If we outsource lunar exploration to China, yes.
You said it was “ought” versus “is”. Try this. Search for “ought”.
Who’s saying “we” shouldn’t try to survive? You were talking about people a billion years from now. That’s not “we”. That’s “they”.
False dichotomy. We can look inward for struggle against oppression and solutions to starvation and disease. We can work hard on problems we have right here. It isn’t a choice between gazing at our navels and setting out on a foolhardy expedition to an irradiated environment where one hissy fit from the sun or a couple of pea-sized asteroids wipes it all out.
In what way is struggling against oppresion, disease, and hunger a “new” frontier?
Where did I quote anything about a new frontier?
If our society needs frontiers to sustain itself, then we’re screwed. If you mean, literal frontiers, not Liberal’s metaphorical frontiers. Because unless there’s a scientific breakthrough in the laws of physics in the next couple of decades, we’re not going to be sending conquistadores to the Moon.
If we need to go to the Moon to avoid become a nation of girly-men, then we’re going to turn into a nation of girly-men, because we’re not going back to the Moon except as another stunt. And once that stunt is over, where will we be? Looking for the next stunt?
If we still need literal frontiers, then we should be focusing on Baffin Island, not the Moon or Mars.
Think about all the reasons why living in an underground city on Baffin Island would suck. Now add in a new problem that it costs a billion dollars just to get to Baffin Island, and you’ll get an idea of why Luna City isn’t going to work.
Yes, the Chinese can go to the moon…eventually.
We need to go to the moon to push the envelop of our technology…and as Sam said to give us new frontiers and new challenges. I love the people who say we should wait until the technology catches up before doing anything significant in space…as if technology is going to improve in a vacuum. By pushing our limits that will drive technology in a certain direction. By not pushing them technology will go in other directions instead. If we curtail manned space missions then we won’t learn anything new about how to do manned space missions…so 50 or 100 years from now we’ll still be in the same boat as today. It will just be 50 or 100 years later and we’ll have OTHER new technologies because they will have moved in new directions. NASA has really no more capabilities today than they had in 1969 wrt space flight. Oh, the computers are better. But really our knowledge of HOW to send someone to the moon or Mars is essentially the same as it was then…because we haven’t done anything significant with our manned space program since then.
The moon is ideally suited as a testing station for us to see if Mars is ever do-able. Going to the moon and setting up a permanent base there will give us the knowledge and push the technologies to make future exploration possible. Additionally the moon itself hasn’t exactly been completely explored, all it’s mysteries solved. It would be like saying that if someone landed on Earth and explored a few hundred miles for a couple of days they would know everything there is to know about it. We don’t even know for sure if there is water ice on the moon for gods sake.
Yeah…I think the Chinese will go. I think they realize that to be considered a real world power a nation must do those hard things Kennedy was talking about. I just wish America would realize that we need to KEEP doing the hard things, to keep pushing.
-XT
Okay, here’s my own take:
Despite the bizarre claims to the contrary in this thread, there is indeed Chinese interest in going there, as amply demonstrated by their repeated statements that they want to go there. I’m just not convinced that they’ll be able to launch a manned moon mission by 2025, which is one of their more optimistic projections.
My feeling is simply that it is too much for them to hope that the Chinese economy will continue to chug along as well as it has for the next 15 or 20 years. It’s well and good for them to plan manned missions, space stations, moon bases, and trips to Mars, but these sorts of technological spectacles are the first things to get the budgetary axe when the economy tanks. Eventually something’s gotta give, things fall apart, yadda yadda yadda, and when that happens for serious next time, they won’t just be able to execute a few of the schlobs who weren’t quite as diligent about fighting corruption as maybe they ought to have been. I just got this hunch that the next genuine recession for them won’t be a cup of tea.
So can they get there? Yeah, I think so. Will they get there anytime soon (i.e. by 2025 when they’re hoping)? I doubt it.
Of course, I was hoping for someone with more knowledge about all this instead of the contentious and off-topic squabbling about whether it’s a good idea. For the purposes of this thread, I don’t give a good god crap whether it’s smart to go. I’m just curious about if and when the Chinese will make it.
If you have any doubts whatsoever about Chinese space success sparking another space race, then I’d say that you are, in my honest opinion, hilariously out of touch with fundamental facts about human nature. But hey, I can wait decades to be proven right about that. There’s no rush.
