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."
China will rule the Pacific (Score:1, Insightful)
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?
Meanwhile in the U.S. (Score:5, Insightful)
We're building the world's largest bureaucracy and collection of Ship B people.
Re:Germany (Score:2, Insightful)
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!
Comment removed (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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 slaves in a perpetual system of debt that by design cannot be paid off.
You're right about totalitarian regimes being efficient, and ours certainly is. A democratic one would be far less so, but admittedly a nicer place to live.
Re:Best news I've heard in a while (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:Germany (Score:3, Insightful)
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 term let alone long term costs. In space you have to take everything with you. including water and oxygen. normally you can find those on earth just about anywhere you need to go. Even nuclear subs have it easy compared to space travel. while oxygen in gaseous form is hard to find under water, it can easily be made, from the abundance of water.
The moon, mars, only have small quantities of frozen water. therefore if you want a colony of any decent size you literally have to ship those locations water on a continuous basis. water that can only come from earth.
Water is very hard to ship, and with a cost of thousands of dollars a pound very expensive to ship into space.
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"....
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:another GPS? (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
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.
Re:world dominance agenda? (Score:2, Insightful)
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?
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.
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: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.
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.