What I’m looking for – desperately! – is the worth in keeping people in space, and living all their lives there. That is essential to the long-term survival of the human race. But where is the short-term economic incentive?!
Except Tibet ( as seen in 1959), North Korea (which China is actively trying to puppetize to prevent the reunification of the Korean people), Sudan (where the murderous regime is heavily supported by China), and etc. etc.
But we have Kennedy quotes!!! And Star Trek platitudes!!! Isn’t that enough???
There isn’t a short-term economic incentive and if there has to be one, there won’t be further progress made in manned spaceflight. That’s why the US won’t do it, but China theoretically could. What China decides to do doesn’t have to always be profit driven or something. They’re going to need room to grow and as you said, they aren’t traditionally imperialist and they don’t have designs on other people’s land much. But, there’s a lot of land in space. It won’t be cheap at first. If it needs to be cheap and/or quickly profitable, it ain’t gonna happen.
Once they get enough people living in space that they can build more of their own habitat more cheaply than moving back to earth, there’s an economic incentive for them, at least.
Circa 1961, the United States’ main motivation was a Cold War fear that manned spaceflight would have a crucial impact on the strategic balance between the West and the USSR. Nukes parked in orbit, manned spy stations, even missile bases on the moon were proposed at one time or another. The USA chose to go to the moon because if you could send men to the moon, you had a massive space capacity that could be used for military purposes. (Seriously- at one time it was anticipated that the USA would launch 20-30 Saturn Vs a year supporting a lunar military base!) Getting there first meant forestalling any attempt by the USSR to nationalize the moon. But the Space Race was essentially over by 1967, when a treaty banned basing nuclear weapons in space or nationalizing other bodies in the solar system. After 1968, Nixon and congress let NASA spend already acquired assets and then canceled Apollo.
No one will go back to the moon until someone needs to build a booster rocket for other purposes that is also big enough to support a lunar mission as a by-and-by.
There isn’t one, sadly. If there was then you’d be seeing private industry jumping in much harder than they have been. Space tourism isn’t going to be more than a toy for a few rich people, if it ever happens at all. Only a nation state, and one that is an economic superpower, can currently afford a manned space program. Or an unmanned program for that matter.
China wants to show it’s cred as a viable economic superpower, and they see this as one of the ways to do it (this isn’t the only arrow in their quiver of course). Unfortunately, as with the feared Chinese retread air craft carrier, most of this is smoke without a lot of fire. The Chinese certainly have a manned space program, but they don’t have much of a chance to really go to the moon and set up a base there…or even do a flags and foot prints mission, at least not any time in the next few decades. The US COULD do it, if we wanted to…but we don’t want to, and our window of opportunity is probably closing, if in fact it hasn’t already closed.
It’s a shame, since I think there is a lot we could learn by real, grand, larger than life manned space missions. But we aren’t going to be doing them, and we’ve wasted our resource on stupid and mostly pointless manned space gestures. It’s a shame that the government is the only entity that CAN do real manned space exploration, because, well, they are the government and are piss poor at actually don’t anything substantial or meaningful, besides wasting money and making grand promises…
-XT
Ah, well. If you want to dream, everybody check out Ben Bova’s Mars. (The trip is funded by an international organization collecting donations – from governments, but also from individuals, etc.)
There isn’t one right now, but presumably if the price of mineral resources was to rise high enough then eventually asteroid mining will be economically viable. It might not even need a space elevator to make it commercially viable.
If China starts launching NERVA style Nuclear rockets from their far western deserts , who is going to stop them?
Nuclear rocketry was killed in the US due to paranoia about anything Nuclear, but it’s an order of magnitude more cost efficient than chemical propulsion, and a combination of Nuclear Rocketry and limited nano-tech capabilities could feasibly make asteroid mining profitable within 40-50 years.
Of course if you build a space elevator or rail gun type launch system the equations change again and it’s much more profitable.
OK, PRC, you’re this national government, see? Of this huge old country, and you just don’t get enough respect! Everybody said you could never set up a Moonbase, they still laugh at you over the Great Leap Forward, and there ain’t no money in it anyway, but you’re gonna do it just to show 'em all! Got it? Pride man, that’s it! Aaaaannnd . . . Action!
That’s basically how the US did it. Building a moon base has got to be cheaper than invading and occupying say, the middle east.
Just planting a flag has been done. They’ll have to do something a bit different. Cooler.
You mean you’ve never heard of the Moonroe Doctrine?
I’ve read it…and the sequel as well. 
Most of this is pure fantasy. The Chinese aren’t making noises about grand manned missions because they want to get in on the ground floor of vast mineral wealth (I doubt any economic factors are going to make it feasible to go out and bring stuff back to earth in any of our lifetimes) but because of the prestige even talking about a manned space program gives them. If they actually pull off a flags and footprints mission to the moon it will be a huge feather in their cap (I highly doubt they will accomplish this in my own lifetime, but I guess we’ll see).
