Chinese Spacecraft Enters Orbit Around the Moon 152
mpicpp sends this report from Scientific American:
A Chinese spacecraft service module has entered orbit around the moon, months after being used in the country's landmark test flight that sent a prototype sample-return capsule on a flight around the moon and returned it to Earth. The service module from China's circumlunar test flight arrived in orbit around the moon this week, according to Chinese state media reports. The spacecraft is currently flying in an eight-hour orbit that carries it within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the lunar surface at its closest point, and out to a range of 3,293 miles (5,300 km) at its highest point. Earlier reports noted that a camera system is onboard the service module, designed to assist in identifying future landing spots for the Chang'e 5 mission that will return lunar samples back to Earth in the 2017 time frame.
Reader schwit1 adds a detailed report on Russia's next-gen space station module, writing, "The Russians have always understood that a space station is nothing more than a prototype of an interplanetary spaceship. They are therefore simply carrying through with the same engineering research they did on their earlier Salyut and Mir stations, developing a vessel that can keep humans alive on long trips to other planets."
Great to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Glad to see someone is returning to the Moon, no matter which nation. We need more space exploration in general.
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Indeed. Humans are returning to the Moon.
Re:Great to see (Score:5, Interesting)
Since 1969 there have been people living on Earth who have visited another world. It would be a terrible failure of humanity if one day this was no longer true. I am not fond of the Chinese government, but if they send people to the moon, I'll be enthusiastically cheering them on.
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It would be a terrible failure of humanity if one day this was no longer true.
Was it a terrible failure of humanity that we stopped building giant pyramids? Sure the first few are cool, but its awfully expensive.
Why not wait a few generations until the technology has progressed sufficiently, that we can do something substantially better.
There is only so much you can reasonably do with muscle power or fossil-fuel rockets.
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A minor nit-pick: I think you mean "chemical rocket".
Probably the most common rockets are liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen. Neither are fossil fuels. Solid rockets could contain oil-derived plastics in their fuel, I don't know enough to say how often this is so. SpaceX uses kerosene/liquid oxygen which does use fossil fuel, although I expect it wouldn't be hard to substitute a suitable biofuel if they really wanted to.
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A minor nit-pick: I think you mean "chemical rocket".
No, I was trying to stress the antiquated nature, and the limited reserves of this resource we are squandering.
rockets are liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen. Neither are fossil fuels.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H... [wikipedia.org]
> Currently, the majority of hydrogen (95%) is produced from fossil fuels by steam reforming or partial oxidation of methane and coal gasification.
OK, so "fossil-fuel-derived" ? But so is gasoline.
Re: Great to see (Score:2)
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We never stopped building giant pyramids. Those specific structures were votive, like the European cathedrals we built later for a different style of worship. The Romans followed the Egyptians with concrete buildings, aqueducts and a highway system. The pyramids of today are undersea tunnels and ultra-tall buildings. Expansion into space is just a continuation of the same process.
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I think the point is that the old pyramids were useless, but extremely expensive, artefacts. Similar to astronauts planting a flag on the Moon. Undersea tunnels and aqueducts actually serve a very useful purpose. The problem is that there's very little useful stuff we can do in space. The biggest exception would be commercial satellites, but we're already doing that. Unmanned exploration is nice for some (I like it), but not appealing enough for the majority of the people to allow for big budgets.
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I'm not an engineer so I don't know how true it is.
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I've heard a lot of nonsense said today. We may not have specific plans to build a giant pyramid, but we can definitely move the rocks around, far better than they could back then, and if somebody had the land and actually wanted to pay to build one it wouldn't be hard.
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I've heard it said today if expense wasn't a concern a pyramid like the greats could not be reproduced using modern tools.
I'm not an engineer so I don't know how true it is.
I hear Obama is a Reptilian, but I'm not a zoologist.
relax. (Score:2)
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Enthusiastically? Maybe not.
I submit that as much as people like to complain about Pax Americana, Pax Sinica will be a helluva lot more overbearing, ethnocentrist, and painful to anyone not Chinese (and within that group, very narrowly benefiting their "1%ers" to an even more lopsided degree than US society today).
It will be interesting to see how 'open' their space program will be to other countries; they've already shown themselves to be rather terrible 'space citizens' in terms of debris-consequences.
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Technology has receded since the last time humans landed on the moon? That's pretty funny.
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The technology to land on other planets has absolutely receded. We are kind of starting from scratch.
Re:Great to see (Score:5, Insightful)
The technology to land on other planets has absolutely receded. We are kind of starting from scratch.
There is an active rover on Mars that would disagree with you if it was sentient.
We do not lack the technology to land on other planets.
What we lack is a reason to include humans in the landings.
