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China to launch space station by 2023
- wtvanhest 13y agoDoes anyone have a list of things China said they are going to do but haven't actually done? [Added] Just to be clear, I am actually interested in a list, not interested in disparaging China. I'm mainly curious.
- bayesianhorse 13y agoThe Chinese call one of theses lists their constitution.
- cygwin98 13y agoThis is hypocritical. US and the whole Western world is not any better on this.
- podperson 13y agoIt's only a bit hypocritical. There are actual degrees of hypocrisy! The US constitution frequently prevents the US government (and US State governments) from enacting laws or enforcing previously enacted laws. This can be good or bad depending on your point of view, but it's a simple fact that in the US we have constitutional rights that are actually pretty potent. Do the police in China have to read people their rights? Guantanomo is a travesty, but it's a travesty precisely because the US Constitution is difficult for the government to ignore. A more interesting example is many former British colonies, such as Australia, and Britain itself manage to have quite free societies despite having almost no constitutional protections. In China I'd say you don't even seem to have the basic rights people in the English system and its descendants enjoy thanks to the Magna Carta (Habeas Corpus, for example, or the right to a fair trial. Wasn't there just a very high profile case in China where the accused was very vocal one day and then suddenly had nothing to say the next?)
- cygwin98 13y agoIt's only a bit hypocritical. There are actual degrees of hypocrisy! I don't get this. Did you mean there are 50% hypocrites and 90% hypocrites? And the 50% hypocrites can always laugh it out at the 90% hypocrites, because he/she may think he/she has a moral high ground due to less hypocrisy. Heck, that's mouthful.
- ugexe 13y agoI don't get this. Are you saying someone who is a hypocrite 1% of the time is equal to someone who is a hypocrite 99% of the time?
- Gigablah 13y agoYes, they are both hypocrites :) (Seriously though, degree and frequency are different things)
- mahyarm 13y agoIt's a matter of degree. The difference between a thief who steals bread, a thief who steals cars and a thief who steals %10 of GDP through political and financial trickery.
- randallsquared 13y agoKind of a bell curve, then? :/
- InclinedPlane 13y agoHold on. The US may have many faults, but claiming that it's not "any better" than China in regards to human rights or protection of individual liberties is just asinine. China put down a peaceful protest using tanks. Hundreds of protesters and dissidents were killed. Some by being shot on the spot, some by being run over by tanks, many more by being executed for the crime of protesting the government. People in China have a legitimate fear that criticism of their leaders could lead to arrest, imprisonment, or even execution. That's a rational fear borne out by decades of evidence showing the consequences of being a political activist in China.
- pavs 13y agoWith how many countries did the US engage in pre-emptive wars with false premise and without much if any support from rest of the world in the last few decades, which resulted in 100s of thousands of death? Lets not forget the US financed dictators that killed many more and the topplings of democratically elected governments that resulted in civil wars and more deaths... And now compare that with Chinese record, or does it not fall under "human rights" category? American exceptionalism is the most disgusting theory if there ever was one.
- pm90 13y agoAll good points, but we're talking about how a country treats its _own_ citizens. And in this regards, the US is far better than most other countries, most certainly China.
- pavs 13y agoUSA has the highest incarceration rate than any country in the world. I have lived in USA for 12 years of my life, perception of having freedom and actually having freedom is not the same thing. At least from my experience I can tell you that most americans don't even know the difference. So much so that most americans will somehow find a justification for all the international crimes against humanity that the american government has done over so many years, sleeping well at night thinking their government actually cares about them and their flimsy perception of freedom.
- ianstallings 13y agoNo, It would be hypocritical if they said unlike the US or the western world. But they never said that.
- bayesianhorse 13y agoSo essentially, because the whole western world isn't perfect, we are not any better in terms of human rights and democracy than the PRC which hardly even tries?
- djvu9 13y agoOne thing for sure is that the list is too long to fit into NSA's hard drives. Proud to be a Chinese!
- dcc1 13y agoConsidering that the hard drives are likely to be made in China who is to say they dont already have a copy!
- rposborne 13y agoMisleading Title, China has had a space station since Sept 29, 2011 called the Tiangong 1. The article is reference a large orbital station similar to the Mir in size. Tiangong 1 could be compared to Skylab but is still most certainly a space station. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1 Edit: The original article has the misleading title.
- ximeng 13y agoThey're also planning a lunar rover soon with potential goal to retrieve fuel for nuclear fusion. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Program http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Progr...
- Loughla 13y agoI am genuinely hoping that this type of thing leads to a cold-war style space race with increased investments into science and technology.
- melling 13y agoProbably won't happen. China will probably take a clear lead within a couple decades. There isn't enough return on investment in a space race and the US won't have the extra money. Kudos to China for taking the lead in the 21st century. Look at how they built the world's biggest high-speed rail system in such as short period of time. Next year it will carry more people than the US domestic airlines. http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-moves-twice-as-many-passengers-as-its-airline-industry http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-move...
- pm90 13y agoReally? You're just gonna give up that easily, huh? I don't mean to poke fun at you, but the competitive spirit was what made it possible for America to be where it is now, technologically. That, and a lot of money, of course
- Retric 13y agoThe space race is like the race to buld the largest hotdog. Interesting spectacle but horrible ROI. It's a classic even when you win you still lose. PS: 100% Self sustaining colonies have value but that takes 100,000+ people which nobody is talking abut sending to space any time soon.