As for nuclear rockets, no one is going to build a nuclear rocket to toss payloads into orbit…at best we might see a continuous thrust nuclear engine for something like a trip to Mars. Space elevators, rail gun launch systems (that would kill any person on board due to the high gee forces, even if you could get such a beast to work for something larger than a small payload) and magic nano-tech are highly speculative technologies that are very unlikely to happen any time soon, if they ever do. Personally, I think we should still do space exploration, manned and unmanned, using the technologies we already have (with some serious refinement), but most people think it’s a waste, so even that is unlikely to happen. I’ll be shocked if China is able to do anything meaningful in space in my lifetime. Even assuming that they continue to grow economically and are able to avoid hitting the various walls in their collective paths they have hundreds of billions of people living in abject poverty that they will have to at least make an attempt to address in the next few decades if they don’t want their system to come crashing down.
-XT
Post-Founders. (By one generation. Didn’t take long at all, did it? :()
NERVA is a continuous thrust Nuclear engine, and it was highly successful, it was only discontinued because of the backlash against nuclear in the west. The physics behind it is solid.
yes and they are, the goals for the 12th 5th year plan 2011-2015 specifically include emphasizing development in rural and inland areas, addressing wealth inequality and turning the coastal regions from the “world’s factories” into centers of R&D and service providers.
Considering they have achieved most of the goals of the 10th and 11th five year plans pretty well I’m willing to give them five years to see how they go on this one.
Hundreds of billions? Did they abandon the one-child policy for an eighty-child one?
For the record, the water in all but a handful of Chinese cities is unsafe to drink. The vast majority of Chinese people must boil their water before drinking it to avoid old fashioned infectious diseases like typhoid. Of course, this does not protect them from heavy metals, which is another story.
We are talking about a government that lacks the capacity to provide even basic government services. What they are good at is laying out massive sums of oney on prestige projects. It’s too early to know the results of this method. Accomplishing your output (high speed rail, etc.) is not the sme as accomplishing results. But we do have some precedent- Africa is littered with showcase airports, luxury hotels, and five star conference centers. For the first decade after independence, it seemed like it was going to work- the capitals had everything a modern city would need and indicators were rising quickly- there was a huge jump in health and education outcomes.
In the end, that jump was merely a result of undoing some of the wrong of colonialism. It wasnt the beginning of an upward path. Corrupt, unresposive, unaccountable and vain governments soon slowed progress to a crawl.
China has a demographic boom of working age adults that it will soon reach the tail end of. It has experienced a huge infusion of cash from selling off the formerly public land in the countryside to private developers. In some muncipalities, sales of public lands account for fifty percent of city funds- and much of this is being pumped into unsustainable prestige projects under the “build it and they will come” theory. Obviously, this plan won’t work forever.
Of course people support the Party in boom times. But people have very little attachement to the party itself- party membershipis prized mainly for the business opportunities it offer. You pay your hefty dues and you get the opportunity to climb the ladder. It’s a cynical, practical transaction. These are fair weather friends, and the moment the economy falters, the party is going to find itself in trouble. The biggest threat is local parties, which are run like franchises. The ciy of Shanghai may well decide they don’t need to listen to Beijing (and they don’t. They have the money. All Beijing really has over them is the legitimacy behind the party name- which is useful currency for now.)
The party recognizes that they cannot promise double digit growth forever. Hey have been reparing for this by trying to lower economic expectations (hard sell) and building on nationalism. Imperial history and Confucionism- once reviled- are being revived in museums and education as the party rebrands itself as not a new era, but as the logical continuation of China’s long political history, which had already achieved the ancient dreams of uniting China and damming the rivers, and is now going to restoreChina to her rightful place of glory and respect as the most advanced country in the world.
Hence the space program.
It sounds good, but these are not real dreams. These are the cynical calculations of a group of old men and young heirs determined to maintain power at any price. If they felt like burning China to the ground would keep them in power, they would burn China to the ground.
Funny that sounds like exactly like what the republican party is doing by refusing to raise the debt limit. Destroying the economy to get back into power. See what I did there?
It seems a bit more constructive to spend your time building power stations, rail networks, etc as a way to hold onto power don’t you think?
Well, time will tell, right?
The whole “America has problems too, neener” defense is one of the weaker bits of nationalist rhetoric, and a moment’s though shows why that isn’t really relevent. I suggest reading the China Daily editorial page for a bit to pick up the hipper, newer ready made soundbytes for apologists. People have already done all the work figuring out what to say to basically any challenge and you might as well use it.
Still not sure what building a ‘cool’ moon base in going to get them. There are astronauts living in space right now and it doesn’t seem like a major event to most folks.
If the Chinese get to the moon by 2040 (their stated goal up thread) what will that really mean to their prestige, if that’s what it’s for? At that point NASA might ask them to bring back something from the antique, 70 year old lunar lander.