The robots are doing fine without us.
well, not great, but not bad (Score:2)
But I differ with you about how robots are doing fine without us. They are very limited. In addition, the GOP continues to force NASA to be a jobs program, which means that economically, we could not go to the moon or mars.
musk and Bigelow are changing the economics of it. Both are making it so that not only will america be
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But I differ with you about how robots are doing fine without us. They are very limited.
How many manned missions continue to operate for 4300% [wikipedia.org] of their planned mission duration?
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1,982 pounds, slightly less than 1 tonne.
Re:Great to see (Score:5, Interesting)
America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard. There are some efforts to try and build some new spacecraft that might actually be useful in the future and they are currently under development, but none of them are flight worthy. If some alien creature was discovered orbiting the Earth and simply asking for somebody from the Earth to meet with them in orbit in exchange for huge amounts of cultural and scientific data, it would have to be done right now with a Soviet-era Soyuz spacecraft or with a Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft. America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that.
Yes, the technological capability of going to the Moon has been lost in the past 40 years and needs to be rebuilt from scratch. All we know is that it was done in the past, where sadly an entire generation of kids are starting to believe the Moon hoax guys because the technology to get to the Moon no longer exists.
Re:Great to see (Score:5, Informative)
America wouldn't and simply can't do something like that
It's not really a matter of technology that has been lost, rather than safety requirements that have been increased to the point that nothing passes them right now.
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lol what? In an agency where pretty much everything is monitored by multiple people and they didn't keep notes? I've seen some of the binders for things like simple tool allocation/procurement and that one was fifty pages.
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Wrong. Dragon has been operational since 2012, and has a life support system (primitive, but no more so than Shepard's) and the proven ability to return safely. Dragon could fly people tomorrow if NASA just had the guts to accept some risk.
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The Dragon can't carry a crew right now, so you are wrong.
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America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard.
No they haven't. The US is perfectly capable technology-wise of designing and building manned rockets. They've just chosen to accept (for political, not technological reasons) a gap of a couple of years between the retirement of the Shuttle and the inaugural manned commercial flight.
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You are confusing science with technology. The equipment necessary to send a crew into orbit simply doesn't exist right now in America. Yes, the science in terms of how it can be done has been created and you can look at previous designs to see how it was done in the past can be done, assuming of course that some of the really critical steps done by previous engineering teams was even recorded and documented.
It also helps to know that previous designs were successful, so you are attacking this engineerin
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You're confusing technology with "currently in production". Several companies in the US posess all of the technology needed to put humans in space. They just haven't produced and flown spacecraft yet.
It is a political issue, pure and simple. The transition between the Shuttle and new manned systems was planned badly, allowing a several-year capability gap.
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America has lost the capability of being able to reproduce the original Mercury flight of Alan Shepard.
That's not true. It's not that we can't. We just don't want to.
that's bs. (Score:2)
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The Dragon has no life support right now and is very much incapable of carry a human crew. Elon Musk jokingly said that you might be able to get a ride with a cot and a scuba tank, but it definitely would not be capable of bringing a crew into orbit with its current configuration. The Dragon 2 (which still isn't flightworthy by any stretch of the imagination) is going to be crewed and like I said, some effort is currently underway to get that crew capability to return. I think you are underestimating the
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Considering that both launch pads 39A & B have been completely dismantled for new rockets, that the Shuttle processing facility to get the vehicles ready for launch has been also rebuilt to do other things, and there are no external tanks available nor even a manufacturing plant capable of building them, I'd say those Shuttle orbiters are going to stay mothballed permanently.
At this point, even the engines have been torn apart and are currently being repurposed and reworked for use on the SLS.
No, there
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Space-X could reproduce the orbital flight of Apollo 7 (first crewed flight of Apollo) tomorrow if there was a reason to, using the Falcon 9/Dragon system.
I would ask a SpaceX engineer about this first. The ones I've talked to about this very point have cringed with even the mere suggestion of this idea. And yes, they've been asked.
No, SpaceX could not duplicate the flight of Apollo 7 tomorrow. They are gearing up to be able to duplicate that flight though in a fashion, so no doubt they will get there somewhat soon, but the Dragon 1 capsule as it currently stands is not crew capable and neither is the Dragon 2 capsule prototype.
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I stand corrected on the state of the Dragon. Still, I don't feel the angst about the US space capabilities which is often expressed around here. Having lived through the 70's with the abandonment of the Apollo/Saturn hardware, with two flyable Saturn Vs left to corrode away on the ground, and then the long, slow disappointment of the STS, the rebuilding situation in crewed capabilities we have today just doesn't seem so bad, and that doesn't consider the golden age of interplanetary programs going on now
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Technology naturally progresses at an exponential rate, but NASA jumped us forward 20-30 years.