And Liberal, you have 10 posts in the thread, and you haven’t even hazarded a guess at the actual questions in the OP. It’s about The Future, so it’s not like there’s a real factual answer. If you’re gonna take a stand against the evil gummit taking what’s yours and shooting it into nowhere for no purpose (which, I admit, is a very closely related topic), then why not take just a sec to take a stab at the actual question?
If you’re going to Junior Mod, then do it to the person to whom I responded, whose post had fuck-all to do with China. Why go after the respondent rather than the initiator? Yes, of course China can get to the moon. It takes nothing more than a strong rocket, a tin can, and a lot o’ luck.
Jimmy Fallon on the WU report on this: Hey China- welcome to the 1960’s
Why?
[airplane ii]
TED STRIKER: . . . But we’re not living in the past any more. Or the present. This is the future!
[/aii]
Because no one’s economy runs along indefinitely forever without hitting snags. And China has a lot of problems they will have to deal with in the future economically that are going to slow them down at some point.
Hell, they are hitting an economic snag NOW just with the snow storms that have hammered them recently. I saw estimates of several billion dollars in lost revenue as well as damage just from that alone.
-XT
But the laws of physics haven’t changed since 1969 either. We understand how to build rockets, and we’re not going to build rockets that are revolutionarily superior to the rockets NASA built in the 60s. It still takes a skyscraper sized pile of hydrogen and oxygen to send a tiny capsule to the moon. Any improvements in rocket technology will be incremental improvements on already existing rocket technology.
Anything revolutionary won’t be due to working for 50 years on making more efficient rockets, it will be other things, like the space elevator. Building a space elevator means intensive research into materials science. And it will require several breakthroughs in materials science, such that it’s pointless to start a Manhattan program to jump start the space elevator, we’re better off funding materials science broadly and seeing what interesting things turn up.
It’s not like we never send rockets into space anymore. Rockets are launched into orbit all the time. And while they’re more reliable than the rockets of the 50s they still use the same basic technique, just like today’s jet airliners are simply refinements of the jumbo jets designed in the 50s, or the clipper ships of the 1800s were the same basic technology that Columbus used.
It’s always going to be hugely expensive and hugely dangerous to sit on top of a skyscraper full of explosives and light the fuse. The only way around it is to use a different method to get to orbit, but those methods aren’t going to be developed by building better and better rockets. In fact, it retards research into other methods, because now everyone has to defend the sunk costs, and defend their turf. Just look at the sacred cow the space shuttle has become. It’s much more expensive per pound to use the shuttle, but we’ve got to continue using the shuttle, because otherwise we’ve wasted all the money we’ve put into the shuttle. And despite Sam’s worry that we’ll become a nation of pussies, we’ve had two shuttles blow up on us, and if we keep operating the shuttles we’re going to get more. Keeping the shuttle running has become an end in itself, not a means.
Of course exploration of the Moon is worthwhile simply as basic science. But if you were handed $100 billion and told to learn as much as you could about the Moon, would sending a couple more Apollo missions be the best bang for your buck? And if we want to learn how to survive on Mars, Baffin Island is available. If we want to learn to survive in closed ecologies, BioSphere 2 only cost a few million dollars, and is still out there in the Arizona desert. And this is the sort of science that has to be done on Earth FIRST, before we can even begin to think of a permanent moon base. Unless we’re going to build another ISS, except this time on the Moon?
China wants to be a world power, and they’re going to have to do those hard things Kennedy was talking about. Like feeding 1.2 billion people, and keeping the country from imploding during the next recession. China is a country that doesn’t have to look very far to find hard problems to tackle, they’ve got more hard problems than they can handle.
But again, a moon shot is a stunt unless it leads to something more. And of course, the 50s space race was driven because it was dual use technology. A rocket that can put a man in orbit can also drop a nuclear warhead anywhere on the planet. We needed ICBMs, and every triumph of the civilian space program was also a message to the Soviets that we could bomb them and that any air defense was useless. ICBMs seem like a fact of nature to those of us who grew up in the 70s, but during the 60s our nuclear bombs were almost all either bomber based or short ranged missiles. ICMBs and satellites were the killer apps that convinced the government that we needed rockets.
