China: The Next Space Superpower 250
the_newsbeagle writes "'As 2014 dawns, China has the most active and ambitious space program in the world,' says this article. While it's true that the Chinese space agency is just now reaching milestones that the U.S. and Russia reached 40 years ago (its first lunar rover landed in December), the Chinese government's strong support for space exploration means that it's catching up fast. On the agenda for the next decade: A space station to rival the ISS, a new spaceport, new heavy-lift rockets, a global satellite navigation system to rival GPS, and China's first space science satellites."
Firefly.. (Score:4, Interesting)
Didn't everyone speak Chinese? :)
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Sorta... sometimes they'd toss in Chinese phrases, have ideograms on some of the crates and boxes, and suchlike, but just enough to add a hint of backstory - that is, that the Chinese and indeterminate-but-we-think-Americans worked together to evacuate their populations off the original dying Earth. Only problem is, the utter deficit of Chinese/Asian folks on the show led one to believe that somehow the language made it there, but the Chinese didn't.
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Sorta... sometimes they'd toss in Chinese phrases, have ideograms on some of the crates and boxes, and suchlike, but just enough to add a hint of backstory - that is, that the Chinese and indeterminate-but-we-think-Americans worked together to evacuate their populations off the original dying Earth. Only problem is, the utter deficit of Chinese/Asian folks on the show led one to believe that somehow the language made it there, but the Chinese didn't.
As a fan, I sort of presumed that the Firefly universe was rather vast, and that Mal and his crew mainly cruised around the parts that were descendents of the Anglosphere of peoples (mainly North America, but also could include Australian & the UK/Europe to some extent). My understand was that there was a whole other part of the collection of star systems of the Alliance which were descended from the Chinese as well, but sort of had their own planets.
It is hard to tell as it was only one half of a seas
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world dominance agenda? (Score:2)
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Nope, just laziness and complacency from the rest of the world.
Re:world dominance agenda? (Score:5, Insightful)
No, there's no Chinese Edward Snowden.
Before the whole NSA thing blew open, we were worried about the Chinese government working with Chinese companies to make sure their backdoors were inserted in all of the networked equipment they sold to us.
Just because the NSA fiasco currently overshadows that doesn't mean that the Chinese haven't been and aren't still doing it.
The second-worst thing about the NSA fiasco is that it has taken everyone's eyes off of the other balls.
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China > USA
At least there is no chinese-NSA.
What the fuck... seriously?
Half of their government is designed to spy on their own population. Who did you think the NSA uses as a template?
Re:world dominance agenda? (Score:4, Insightful)
Who did you think the NSA uses as a template?
According to Angela Merkel, the Stasi. And having grown up under them, she would know.
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I don't see any reason to believe there's no chinese-NSA...except that they are mainly intrested in internal matters, and don't consider the rest of the world as to be taken seriously. Since internal matters covers more than half of humanity, they may have a point.
So. The Chinese don't have an NSA. This is because they don't have a rule against the government spying on the citizenry. (Note that the fiction is that the NSA only spies on foreigners.)
Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
Unlike the USSR and America, China has not had the benefit of of German rocket scientists to develop and run their space programme.
They may have a few stolen blue prints, and without doubt the calculations and knowledge that the USSR still knows and America is fast forgetting, but they have also walked a long distance on their own feet, and they have done this in quite a short time.
Sure, you Americans can trumpet "Pppthhhffff the Moon, been there, done that" but I do need to ask: When China and India have bases on the moon and men on Mars. More importantly, when you as a nation have lost the ability to launch your own rockets, and you can only rent payload from communist states -
Whatever did happen to your once great ambitions?
Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
Just where did you go wrong?
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Nope the USA let capitalism get in the way. unrestricted capitalism. Just look at health insurance. it isn't based on good facts, but on the companies we work for providing information.
besides lastly the USA is doing something else. trying to commercialize space travel. to push the cost of launching onto people who have an interest in lowering said costs greatly.
Not only that but the USA also realizes that space is a pain in the ass. The few resources present are useful but hardly justify the short te
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Nope the USA let capitalism get in the way..
