According to this article, they plan a space station in 2020, and don’t plan a lunar landing until ten years after that. I think we’ve got plenty of time to beat them there, if it’s important. I don’t think it is. No description of the purpose of the space station.
18 thoughts on “The “Space Race” With China”
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Of course options being offered by the Augustine Committee suggest a lunar landing beyond 2030. Some of them very far beyond.
I wonder if they’ll go with a hard shell like ISS or inflatable like Bigelow.
Mark– Building the rail road to Oregon came a long time after Lewis & Clark first went there, but the rail road was the more sustainable and socially useful investment, don’t you think?
Destinations only matter to those with small imaginations. Building a lasting, sustainable presence is what should be of interest to anyone who wants to see humans in space.
Besides, even if NASA doesn’t get there until “long after” 2030, private industry will get there as soon as the cost to launch is low enough. That could be well before 2030, not matter what NASA is up to.
im not claiming any threat of race here, but the article is a bad double translation and results being wrong ( not surprising, coming from ria novosti )
the next shenzou flights are supposed to practice docking, eventually forming a small mir-style station. 2020 is the date given for permanently manned and maintained design.
no plans for lunar landing, just a cautious “we’ll see if our tech pans out” date
No description of the purpose of the space station.
So Daveon can tell us how great other nation’s space stations are, and how behind the times the US is.
Huh, I thought the Chinese were aiming to launch the Tiangong 1 in 2010-2011. Does this mean their plans have been delayed by 10 years?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong_1
So what to the Chinese get to say if they reach the Moon in 2030? Probably something like “We’re just as good as those Americans were fifty years ago!” Then they’ll probably have a big parade and a party. Whoop-de-do.
Mir was not small at all. Well, sure compared with ISS. But not compared with anything else before it. Mir had like seven modules in it. I suspect no one will build another station with as many modules as ISS for a long time.
I would rather call this a Chinese redo of Skylab or Salyut. I have seen mockups of Chinese Mir like space stations. But those were usually next to their lunar rover mockups…
I think the Chinese should orbit a space station and rent time on it (as well as launch service to it) to the American porn industry.
This is an entirely different space race than that of the sixties. It’s not a two party race. The ‘racers’ not just being countries.
It is a slow race. I hope I live long enough to see it get faster.
PS: Here are some links about the old Chinese space station rumors:
http://www.astronautix.com/craft/prot9212.htm
Plus the “officially” announced Tiangong thingie:
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/chinas-tiangong-1-space-station-unveiled-for-tiny-taikonauts/
Carl, given that China uses its mandatory anti-porn software to justify political censorship, I don’t see China suddenly becoming lenient about porn.
Given that Elon Musk is friendly with his former neighbor, the guy behind Girls Gone Wild, I think this is a job for SpaceX!
On 2nd thought, this article
http://www.space.com/news/080505-nasa-zerog-congress.html shows why SpaceX shouldn’t go near Girls Gone Wild, and maybe hints at why the Russians would be a better bet. The article is on a subject that Rand undoubtedly knows more about than me or the author of the article — why Congress was reluctant to use commercial companies for zero-g airplane flights – supposed involvement with Girls Gone Wild being one of the reasons, as if that could possibly matter.
Goodness, Bob Prime, like most of the schlock that China makes, it would be purely for the export industry. For your old-fashioned Maoist, it would be the ideal fifth-column operation, sucking the running dogs’ wallets dry by having them pay top dollar for their own cultural degradation.
In the Worker’s Paradise, we would continue to watch only the pure uplifting stories of heroic unisex workers exceeding quotas, of course.
The Chinese, crafty devils that they are, are building the station first and going to the Moon later? No wonder Orientals outscore us on average on the IQ tests that we wrote.
I kind of wish our political class had that kind of wisdom back in the Sixties. No telling where we would be today.
It’s a funny kind of race when the objective is to be the first to go where we went 40 years ago.
“The Chinese, crafty devils that they are, are building the station first and going to the Moon later? No wonder Orientals outscore us on average on the IQ tests that we wrote.”
Indeed. If the Chinese are smart, THEY are paying close attention to, and taking the lessons of the Aldrige Comision/Orbital Depot debates as well…
If the Chinese are smart, THEY are paying close attention to, and taking the lessons of the Aldrige Comision/Orbital Depot debates as well…
Nah, they are still too busy building their own Shuttle analogue, trying to fullfill their strategy from a couple of decades ago:
http://www.strategycenter.net/research/pubID.174/pub_detail.asp
The Chinese have snail paced space development. They only haven’t been completely surpassed because the USA has had a bunch of failed space vehicle projects in succession.
Nah, they are still too busy building their own Shuttle analogue, trying to fullfill their strategy from a couple of decades ago:
Amazing.
China is developing a military spaceplane, which would give them total control of outer space. Something that’s still on the drawing board in the US.
And you dismiss it as “their own Shuttle analogue”?
Did you read the article you linked to, or did you just see a picture of something that had wings and figure it must be a Shuttle analog?