Well, we’ve been launching satellites for decades, but the technology for putting satellites into orbit is pretty much the same as it was in the 50s. And this is an application where companies stand to make or lose billions of dollars. We can spend billions of dollars to put stuff into orbit, but if we want 2x stuff into orbit we still need to spend 2x billions. We can pour more money into putting more stuff into orbit if cost is no object, but what we can’t do is pour money as if cost was no object into putting stuff cheaply into orbit. And that’s what we need to make manned space travel beyond LEO work. It’s not the case that if we spent a few billion dollars on the manned space program that we could bring costs down by an order of magnitude, even if we discount the upfront costs.
The usual - conflict over resources and the distribution thereof. Errr, probably.
I’d really love to see a cite for this given the Moon is not geologically active and I can buy a telescope capable of this arcane feat on the geologically active Earth for under a £1000.
Guys, the far side of the Moon is not in perpetual dark. Over every lunar period, any given point on the Moon is in sunlight for approximately half of the time. There are a few polar regions that may be in shadow, but being at the poles will make them difficult to reach, and the effective of tidal forces on the Moon causes regular vibrations and quakes. Our experience with satellite observatories has demonstrated that once emplaced they are manifestly cost-effective to operate without a direct human presence. Of all the reasons for manned space exploration and extraplanetary bases this is by far the weakest.
Helium-3 mining has already been mentioned, or at least implied, a few times; this would be valuable to us in terms of providing aneutronic fusion energy if we could actually sustain a fusion reaction using pure [sup]3[/sup]He; in fact, we’re decades away from overunity D-D or D-T fusion, which is several magnitudes of difficulty more easy than helium fusion.
First of all, it wouldn’t cost $50B to get to the Moon, especially for the Chinese who are not as risk-adverse as NASA. Second (as already mentioned) the Chinese National Space Administration has already performed two manned space missions and are planning a third later this year which will include a space walk. The Chinese Shinzhou spacecraft is a much evolved, somewhat enlarged, and more capable version of the Soyuz capsule. The Chinese have extensive plans for further launches in the next few years, including assembling a primitive temporary space station before the end of the decade. While they are quite a ways away from deploying a launcher capable of delivering a Moon-transit vehicle into orbit, it would not surprise me that if given consistant political will and motivation that they could do it in a 10-15 year timeframe, and at a cost of US$10B-$20B. The basic technology has already been established, and the Chinese are very good at taking a known system and reverse or parallel engineering it economically and effectively. The biggest problem for the Chinese right now is building a booster; their current SLVs are all based on ICBM designs (themselves remotely based on Russian ICBMs). The class of vehicle necessary for a Lunar transit vehicle is substantially larger and more complex than an ICBM. This is what kept the Soviets out of the Lunar landing game (their massive multi-engine N-1 rocket tore itself apart every time they attempted to launch it) and this, plus the capability of a lunar landing craft are going to be real technological hurdles.
Anyone talking about going to Mars at this point is engaging in errant speculation. No one has yet seriously proposed a realistic scenerio for an interplanetary class mission. The next generation NASA system, if it even makes it into space, is no where near capable of this even given evolutionary developments, alleged modular design or no. Going to Mars will require experience with long-term habitation outside of a LEO environment (i.e. protection from solar radiation hazards not experiences in LEO due to protection of the Earth’s magnetosphere, advances in microgravity physiology or the ability to simulate gravity via a large rotating habitat), substantial advances in propulsion science, and more experience with isolation sociology. And for what? To scoop up some Mars rocks? Humans are of course more flexible and can display a wider range of judgement than robots, but at several magnitudes of order more cost and risk to the mission; it’s not clear that there is any scientific justification for manned space missions.
Putting people in space for the experience of getting better at putting people in space is a justification to its own end of course, but one which carries an entirely different and more costly standard of risk which is often inimical to the primary scientific goals of space exploration. The reason to put people in space is because they can do something that robots can’t, and the goal should be creating an infrastructure that is self-sustaining, i.e. asteroid mining, industrial manufacturing using materials from space, et cetera. Sending blokes to Mars just to plant a flag is the kind of football coach mentality that resulting in Apollo being cancelled just as it was beginning to become less costly and more routine.
Stranger