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It's funny how much things change over a decade, yet it never feels like anything is happening on a day by day, or even year by year basis. Just imagine going b

It's funny how much things change over a decade, yet it never feels like anything is happening on a day by day, or even year by year basis. Just imagine going back 10 years in time and trying to describe to yourself what the next 10 years holds. You'd probably think yourself crazy! But to the point, in 2011 the US passed a law banning China from participating in the not-so-international ISS. The arguments given were that China had nothing to offer, and implicitly - that they'd just steal everything. Today, just slightly more than a decade later - they have one of the most advanced space programs on the planet, have built, launched, and manned their own space station, executed sample return missions from the Moon (the first since 1976!), and more. What would you have thought the odds of that in 2011? And all of these things are the sort of stuff that is happening in just a decade. The world is changing extremely quickly (even if it often doesn't feel like it), and space tech is one of the fastest advancing industries right now. I think the best window into the future is the past. Look at the trajectory we're on, not necessarily just the US - but the whole world. It's a good one, at least as far as space goes.

bnralt 3y ago
Here's an NPR article from 2011: > The country is now due to launch Tiangong-1, the first module of its own space station, possibly before the end of September this year. This will dock with an unmanned spaceship, Shenzhou-8, in China's first ever in-orbit docking attempt. Next year, two or three astronauts will be sent into space for the first manned docking. > Beijing hopes to put a rover on the moon by 2013, and then a man on the moon, as well as opening its own space station by around 2020. But its ambitions could be greater still than those being publicly announced. > "What we have seen again in reporting, as opposed to official documents, seems to be a group of Skylab-type Tiangong stations to be followed by a Chinese version of the International Space Station, which would suggest that China is aiming for a long-term human presence in [inner] Earth orbit," says Dean Cheng, an expert in China's space program at the Heritage Foundation. "Given past Chinese history — which is that their missions always last longer, weigh more, achieve more [than U.S. missions] — it is quite likely that the Chinese would try to set up some kind of longer-term presence on the moon, measured in weeks or maybe months." https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137815962/china-seeks-to-carve-out-a-space-of-its-own https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137815962/china-seeks-to-carv...

bnralt 3y ago

Here's an NPR article from 2011: > The country is now due to launch Tiangong-1, the first module of its own space station, possibly before the end of September this year. This will dock with an unmanned spaceship, Shenzhou-8, in China's first ever in-orbit docking attempt. Next year, two or three astronauts will be sent into space for the first manned docking. > Beijing hopes to put a rover on the moon by 2013, and then a man on the moon, as well as opening its own space station by around 2020. But its ambitions could be greater still than those being publicly announced. > "What we have seen again in reporting, as opposed to official documents, seems to be a group of Skylab-type Tiangong stations to be followed by a Chinese version of the International Space Station, which would suggest that China is aiming for a long-term human presence in [inner] Earth orbit," says Dean Cheng, an expert in China's space program at the Heritage Foundation. "Given past Chinese history — which is that their missions always last longer, weigh more, achieve more [than U.S. missions] — it is quite likely that the Chinese would try to set up some kind of longer-term presence on the moon, measured in weeks or maybe months." https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137815962/china-seeks-to-carve-out-a-space-of-its-own https://www.npr.org/2011/07/13/137815962/china-seeks-to-carv...