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He should have said heavy. Which is correct. But he forgot that the system can recycle the water that is shipped, so that's a one-time cost, not a recurring one. And it's going to NEED to recycle even the air in order to be practical. And THAT'S the big problem which everyone has been ignoring (unless it's been marked SECRET). The private attempts at closed ecosystem have been failures, and with the budgets they had they couldn't just correct the mistakes and try again, which would have been the corre
Re:Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
Just where did you go wrong?
The answer is easy. They went wrong just after WW2 when the US decided that they didn't need to transition to a peacetime economy. The whole military industrial complex is a result of that thinking. Mind you, the US military resources are many times more than needed to defend the country. Eisenhower was the first to recognise the dangers of the military industrial complex over 6 decades ago, and it seems nobody listened. The US is a country perpetually at war, when there isn't one they create one, either outside their borders or inside. Gotta continue to feed those "defense" consultant companies.
Everything else is window dressing. The patriotism, the american exceptionalism, the american dream all vaporware. The military has ruled the US since the end of WW2. And it continues to do so.
Re:Germany (Score:5, Insightful)
Short time? It's taken them 43 years to go from first satellite launched to a lunar lander. Which is about 35 years more than either the US or USSR took to do the same thing. Hell, the US managed a MARS rover in only 36 years, much less a Lunar rover.
I'm not trying to denigrate the Chinese effort. It's making steady progress in a difficult field. But it's NOT making this progress in "quite a short time"....
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Re:Germany (Score:5, Interesting)
The father of the Chinese space program was one of the founders of JPL, Jet Propulsion == rockets. The U.S. government hounded him so much for being Chinese, and possibly a spy, he eventually returned home to China and built a space program there.
The rest of your thesis is deeply flawed and NOT insightful. The U.S. space program is alive and well at JPL, SpaceX, Blue Origin, Orbital Sciences and a number of other private companies.
The only thing that went wrong was letting a series of U.S. Presidents, Congress and NASA completely screw it up for a few decades. Space programs need to be run by visionaries with a plan, laser focus, sufficient resources and the capacity to stick with it even when its hard, so they acheive their goals. Von Braun was the visionary who made Apollo happen. Musk is the most likely visionary to get the U.S. to Mars first.
The space program as run by the U.S. government and NASA is doomed, if for no other reason than they completely change the strategy every 4 to 8 years, and their strategic decisions are based on how many jobs will be created in the districts of powerful Congressmen, not sound or rational engineering or whether a project is worth doing. As a result NASA seldom ever finishes anything (outside of JPL and observatories).
NASA is also never held accountable for failure to finish anything, partially because politcians always cancel the programs half way through right before they actually have to build and do something. NASA's staff need to propose projects that are well engineered and worth doing, tell Congress to fund them at a sufficient and sustained level to finish them, and if Congress and President wont they need to threaten to mass resign. If NASA can't do programs like that they should all mass resign, shutter the failed parts of the organization and put the money directly in to places like SpaceX and Orbital Sciences.
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Getting there first isn't the task. Getting there survibably is the task. (Fortunately, I believe that Musk understands this...I'm not sure he understands just how much of a problem a recycling closed environment is.)
No, the US space program is not well. It's been severly ill, and has suffered extensive memory and capabilites loss. SpaceX, etc. are trying to re-invent many techniques that were previously solved problems. They may come up with better solutions, but if they do it will because they HAD to
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More importantly, when you as a nation have lost the ability to launch your own rockets, and you can only rent payload from communist states -
Take a look here [wikipedia.org] and try to count how many of the little flags represent the United States.
As far as scientific missions...What about the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter [universetoday.com] and Mars Rovers [nasa.gov]? Don't they count?
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Unlike the USSR and America, China has not had the benefit of of German rocket scientists to develop and run their space programme.
No they had the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance [wikipedia.org] through which the USSR gave China several R-2 [wikipedia.org] rockets which were improved versions of the R-1 (the soviet copy of the V-2). They also provided the blueprints, training to Chinese engineers for almost a decade.
Since the colapse of the USSR China continued to recieve assistance from Russia. Both in the form of training by sending Chinese cosmonauts to Star City, and technology transfer. For example, the first Chinese spacewalk
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Have you, America as a nation, let your hunger for war and hegemony override your once great ideals for the betterment of mankind?
