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Space Plan From China Broadens Challenge to U.S.
- melling 15y agoHopefully China has a great decade and doesn't falter. Their rise has been truly impressive. The Economist is predicting they will pass the US economy in 2018. Having another country as big as the US pushing boundaries in science, engineering, etc will accelerate progress. What's really missing is for China to have a few dozen universities doing research at the most advanced levels.
- melling 15y agoWhy the downvote? It's not my fault that America exported its middle class, its manufacturing, and its future. If you ask the average American, they'd say "why are we spending so money on NASA, when we've got problems on earth?" Then they'd run off to Walmart to buy all that cheap crap from China. At least China is doing to cool stuff with the money. A space program, thousands of miles of high-speed rail, etc.
- andylei 15y ago> "why are we spending so money on NASA, when we've got problems on earth?" > doing [...] cool stuff with the money is that the best reason you have? i think the money would be better spent curing diseases
- melling 15y agoWe already spend a lot more money on medical research than space exploration. The NIH budget is bigger than NASA's. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Institutes_of_Health
- vamp11235 15y ago"Why, sir, there is every possibility that you will soon be able to tax it!" - Michael Faraday
- karamazov 15y agoI can't help but compare this to the US government, which can't even seem to pull itself together for an annual budget. With respect to space, hopefully SpaceX and other private efforts will be able to propel the US in ways that NASA hasn't been able to.
- cpleppert 15y agoThe challenge from China on space needs to be kept in perspective the chinese still spend much less than the US on space technologies. The real failure has been the constant insistence by political leaders that NASA utilize shuttle derived components. After having to cancel the constellation project due to questions about whether the ares rockets would ever fly it is disconcerting that a similar approach is now being tried again. The new approach is probably workable in the sense that it will fly but it will continue to use shuttle derived components that will promise a high cost and limited flexibility for very little benefit over commercial approaches.
- CWuestefeld 15y agoI don't get it. Where's the challenge? If the Chinese are able to excel in their space program, how does that have any effect (particularly a negative one) on the rest of the world? This, as with economics, is not a zero sum game. Space... is big. Really big. You just won't believe how vastly hugely mindbogglingly big it is...
- gasull 15y agoThe challenge is on a) challenging US domination of the space b) China might (and probably will) deploy weapons in the space, just like the US does.
- estevez 15y agoTwo questions: (1) What does domination of space look like, number of military satellites?; (2) What weapons has the US deployed in space?
- groks 15y agohttp://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/chinese_space_white_paper/ http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/12/30/chinese_space_white_...
- estevez 15y agoI suppose my point is that China, like Russia and the United States, see a comprehensive space program as important to its interests. As the article linked to in the parent notes, these technologies are necessarily dual use, but I see no reason for that to lock us into a Sino-US space race. China's leaders have ambitious long-term goals for their space program that will be almost impossible to meet on its own (the cost of a Mars mission would be staggering), so cooperation with the US is in their interests as well as ours. China gains access to dual-use technology, we get to massage China's nationalism into something less virulent, and if nothing else, we both get to delay a strategic confrontation. Hey, I'm just some guy on the internet. But it seems wise to avoid repeating the mistakes of the 20th century and do a better job of accepting the reality of China's rise to great power status and accommodating them into the international system.
- a_a_r_o_n 15y agoIt's only a challenge if the challenged has the ability and intention to rise to it.
- estevez 15y agoI don't understand stories like these at all. Why are still seeing this from a Cold War perspective? First, in what possible sense is a Chinese manned spaceflight program a challenge to the U.S. If we apply the same standard to the Russians, haven't we've already "lost"? What's with the International Space Station, can China not join the club? The first item in the National Aeronautics and Space Act [1]: >(a) Devotion of Space Activities to Peaceful Purposes for Benefit of All >Humankind.--Congress declares that it is the policy of the United States that >activities in space should be devoted to peaceful purposes for the benefit of >all humankind. Second, why no division of labor? Let China do manned spaceflight. Hell, let's chip in (aside from debt service on all those T-bills). We can do plenty of cool stuff: start flinging bacterial spores into interstellar space, submersible probe(s) on Europa, etc. [1]: http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLICY http://www.nasa.gov/offices/ogc/about/space_act1.html#POLICY
- EREFUNDO 15y agoThis century (the next 88 years) can be summed up in one word: China....