- InclinedPlane 13y agoThat's not going to happen. At least not due to China's space program. Manned spaceflight in China is a program of national prestige (though that's no different than any other country). But because of China's culture, their government, and the fact that almost all of what they are doing in spaceflight is retreading old ground they have been and will continue to be extremely cautious, moving at a slow pace. China's first manned spaceflight was a decade ago. In that time they've launched a grand total of 5 manned missions. Recently they've accelerated to a rate of about one every year. Meanwhile, they plan to spend the next decade slowly building a larger space station (similar to Mir though with only 3 permanent modules) and developing automated resupply spacecraft. They aren't trying to trailblaze new eras of space exploration, they're just trying to play the manned spaceflight game to show that they are a country capable of doing so. Fortunately though there will be considerable competition among private companies in the US, in both launch vehicles and manned spaceflight. Two companies have already developed unmanned cargo resupply vessels (though Orbital has not yet fully demonstrated theirs yet), at least 3 companies are building manned spacecraft for putting crew in orbit, and several companies are working on yet more advanced technologies for sending crews beyond Earth.
- velodrome 13y agoOrbital space debris is a real problem. I hope China will be a little more responsible than they have in the past. http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/4314987544/sizes/o/ http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/4314987544/sizes... http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisome-debris-cloud-circles-earth.html http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisom... http://www.space.com/20138-russian-satellite-chinese-space-junk.html http://www.space.com/20138-russian-satellite-chinese-space-j... In any case, I hope more countries put more space stations up. It would be great for space tourism and other human endeavors.
- cygwin98 13y agoFlaming remarks. Removed
- podperson 13y agoI think you're missing the point of the "big brothers". The dark translucent outer circle represents debris. China has a huge amount of debris (thanks to deliberately blowing stuff up) compared to countries with far larger numbers of satellites.
- velodrome 13y agoActive Satellites / Non-Active Satellites / Orbiting Space Debris: US: 453 / 683 / 3258 Russia/USSR: 86 / 1310 / 2690 China: 40 / 29 / 2690
- cygwin98 13y agoSo blame the picture itself then. The last number is colored nearly black on a dark background. Also the number is a bit misleading. Most of the China's debris were probably generated by the ASAT test in 2007, which is not a common case.
- javindo 13y agoThought I'd comment before the typical anti-Chinese-Engineering brigade shows up. In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world. China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on. I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.
- infinotize 13y agoThe cost now in such infrastructure expansion isn't "only" the human expense of civil/personal liberties in China, it's increasingly the planet itself. The sooner China, the US, and other industralizing countries start taking that seriously, the better.
- cygwin98 13y agoAnd meanwhile Fukushima has been dumping huge volumes of radioactive waste water into Pacific for the past two years, the western world seems to be OK with that. Maybe space is more valuable than oceans.
- infinotize 13y agoWe seem to generally (east, west, whatever) lack the collective capacity to care about these things unless we can't ignore it in the short term.
- cygwin98 13y agoI agree. This is the tragic commons of the human beings.
- peter303 13y agoChina was not invited to participate in the ISS-1 due to fears it would steal Western aeronautical technology. Well, it looks like they have taken anything they wanted. So we might just build the post 2025 ISS-2 with them.
- maaku 13y agoChina never asked to participate in the ISS. If they had wanted to, they could probably have joined. "The west doesn't want us to join their space station project" was pure politburo PR bullshit. (Source: I worked at NASA at the time)
- huhalu 13y agohttp://www.justice.gov/olc/2011/conduct-diplomacy.pdf http://www.justice.gov/olc/2011/conduct-diplomacy.pdf
- maaku 13y ago? Not sure the relevance. That post-dates the China/ISS issue by years, and anyway is about NASA doing it's own diplomacy, which it shouldn't have been. That's State Department's business - just like it was when Space Station Freedom turned into ISS and the Russians got on board. The Chinese could have worked with the State Department, Russia, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians to join the ISS program and it would have been legal. They deliberately chose not to.
- SCAQTony 13y agoA space station is a bad investment for any country. The annual cost of the ISS is $3-billion-year. It will cost an additional 24-billion for the next 6-years to keep it up The total budget cost of the Kepler Spacecraft was $0.6-billion and discovered something like 2,740 planets outside our solar system. The Mars Science Laboratory cost was $2.5-billion and as of last month revealed that Mars once was a habitable planet. The Hubble space telescope in all cost $9.6-billion over the decades (plural) and sincerely over-delivered by refining the predicted age of the universe and validating that the universe is indeed expanding faster and faster. I would rather they launch more probes, telescopes, and comet samplers than a space station that costs more than it delivers.
- ttflee 13y agoBut it would be such a huge positive political asset that can feed so many people for years.
- noselasd 13y agoYou explained how much it costs, which is a lot, but not why it's a bad investment. We get quite a lot of tech and science out of the space statio + the experience to go further.
- readme 13y agoIt won't be a bad investment when some aliens come to visit. At least they won't think we're that stupid.
- lallysingh 13y agoDepends on the alien, no? They might think we should've just built more supercomputers and colliders, and predicted everything else out from there.
- Scriptor 13y agoIt's hard to really quantify scientific returns as a per-dollar measure. The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space. Of course, the results of these experiments rarely make it into pop science articles so they're not often publicized. But they do happen and it's important not to just brush them aside as not worth the cost of the station itself.
- chiph 13y agoLooks like the Chinese have their own docking mechanism, of unknown compatibility with an older Russian design. I think it'd be a good idea if they collaborated with NASA and Roscosmos on a design. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecraft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecr...
- LiweiZ 13y agoJust another misallocation of the crucial resource to military power. When there is little resource, end game comes.