No, but our cronies find it a far faster return on investment to manufacture consent for war through scaremongering. [youtube.com] Don't forget, we went to space in a race to outdo other nations first. We're still dominant in that regard. [youtube.com] I do seriously wish Europe, Asia and Indonesia the best of luck. We're all in this together. Here in Houston astronauts from all over the world train for EVA and re-entry. Off the coast of Florida they train for life in space habitats under the water in SEATEST. [youtube.com] In Canada they lear
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No. We stopped going to the moon because it stopped being politically profitable. The US appears to be incapable of running a long-term project, and by long term I mean 10 years. (Longer than one president's term of office.) We only got to the moon because it was seen as a sporting event, but by doing it that way we lost almost all the advantages of doing it, and only gained political points. Any science or engineering was incidental.
There is much that could be done on the moon, but there are engineeri
I always suspected (Score:2)
All isms are totalitarian (Score:2, Insightful)
You do realize that the US is a totalitarian regime, I hope? In a capitalist system, the totalitarian dictators are the banks.
The banks may not kill and torture you physically, but they'll take all your possessions and leave you destitute -- certainly a form of torture. And if you understand Fractional Reserve Banking, you already know that they operate everyone in society as labor sla
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Space Superpower isn't a thing (Score:3)
Until someone blows up a satellite, there's no "power" in space. You can launch from essentially anywhere, there's no way to monopolize the field.
Re:Space Superpower isn't a thing (Score:4, Informative)
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I think you need to reread the reports on what we did. Granted, we didn't create the problem the Chinese did, but what we did wasn't anything spectacular, more a PR response. (Judging by how you remembered it, it seems to have worked.)
Destroying satellites (Score:4, Informative)
Until someone blows up a satellite, there's no "power" in space.
Both the US and China have blown up satellites in space from the ground within the past few years using missiles. I'm quite sure Russia could manage the trick as well if they felt like it.
Damn, that time traveler was right (Score:2)
That time traveler in the documentary "Looper" was right .. I should learn Chinese.
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There *is* a dialect of English that's easy for foreigners to learn. It's a development of Pidgin (i.e., business) English. To most US people it would be a foreign language. OTOH, a decade ago it was reported to be the fastest growing dialect of English, accounting for most of it's growth worldwide. (Was the report correct? Is it still? I don't know...and I'm not asserting either.)
Meanwhile in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're building the world's largest bureaucracy and collection of Ship B people.
Best news I've heard in a while (Score:3, Insightful)
Nothing seems to get goverments spending money on space like any kind of race. Just a shame China don't just say "Mars would look great in China Red", that would soon get the budgets for NASA and to a smaller extent ESA raised a bit.
Rather co-operation on this, I know there is some. A Chinese moon base? Like America would let that stand!
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Competition amongst earth's nation-states will have to do as motivation until cooperation is plausible.
Hopefully we don't have to wait for that until we have a common off-planet enemy.
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A Chinese moon base? Like America would let that stand!
What are they going to do, nuke it?
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If China builds a moon base with the primary purpose of mining rare-earth metals; it will be defended.
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really? turning a discussion about Chinese space efforts into a rant about Obamacare? Guess being that I'm British I dont have to worry about such things. UK space program is barely worth calling a program :)
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Re:nothing new here (Score:4, Interesting)
Disturbingly, the stock price of the top five US defense contractors have experienced a distinct and steady rise since the beginning of 2013.
Yeah (Score:2, Funny)
... because what the world is ANOTHER FREAKING SET OF NAVIGATIONAL SATELLITES!
I'll launch my own too, can't trust any government. Maybe we should found a set for each of us together through Kickstarter?
More junk in the nearby space place!
They should catch up fast ... (Score:5, Insightful)
And pass both the US and Russia quickly.
Why? Technology is 40 years newer. Materials science has changed, automation, manufacturing techniques and a slew of other core technologies important for space flight have changed as much in the last 40 years as computing technology has. They're going to be able to do more with less the same as other up-starts like SpaceX can do -- but they're going to invest national levels of resources into it, with SpaceX levels of innovation and dramatically less of a "defense contractor welfare" bloat that drags down NASA.
And good for them. For the sake of every living thing that's fought entropy for the last three billion years on Earth, it doesn't matter who is working towards getting life off this rock, it just matters that someone is.
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And yet they're taking decades for milestones that both the USA and Russia accomplished in years.