Re:Great to see (Score:5, Informative)
How can you say that technology has receded? That is so far from the facts that I cannot believe that you said that deliberately.
Did you forget that last year we landed on a Comet? Did you forgot the Titan Landing, the minor issue of our presence on Mars for what - 15 continuous years now? Did you forget Cassin, Voyager, MESSENGER? Did you forget that even at this moment we are on the brink of our first good look at Pluto?
You live in a bizarre world.
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How can you say that technology has receded?
The USA doesn't even have a rocket capable of sending people to the moon, or even into LEO, and it's not because we don't want it.
You live in a bizarre world.
Yes, that's absolutely true, and I wouldn't want that to change.
Re: Great to see (Score:2)
In addition, dragon 1 and 2 are fully capable of holding 7 humans today.
nope (Score:2)
The problem is that going to mars was too expensive because companies became too expensive. Now, spacex and Bigelow are making it cheap to go to both.
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People use the buggy whip as an example because some inane person mentioned it on Slashdot a billion years ago and people have co-opted it since then for ridiculous arguments that make no sense - buggy whip makers went out of business because there was no longer a mass market for their product, not for any other reason. Buggy whip makers went on to make other things, they didn't die a horrible starving death because one of their products went away.
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Uh, no, thats not the point people are trying to make when they talk about buggy whip manufacturers, as in many cases its put across as a far more course argument - "buggy whip manufacturers went away because no one wanted their product", and yet the modern examples that buggy whip makers are used for, the products are still massively in demand...
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Dave420 says "the buggy whip manufacturers didn't all die out in the gutters lamenting their lost industry" and you say "Buggy whip makers went on to make other things, they didn't die a horrible starving death because one of their products went away." So you agreed with him? The truth is that the buggy whip meme is the best-understood and least-misused meme on slashdot.
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The S&M market?
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a valid justification for Man in space (Score:2)
a man's reach should exceed his grasp -- Robert Browning
Re: a valid justification for Man in space (Score:2)
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Mining is a prime candidate for broad commercialization.
No. It's too expensive. Even metal-rich asteroids are mostly made of base metals such as iron and nickel, of which we have plenty down here on Earth. The valuable metals in the platinum group are still relatively rare. This means you either have to install a refinery on an asteroid, or try to safely deorbit tons of worthless garbage for a handful of precious metals. Either proposition is hopeless.
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I can see most of the base metals produced in space being used "locally," such as in structure for vast solar arrays. But as the cost of mining on Earth keeps on going up as we have to go deeper and weirder (under the ocean, etc.) for supply, the temptation to drop asteroidal metals down to Earth will become irresistible. Keep two things in mind: While it is and still will be blisteringly expensive to haul goods up the gravity well from Earth and then further out of the Sun's gravity well, sending anything
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Deorbiting stuff safely isn't cheap either. Remember that the stuff is going Mach 25, and you only have a very short time to slow it down in a controlled manner. The more massive the chunk is, the bigger the problem. And you don't want a uncontrolled deorbit. First of all, it will make it hard to predict how it will interact with the atmosphere and where it will land. Also, it will land with such an impact that the explosion will blow your precious metals all over the place.
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The deorbiting problem is one of controlling the descent, while taking something to orbit requires an inescapable amount of applied energy. Over the years we have gotten good at controlling spacecraft much faster than we have gotten good at lifting heavy weights.
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Deorbiting requires removing a lot of energy, and that's almost as difficult. Notice for instance that our capability to bring stuff in orbit greatly exceeds our capability to bring stuff down. The best thing right now is the cramped Soyuz reentry vehicle, barely capable of bringing three astronauts and some carry-on luggage. The Dragon capsule promises a bit more, but it's still nothing compared to what you would need to do mining. And don't forget that the reentry vehicle needs to be launched from Earth,
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I don't see us bringing back asteroidal metals in any sort of spacecraft, especially one launched from Earth! It's going to be more like sending back refined metal shaped into an aerodynamic reentry body wrapped in something ablative, perhaps made from slag generated during refining. We need to come up with a shape that is self-righting and which can be aimed with reasonable accuracy at a large unpopulated area, such as Mojave or Mauritania, for pickup.
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I seem to recall the space shuttle having recovery capability and far more capacity than 3 astronauts and some carry-on.
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In that case, you'll need to send a refinery to space. Any idea how much mass that is ? And even then you'd still be limited to small pieces (ablating too much during descend) and hard impacts (scattering your profits). If you add up all the cost, space mining just doesn't make any sense. Where do you get all the energy for your mining and refining ? Asteroids are far from the sun, so solar panels aren't going to work very well.
