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? :)
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.
Re:How about postal addresses? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:China? (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:Firefly.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:They should catch up fast ... (Score:2, Interesting)
And yet they're taking decades for milestones that both the USA and Russia accomplished in years.
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?
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: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.
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: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.
Re:China will rule the Pacific (Score:3, Interesting)
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 Ocean will never be under Chinese influence except in the most transitory fashion.
BTW, this part of the Pacific would clearly be considered "defending their own borders" on the part of the USA as well. That China might carve out a smaller niche part of the Pacific from the North Korean border south to Thailand is no doubt something they would equally consider important, but that is about as far in the Pacific that China will ever really control as a part of the Pacific. China certainly isn't going to do something dumbass like invading the Philippines, or for that matter even Taiwan or South Korea without sparking another world war.
China will certainly not "rule the Pacific" as you are asserting.