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They don't seem to be stopping after a few PR stunts.
Not waging proxy wars all over the place does give them the resources to keep going, and going, and...
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Neither did we. Or do you count the Mars Rovers as "PR stunts"? Note that we put the Mars rovers down on Mars 36 years after our first satellite launch. Which is seven years less time than China took from first satellite to lunar rover.
We spent more on Afghanistan & Iraq in the last ten years than we did on NASA. And we still managed the latest
Re:They should catch up fast ... (Score:5, Interesting)
dramatically less of a "defense contractor welfare" bloat that drags down NASA.
Genuinely curious why you think this? It's been my understanding that there are strong ties between the government and the defense contractors, and the defense industry there is fairly shrouded in secrecy, making corruption easy to pull off. Do you think the Chinese government is more capable of taking an 'agile' approach to a space program than the US?
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Genuinely curious why you think this? It's been my understanding that there are strong ties between the government and the defense contractors, and the defense industry there is fairly shrouded in secrecy, making corruption easy to pull off. Do you think the Chinese government is more capable of taking an 'agile' approach to a space program than the US?
Corruption in China tends to be far and away an issue with regional and local programs, and lately there's been a serious crackdown on it. But mostly, they lack an entity like Congress that sets budgets and buys/sells votes to get projects broken up and put into lots of different districts. A big part of why SpaceX is so efficient is that everything is made in the same factory... not 50 different companies in 300 locations. Something needs to get done, it gets done. I'm not passing judgment on that, good or
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There's a lot of good in things like SpaceX, but don't be deceived. Corporations also have failure modes, and some of them are pretty bad. One that often happens with technical companies is, the first generation of management are technical visionaries, the second generation are competent engineers, the thrid generation are bookkeepers. There usually isn't a fourth generation. (OTOH, note that this is just a "usually". IBM is a good counterexample. But then HP is an excellent example.)
from the article (Score:5, Insightful)
TFA says it perfectly: "...Johnson-Freese put it more bluntly: âoeIn terms of technology, are the Chinese at a peer level or more advanced than us? No, absolutely not. What they have that we donâ(TM)t is political will.â"
Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
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Simply, Western governments have decided that space is no longer important. Certainly, not more important than handing out subsidies to industries, banks, and the underclass of easily-bought voters.
Except that the biggest recipients of government largesse are Red States (look it up). So much for your "easily-bought" assumptiony.
I also have the expectation of the government spending my tax dollars in things that benefit the general population instead of tax breaks to Mitt Romney so he can stash his $100 million retirement fund in a tax heaven in the Bahamas (again look it up).
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I'll accept that for the 1960's, but not for the 1950's. During the 1950's the US just about ignored space. That's why we were so surprised when the 1950's ended with Sputnik. (The Russians hadn't been keeping it secret...they'd just been ignored.) For the 1950's you need to find some other mechanism.
P.S.: Spending for political spectaculars doesn't do that much to advance Science and Engineering, even when they are the purported beneficiaries. I think Kennedy actually had a vision of developing space
Current Space Superpower (Score:2)
The Important thing: (Score:2)
The US can still beat them in Eve Online, can't we?
How many times did I hear from tech pundits that the New Virtual Economy made the brick and mortar world less important? Isn't this the same?
Oh wait. There was that little thing called the dot com crash. Guess the real world capabilities still matter.
No big deal. Guess I'll just get a beer and go back to playing Kerbal Space Program, then. It's what made America great. ;)
time for US to cooperate with China (Score:2)
But its time to do joint government science projects now. Two groups together can accomplish more together than separately.
SpaceX (Score:2)
I've seen the thousands of people used to monitor space launches run by government programs. Like all government programs, they become public works projects. My son works for SpaceX in Torrance California. Their last successful launch of the Falcon 9 had 39 guys monitoring the launch. 39! I am doubtful China can match SpaceX. I can't wait till the manned Dragon capsule launch.I hope SpaceX eats everybody else's lunch. I confident they will too. :-)
Not all it seems (Score:4, Insightful)
To take an opposing view to 99% of the posts here, China is not as big and scary as it seemed to be. Remember, at the end of the 80's early 90's everyone thought Japan was going to overtake the US, and look where they are now; they haven't recovered yet from their market collapse 20 years ago.
