China Plans To Reach Mars by 2020 and Eventually Build a Moon Base (techinsider.io) 105
Rebecca Harrington, writing for Tech Insider: China has plans to orbit the moon, land people on it, and eventually settle a moon colony. But that's just part of the nation's vision for space exploration: China intends to get a spacecraft to Mars by 2020. "Our long-term goal is to explore, land, and settle [on the moon]," Wu Weiren, chief designer of China's moon and Mars missions, told the BBC. "We want a manned lunar landing to stay for longer periods and establish a research base." Weiren didn't specify when the country plans to accomplish these goals, but he did say they will "check out" the far side of the moon before attempting to land astronauts there. This mission already has concrete plans. He also said China wants to reach Mars by 2020, and implied that the country has finally settled on a mission to send a rover to the Red Planet. "We will orbit Mars, land and deploy a rover -- all in one mission," Weiren told the BBC.
Re: No fscking chance! (Score:4, Funny)
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Century 21, we're HERE! (Score:2)
The funny papers [gizmodo.com]
Walt Disney
The Monsanto corporation
Parliament
The Jetsons
The U.S. Air Force
Gerry Anderson
George Adamski
James Bond
Several World's Fairs
Movies
Syd Mead
Nikola Tesla
Canadian Avro Aero corp [gizmodo.com]
Television
Paul Moller
Sun Ra
George Van Tassel
GM
Pretty much everybody that wasn't warning us of IMMINENT ATOMIC DEATH from the COMMIES. And half of them, to boot.
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And you have the notarized deed of the formal promise they made? Do you understand the difference between a daydream and reality? And really? A UFO hoaxer? Kid's shows?
You sound like a whiny, entitled taker who just expected to sit on his ass and have the future handed to him!
Taker! Loafer!
Well, he is a baby boomer, after all. Even as old as they are now, they think the world owes them everything.
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"We didn't start the fire, it was always burning
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Flying cars. Even that would have been a start.
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Re: Finally (Score:2)
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This century? Google, Facebook, Twitter, the smartphone, bluetooth, WiFi.
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They have't started shit. So far, they're just TALKING shit.
Re: Finally (Score:2)
Re:Finally (Score:5, Informative)
They have't started shit. So far, they're just TALKING shit.
Well yes and no. They did land a rover on the moon recently. It croaked during the first lunar night, but it worked up until then. So they are building hardware and successfully soft-landing it places that aren't Earth. They aren't random space nutters wishing out loud. They're engineers with a proven track record, orbiting multiple humans and landing a moon rover. Western media carefully forgets that China has engineers and astronauts with orbital experience, not just sub-orbital.
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China is also being extremely timid with their space exploration plans. While they have done everything you have said, they aren't really pushing any sort of frontiers in any real sense of the word or doing anything that hasn't been done repeatedly by other spacefaring countries in the past.
In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against. They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about wh
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In that sense, statements like "we will build a base on the Moon" definitely makes them sound a whole lot like "space nutters" that you are railing against.
For the record, I wasn't railing about "space nutters". I was preempting the usual Slashdot complainers.
They have so much to accomplish and so much to learn about what it would take to actually get there that I strongly question any bold statements of that nature.
I'm not seeing what they're missing. The rover landed. Building anything on the lunar surface is, for the time being, just more of the same. Land a bunch of pieces and make sure at least one has the wheels and the lifting capacity to trundle around and collect all the pieces and set them next to each other.
I strongly suspect that the US notion of a lunar base and the Chinese notion of a lunar base are
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Weird (Score:1)
And presumably Nasa and others do not talk or announce plans or go through years and decades of talk. Why this gratuitous animosity? Towards a natural process of announcements of plans. Something weird happening here with these reactions.
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In addition, we have Blue Origin which will have cheap orbital rockets by 2020.
Then we have Bigelow Aerospace, that is making for space stations, and even lunar/mars bases to be cheap.
Finally, NASA is hard at work helping build up a number of companies that will want to go to the moon around 2020. And Spacex will be going around 2027 to Mars. Chances are, that SpaceX
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Unfortunately SpaceX is screwing the American taxpayers right now, being incapable of getting even 10 tonnes into orbit for 133M with its CRS flights.
You do realize that SpaceX just sent a CRS payload into orbit this past week, and the capsule is still up on the ISS attached to the station as I'm writing this reply?
I don't know what you are complaining about, other than a big oops happened with the CRS-7 flight. Those issues (at least the cause of that incident) have been resolved and the Falcon 9 has gone back into service with what I have seen as one of the fastest turn around times of any launch provider after a complete catastrophic failure of their
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I suspect that nobody wants to take him.
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Unfortunately SpaceX is screwing the American taxpayers right now, being incapable of getting even 10 tonnes into orbit for 133M with its CRS flights.
What the hell are you talking about? You think you can do it for $19.95? The CRS flights definitely get ~10 mt into orbit for those $133M. In fact, they can also get something like two tonnes of equipment back, which nobody else at the moment can do for any amount of money.
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Well except your gay sex buddy WindBourne was waxing eloquent about 150-250 mt for $500M.
Why can't you just fuck off back to /b/ and let the grown ups talk here?
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Blue Origin will be lucky to get their sub-orbital operations going commercially by 2020, let alone orbital. There's no saying whether their orbital flights will end up cheap at this point either, since they haven't even finalized the design let alone built one let alone tested it.
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What will USA, Russia and EU do to compete?
Say "please"? ;-)
Then stop talking (Score:4, Informative)
Then go do it.
Talk is cheap, bitches.
Re: 4 Years? (Score:3, Insightful)
Seriously, the causal racism on Slashdot these days is getting way out of hand and really really old (as you probably are)
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Judging from his user name he is already posting from beyond the grave.
