater 400km wide called Sinus Iridum, thought to be relatively flat and clear of rocks, and explore its geology. China.org.cn promised live coverage of the event."
Space race anybody? (Score:5, Interesting)
Good for them. I wish them the best of luck.
I kind of hope this kicks off another space race. That would be so much better then a battleship arms race (see WWI) or a nuclear arms race (see cold war).
Re:Space race anybody? (Score:1, Interesting)
the space race was really about making ICBMs. sputnik intentionally looks like the nose cone of a missile.
why do you think the whole thing was supported by the DoD?
Re:Space race anybody? (Score:5, Interesting)
Because in space, no weapons are allowed
that happened shortly after we scared the hell out of ourselves by detonating a 1.4 megaton nuke in space [wikipedia.org] which created a hugeass radiation belt [wikipedia.org] which damages satellites. [wikipedia.org]
historical perspective (Score:2, Interesting)
Googling slashdot over the past 15 years or so, it seems like China is always just ten years away from putting a man on the moon. Vaporware or hype? You decide:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/02/05/20/1224219/china-plans-moonbase
http://science.slashdot.org/story/07/10/04/2117217/the-new-moon-race
http://science.slashdot.org/story/04/05/18/1639246/china-scrubs-moon-mission-plans
http://science.slashdot.org/story/03/05/30/1227223/
Re:2030? (Score:2, Interesting)
I'll be surprised if there aren't tourists on the moon long before 2030. SpaceX's next-gen "man-rated" Dragon capsule will be flying in a couple of years, and the gap between that and a lunar landing/return capability is pretty well understood territory. It's not quite "off the shelf" yet, but there are plenty of folks working on the necessary technology. And if, in the meantime, they get their Grasshopper RLV into service, that will slash the cost dramatically.
Hell, Elon expects to have people on Mars before that. AFAIK he hasn't talked much about a moon trip, but others have. It's just a matter of time.
Re:Beijing: we'll see your lunar launch (Score:4, Interesting)
And it may be that any new lunar lander should use a similarly capable computer. If the urge to use newer hardware takes over, it won't be long before some asshole suggests the next lander be controlled by software written in Java running on Android. Ask the astronauts about the laptops they were given to control ISS systems. But only if you're prepared for an earful.
Add to that the fact that modern low voltage, tiny feature size hardware is much more susceptible to the affects of cosmic rays than the old gear. Once you leave the Van Allen belts, you're getting pelted with a lot more crap, and it's much easier to flip a bit in modern RAM than it was in the older stuff. If you want radiation-hardened chips, suddenly you're talking about 4 or 5 generations back, if you're lucky. Didn't Intel say they were going to stop making their radiation-hardened gear at all? So now you have to provide external shielding, and preferably multiple redundant tell-me-three-times systems, so if one of them loses its feeble mind during operations, the other two can agree to ignore it and still get you landed in one piece.
The problem remains nontrivial and expensive simply because nobody has been doing it much. There are no economies of scale beyond LEO and there are only any economies of scale to LEO now because of SpaceX. It won't be easy, for China or anyone else.
Re:Space race anybody? (Score:2, Interesting)
I hope not. The 1960s space race was detrimental to long-term manned space travel. Before Sputnik, in the mid-1950s the U.S. plan for getting people into space was with a hypersonic plane [wikipedia.org] which used both aerodynamic lifting surfaces while in the atmosphere, and a rocket for lift when the air got too thin. Several of the X-15 pilots flew high enough to earn the USAF's astronaut wings (50 miles), and two flew high enough to enter the international definition of space (100 km).
With the space race and especially the race for the moon, projects like this took a back seat to the quick and dirty (and expensive) solution - rockets.
After playing around with rockets for a few decades, we are now... researching a hypersonic plane for ferrying people inoto space and around the world. Except now we're 4 decades behind where we could've been if we hadn't been distracted by getting to the moon before the Soviets. Rockets are great once you're in space, but they burn a prodigious amount of fuel just to counteract air resistance, and generate a lot less lift per kg of fuel compared to aerodynamic lift. The economics still favor a vehicle which flies like a plane until the air is very thin, then has a rocket take over.