China is in a similar crisis; the Party is good at hiding it but when you look at the signs they are there. Unemployment is rising in China. Profits are dwindling. Layoffs are occasionally happening. None of this should happen in a so called "Communist" state. This is mostly due to the fact that their middle class is getting more wealthy and demanding better rates and better living conditions while at the same time most of what built the Chinese economic model was cheap labor. Most of the cheap labor demand is moving to Southeast Asia and away from China as China is actually getting too expensive. I know several companies that have brought manufacturing back to the US and Mexico because it's cheaper, higher quality, and North America is easier to work with than China.
Why do I say that? Because an active and aggressive space program requires a robust and sturdy economy. The first steps in a space program are a huge money pit to get going, and China's economy is starting to show the cracks in their model. They will struggle to maintain this when other priorities take shape, such as dumping more funding into the economy to maintain employment or shoring up their banks to maintain the shrinking credit market there.
Meanwhile, the US's economy is not built on government agencies like NASA, it's built on entrepreneurship and private enterprise. The private sector historically has been more efficient than the government in almost every respect. The last 50+ years NASA poured money down the drain to get over the initial technical hurdles to get into space, but now that technology is robust. The next step into massive space exploration is not in building the next super advanced rocket that costs billions, which is what NASA is good at, it's in building a cheap reusable rocket that is cheap so we can increase the number of launches by orders of magnitude, historically that's what private enterprise is good at.
I mean, at this stage in space exploration, what's better? An ultra-advanced rocket that costs $100M to launch so you get 10 launches for $1B, or a cheap rocket that costs $1M to launch so you get 1,000 launches for the same money? Doing things like building a space base, a moon base, sending a mission to Mars, etc., are all technically feasible propositions, but they are not economically feasible. The next major hurdle is to make them economically feasible so we can do these things.
That's the transition going on right now in the US economy. NASA is evolving into a guiding force for the several private enterprises that are starting to come online, and the private enterprises are learning how to make launches cheap. China is still trying to get over the technical hurdles and the science stuff first. So right now it may look like China is ahead. In 10/15/20 years, it'll look like a vastly different story.
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The one thing that I use to show how the Chinese Space Agency is hardly something to be worried about is simply their tempo of operation. China may be doing the sort of flags & footprints kind of missions where they do things for political purposes, but they are not really building up any sort of significant experience with their manned spaceflight program in particular. The time between flights is longer than almost any nation which has a manned spaceflight program, and they simply don't have the exp
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I mean, at this stage in space exploration, what's better? An ultra-advanced rocket that costs $100M to launch so you get 10 launches for $1B, or a cheap rocket that costs $1M to launch so you get 1,000 launches for the same money?
A rocket that has a reasonably low price per kg launched, combined with flexibility, and with the ability to launch payload sufficiently heavy to be relevant (for many classes of payload, being able to launch a heavier spacecraft invokes the all-important economies of scale, and we're just not at the phase of building geostationary satellites out of cubesats quite yet).
And Americans are happily oblivious to it (Score:2)
Not that we need another space race but it's tragic that Americans don't even notice that it's something we no longer do.
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The US will have spy satellites riding piggyback on all satellites and peeking into the windows of space stations.
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And the Chinese will have even bigger satellites watching those satellites...
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Will it be satellites all the way up?
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:5, Insightful)
Hopefully the U.S.A. can tone down their aggressiveness
All the current disputes with China (Diaoyu/Senkaku Islands, Parcel Islands, Spratley Islands, Scarborough shoals, Socotra Rock, etc) are a result of Chinese, not American, aggressiveness.
and be content to defend their own borders
If America withdrew from the Pacific then Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan would all develop nuclear weapons within six months. Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines would follow as soon as they were able.
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I have serious doubts that Japan lacks nuclear weapons capability of their own. They certainly have both the scientists, the nuclear reactors, and the financial assets capable of being able to make them. The only thing that really keeps Japan from building their own nukes is mainly a domestic political situation that would result in a near total collapse of their current government if even a whiff showed up that the Japanese Self-Defense Force had nuclear warheads of any kind.