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What do you mean by 'people like you'?
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So that was why the Chinese guy was arrested for political critique when he said he is displeased with the inadequate erections?
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But he already knew how wong he was. And how wang too.
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Really. All I could say is Ho Lee Fuk!
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Re: 4 Years? (Score:2)
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Seriously, the causal racism on Slashdot these days is getting way out of hand and really really old (as you probably are)
Seriously, anonymous complaints are white noise.
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Seriously, the causal racism on Slashdot these days is getting way out of hand and really really old (as you probably are)
Old racists, young dyslexics. Another missed chance to untie on an issue.
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this is what you get (Score:5, Interesting)
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Well the NASA sort of lost its point after it has successfully been used to show the russians who the boss is. Perhaps the Chinese manage to make enough competition that the American pride gets hurt. If that happens, there will be an US flag waving on Mars faster than the senate requires to pass an average budget legislation.
Re:this is what you get (Score:5, Insightful)
Sadly, the loss of life we have suffered did not used to terrify us, and I don't think it terrifies most people in the USA today either. It's those people who are always looking for some sort of outrage or some sort of event to make themselves seem important or to grab a headline. And then the damage control starts and the politicians run away so that they don't end up on the Evening News.
I don't think America as a nation has run away from a space program or space exploration, but I do think our *government* considers it either a joke or a pork barrel. And that is why I hope commercial exploration keeps moving forward.
If they succeed, which I think they are quite capable of, China will prove that we are held back less by the difficulty of the task of the Moon, or a Moon base, or going to Mars, but rather by the difficulty of getting our politicians to pull their heads out of their asses to commit to it.
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Re:this is what you get (Score:4, Interesting)
Nothing at all. I have no doubt there's government pork involved. However, as the Chinese are relatively new to this manned spaceflight thing, the distribution of that pork is still up for grabs. Here in the US, it's been set for decades and there is probably no way to overcome the inertia associated with it (as far as NASA *** is concerned). Also, the Chinese government won't hesitate to take a heavy handed approach and squash anyone that gets in the way of the ultimate goal. In the US we'll let the NIMBY's and special interests add so many requirements and caveats to a government project that it drowns under the weight.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not really advocating the Chinese way of doing things. I'm just pointing out that it's silly to dismiss their plan as BS, since they don't have to attempt to please everyone. I think 4 years is probably optimistic, but 8 years? yeah, they could do that. Meanwhile, NASA will probably still be running tests of new hardware in LEO and revising the "why we're behind schedule" paperwork again.
***I mean NASA the organization here, I have much respect for NASA the people.
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I'll take my hat off to them when they pull off a sustainable colony on the moon.
Hope you like wearing your hat.
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Cheaper launch methods are on the drawing board for quite a few players, much cheaper than current systems. Rockets are on the way out and launch tubes are in, and not circular but elliptical to ensure the correct lifting body shape and fuel should be used for guidance and landing only (a fuel less take off, as far as the flying body is concerned, using the last bit of atmosphere to adjust vector and speed). So once you shoot that flying body in space, landing it becomes a matter of effective breaking, the
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If China does it, they won't have to worry about that. They'll have a Great Moon Firewall that will make connections to the Internet impossible anyway.
Mr. President, we must not allow a moon base gap! (Score:1)
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Gentlemen! Please! You don't have to crowd so close together, this is the Space Room!
Unless you have a better idea, which you don't (Score:1)
Sorry, the free nations of the Earth must forbid dictatorship from spreading off world.
The kickstart we need (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, it's my personal opinion that the US needs someone else to beat us to a major milestone in space. We've fallen into a bit of a winners dilemma. We've beaten everyone else, why do we need to keep trying? I think if China beats the US to Mars, you'll see the political will materialize around the space program again.
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The US made several landings on the moon and decided that it was too expensive.
FTFY.
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The US decided that moon landings were too expensive even before succeeding with the first one.
FTFY #2.
Re:The kickstart we need (Score:5, Informative)
Honestly, it's my personal opinion that the US needs someone else to beat us to a major milestone in space. We've fallen into a bit of a winners dilemma. We've beaten everyone else, why do we need to keep trying? I think if China beats the US to Mars, you'll see the political will materialize around the space program again.
For the most part, the US got whomped by the USSR in major milestones in space. Besides landing a human on the moon and some amazing unmanned planetary and outer system probes, they beat us at nearly every early milestone: ICBM, probe to orbit, animal in space, human in space, spacewalk, woman in space, probe to moon (orbit, impact, and soft landing), image of dark side of moon, return of moon sample to earth, space station, ...
Your last sentence is spot on, though. Getting beat by the Russians was the perfect motivator for our space program.
Where's the hardware China? (Score:1)
If you want to actually be on Mars by 2020 then you need to be in flight for 6 to 8 months before you touch down and that's not mentioning all the planning that takes place.
Where are the publicity shots of your rover prototypes if not the real rovers themselves?
Where are the publicity shots of the orbiter and deployment bus for the rover?
What rocket platform have you validated for Martian transit?
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Where are the publicity shots of your rover prototypes if not the real rovers themselves?
Here [scmp.com]
Let it be HKL (Score:2)
I hope they make it! (Score:2)
And I hope it lights a fire under President Hillary Clinton (odds are 1/3 in her favor) to start Space Race 2: Mars or Bust!
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There's a lot of things I plan on doing (Score:2)
Talk is cheap
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Memo to China (Score:2)
2020? Too late (Score:2)
The glorious leader Kim Jong-un has already established a very successful moon research base, and has single handedly colonised mars in his spare time. He announced it at Christmas and said it would be done by the end of the year.
Got to love the Chinese (or any communist) propaganda train