It's much easier to stay on Earth, and go after the low grade ores. We have plen
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Yes, I'm assuming a smelter at the point where the metal is extracted. Such a refinery would of course not be cheap, but could take advantage of microgravity and baseload solar energy (no weather, no night, no bird poop, no environmental 'activists') to produce high-purity metal at perhaps a lower cost than accelerating unusable mass back to LEO.
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Don't forget no gravity, needed for traction in mining (try using a shovel or bulldozer in zero gravity and then there are explosives) and needed for purifying the metal through the trick of lighter things floating on heavier things.
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Yes really. Smoke less weed if you can't formulate a coherent, on-topic sentence.
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I'm a Chinese (well, Hong Konger, but after the fucking handover now I'm technically Chinese) and I've worked in the mainland, so listen to me. China is NOT communist. Not even close. Sure, the Communist Party is in power there, but they are just crooks. If you actually go to the mainland you can see the elders walking the streets, begging for money and food. It's everywhere, from the biggest city to the little town. A communist government would actually care about these people and provided them shelter, f
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I don't know whether what he says is true, but beggars are not a typical sight in communism.
In a communist state, they would either not get much gain by begging on their streets (think Cuba, at least when foreigners are not involved), and or be thrown in jail by doing it (like what they say happens in North Korea)
Also, political leaders enjoying luxury goods and meals is the norm in most countries, communist ("real" or not) or otherwise.
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obviously, you have no clue (Score:2)
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"returning to the moon" -- Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter, a NASA spacecraft, is operational in orbit around the moon right now and has been there since 2009. NASA just makes it look so easy that when they do it, nobody notices.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L... [wikipedia.org]
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pa... [nasa.gov]
A new space race? (Score:3)
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The Republicans don't beleve space exists so they're against NASA and especially against LEO trips. That is the way of their kind. They hate humanity in general so they won't allow us to go to space, because they don't believe in it.
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A new space race? Asians!
We should face facts (Score:1)
Our systems, especially propulsion, are just too primitive to be sending any humans to any of the planets. And most of that technology will have to be built on the moon, outside any atmosphere and in a much smaller gravity well. Also, considering our success rate in such things, we have just as good a chance of terraforming the moon as we do Mars. It will all be under glass anyway. Without a working core Mars can never generate and hold a breathable atmosphere. And unless the damn spaceships are as comforta
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Use a nuclear rocket. Have a self-contained reactor heating your working fluid and expelling it out the back (say, hydrogen) at high pressure & velocity.
Now, your fuel is a bit more common, you just have to get sizable quantities of it one place. As an alternative, you could just have it use whatever was available (within specs) as a working fluid.
There's a goal they haven't thought of yet... (Score:3)
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I hope they do this... it would trigger a new space race: Then we all win!
Oh! Oh! I know what those are called! (Score:3)
"...within 125 miles (200 kilometers) of the lunar surface at its closest point, and out to a range of 3,293 miles (5,300 km) at its highest point..."
Thanks to Kerbal Space Program, I know what those are called! The first one is the periapsis and the second one is the apoapsis. :D (Yes, I know, common knowledge, but it's cool that a game taught me a thing or two about spaceflight...)
Too bad real life has the Ferram Aerospace mod enabled; this craft very likely would be unable to reenter the atmosphere and land (or splash down) without breaking up, because it's not designed to withstand the heat and drag forces.
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Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:5, Insightful)
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Space-X could carry humans to the ISS at any time. Currently, they haven't gone through the very large amount of testing to be certified for it, and the Russians are still willing to do the carrying.
Re:Success rate of 0% (Score:5, Informative)
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It didn't help that Sergei Korolev died right before the Apollo moon landings. It was even apparently due to a poorly trained surgeon for what should have been a routine medical procedure that caused his death. Had Korolev been around to provide strong leadership to the Soviet Moon program, I think there might have been an outside chance for a Soviet crewed lunar landing to have happened by about 1970 with the N-1 rocket becoming successful.
The funny thing is that the N-1 engines that should have gone to
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Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2)
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Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2)
Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2, Insightful)
No human ever reached escape velocity. No human's ever been outside Earth's sphere of influence.
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He means escape velocity of the Earth, Sheldon.
Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2)
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The Russians landed one of the only working probes on the surface of Venus.
Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2)
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have fun paying for all that with your Putin Pictures -- uh, I mean "rubles".
Does any Russian currency feature Putin on it? Not to my knowledge.
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The most high-quality stream of photons we have ever received from space is PRODUCED IN SPACE. And keeping it going has required periodic servicing by human crews.
Re: Success rate of 0% (Score:2)
note that without human fixes, we would have discarded Hubble. The fact is, that repairing a sat via robot is difficult.
What total BS (Score:2)
OTOH, it is MUCH cheaper to fix the hubble. Even with the shuttle, it was still cheaper. Now, with the coming Dragon along with Inflatable space stations.
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not anymore. (Score:2)