It still shocks me though how
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The Pacific Ocean is the private pond of the USA from Guam to California, and Alaska to Samoa. Anything which happens inside of that rough box including up to the Kármán line and down to the mantle of the Earth is justifiably seen as a direct threat to the United States of America and would be seen clearly as casus belli. The U.S. Navy still rules supreme in that part of the world. China can certainly "practice war games" and do other crap in "international waters", but that part of the Pacific
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China has no direct access to the Pacific.
Back when you were in school, you got your lunch money taken a lot didn't you?
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:5, Informative)
http://rhk111smilitaryandarmspage.wordpress.com/2013/08/07/unrestricted-access-to-the-pacific-ocean-what-china-wants-part-one/
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:4, Interesting)
Now that's a scary thought. The Empire of Japan's spurious belief it needed to militarily secure access to Southeast Asia to be a viable economic power led them to attack Pearl Harbor. Once they dug themselves out from the hole they'd dug themselves into, that belief was proved spectacularly wrong.
The Chinese regime has shown some of the same worrying signs of jingoistic paranoia.
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, with one small twist: China has (at least for millennia) been quite content to consider themselves the center-point between Heaven and Earth (culturally, that's how they'd considered themselves all this time.) With I think like one or two exceptions (one of which involved a Mongol leader wanting a piece of Japan), they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
It'll be damned hard to break that kind of ingrained culture - not saying it'll never happen, just that it'll take a lot to overcome the cultural inertia.
Now Space may whet their appetites a bit for it, but I think it'll be just to move out in that direction, which honestly I'm completely okay with - so long as they don't keep anyone else from migrating skyward...
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:4, Interesting)
they've never really done much in the way of projecting power out beyond their own rather well-defined region.
Yes, but within that region - which is certainly not exclusively populated by Han Chinese - they've never been shy about aggressively claiming territories that were once independent, or are held by other nations. And under the Manchus, at least, any nation wishing to do business with China had to essentially pay tribute to the emperor, which resulted in basically every European colonial power being officially considered a vassal state. China's current brand of imperialism is a big reason why the Vietnamese, who have every reason to hate us, are on surprisingly good terms with the US right now.
Re:another GPS? (Score:4, Interesting)
Redundancy is good. What's more, the US-controlled GPS system can be crippled at will by the US military - and was for the longest time, until fairly recently. Do you trust the US to provide service with full accuracy to the entire world forever? Do you trust the US to have the capacity to replace failing GPS satellites? Heck, the US isn't even capable of keeping enough essential weather satellites up there [ibtimes.com] anymore...
The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
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What's more, the US-controlled GPS system can be crippled at will by the US military - and was for the longest time, until fairly recently.
Although Selective Availability was turned off (in reality, the random offset was set to zero), don't believe for a moment that the US military has given up that capability, or that they don't have similar backdoor capabilities on other satnav systems.
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The United States is going more and more decrepit. I for one am glad there's Russian, European and Chinese alternatives to fall back onto if the GPS system becomes useless for one reason or another.
Yes because we all know that neither the Russians nor the Chinese would ever under any circumstances manipulate such alternatives that they controlled if it suited their whims to do so and only the "evil" US would ever do such a terrible thing. Right....
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Sure they can, but unless Russia, China, and the US all coordinate to do this bullshit at the same time in the same places, then it doesn't matter.
That's literally what redundancy means.
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There has frequently been good evidence that the US innovations were copied. Occasionally it has been shown that this was done using actual copies of some of the technical information.
OTOH, those who make that claim usually forget how the US got it's start: copying technology from Great Britain (then leading the industrial revolution). This was also often done using copied actual technology. (At that time technical documentation was less important than the actual mechanisms being available to study, and
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You listed the countries that currently (or soon) could put one up. You didn't justify them as necessary.
Personally I think it should be three or four, but five would probably be safer. That way you could always trust SOMEONE to be providing service. Hopefully they'd all use similar (i.e., easily switchable) protocols. The reason for five is that someone is likely to come up with a was to "lock-in" the users, and you want to be able to avoid them.
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More importantly, since there are multiple satellite constellations, why aren't there more multi-system receivers available?
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Quite a few already do! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_smartphones_using_GLONASS_Navigation [wikipedia.org] That is just phones, but that is how a huge chunk of the population gets their sat-nav these days
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This is typical authoritarian bravado. China invests heavily in a field that generates PR for nationalistic pride (with a dual military purpose.) Meanwhile, they don't even have a postal address system. Don't be fooled by the hype. Yes, their economy will be the largest, simply due to their numbers. (If the Chinese simply earned per capita one third of the US average income, they'd be a larger economy than the US.)
I'm not sure if that's just racism or lack of knowledge... but China has more people living in a US-level middle class than the US has people.
And, strangely, I've never had an issue mailing something to China. You don't just scribble a name on it, and someone walks along an asks 1.2 billion people if that happens to be them, after all.
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I'm not sure if that's just racism or lack of knowledge... but China has more people living in a US-level middle class than the US has people.
Both what you said and what the GP post said are true.
China may have more middle class, but they have a huge amount of population in poverty as well.
On a per capita basis, if they matched the US, their economy would be about 3 times larger than ours. The do not have that yet.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Citation on "dont even have a postal address system" or were you just to lazy to even look it up?
You mean like the US Zip, or enhanced zip+4 system?
Seems they use a similar system: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_postal_codes_in_China
PSS :
The postal service in China can be dated back to the Shang Dynasty ( 1766 BC to 1122 BC)
Seems they may have addressed their "postal address system" in that time.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Wake me up when one of these budding super powers no longer has people shitting in the streets. China and India are third world shit holes who waste money like this, when they should really be working to help their people.
It may not be obvious to people who haven't spent any time traveling the world ... but the rich in China make the rich in the US look poor ... the middle class in China is living as well as the US, and is 6x the size ... and the poor in China don't live in anywhere near the squalor that the poor in the American Southeast live in. Visit rural China and rural West Virginia ... your eyes may be opened a bit.
Re:China? (Score:4, Informative)
As someone who normally tries to counterbalance the inaccuracies regarding China i think you might be mistaken.
I was in china a few years ago and went out of my way to visit Rural areas and they are literally "dirt poor". Granted i have never been in the southeast but its hard to imagine anyone still living like that in north america.
Next time you are in China drive a few hours out of any city and stop by to visit the locals in the area.
Re: (Score:2)
I don't know about in this decade, but a few decades ago there were people in the US living essentially on a non-cash economy. I'll grant that they held possession of their own property...but I can't say they owned it, as I don't believe they ever paid taxes, so they probably couldn't hold a deed. I think they must have got by on, maybe, $500/year. They probably weren't on the census roles. They used someone else's mailbox when they needed to mail (I don't know if they ever did). They lived on garden a
^this (Score:2, Redundant)
I was going to type a longer response with links where I mention things that the "fear China" crowd ignores like China has absolutely ruined their environment (have you seen the news reports on the smog?) & human population w/ the 'one child policy'...blah blah blah
parent says it more succinctly...
Re: (Score:2)
America still has people literally shitting in the streets.
As a resident of the Bay Area, I can attest to this.
Re: (Score:3)
To be honest, I fail to see how invading two countries is internal spending.
Re: (Score:2)
Money spent invading two countries: ~$1T over ten years.
Money spent on SSA/Medicare/Medicaid in the same period: ~$16T. At the Federal level. Medicaid is partly funded by the States, so the total would be slightly higher
Does tend to look like our internal spending is considerably greater than the cost of those two wars, doesn't it?
Re:But we have health care (Score:4, Insightful)
You've been paying too much attention to Mitt Romney and not enough to the facts. The war in Iraq alone would have been enough to put men on Mars ten times over.If that didn't suffice tax breaks to millionaires and corporations alone would too.
Yet, your proposal to put men on Mars is to remove health insurance from the sick. Boy has his country ever lost its way!
Re: (Score:2)
Extinction-Level Event. We might want to survive as a species *when* Earth gets toasted.
Compare National Space Budgets (Score:4, Informative)
From Wikipedia:
USA NASA annual budget: $17.7 billion, and that is just the NASA budget, the US Air Force Space budget is another $8 billion.
China CNSA annual budget: $1.3 billion.
Total pending by all national space agencies: $40.6 billion.
So the NASA budget is over 10 times that of CNSA and almost as much as all the other nations' programs put together. Considering that the US GDP is only about twice that of China's, then the NASA budget is a far larger percentage of the US GDP than the proportion that CNSA is of China's.
Re: (Score:2)
what the US did 40 years ago, but that's also what the US can no longer do at all
Oops
Really? Like what are you referring to here?