Jeff Foust lays out the case, pro and con. As he points out, there is a lot of ignorance and misinterpretation in this area, on both sides. I don't think that we're in a race, and if and when we are, it will become clear long before it's "too late," in any sense. We will not be surprised by a Chinese lunar landing.
As noted previously, the real race is not between governments, but between plodding politicized bureaucracies and cash-starved private space enterprises.
And I found this bit amusing:
It is difficult, though, to get a handle on some information, such as exactly how much money China spends on its space program; estimates vary widely and even Chinese officials have said that their budgets are "very complicated..."
Does that distinguish them in any useful way from NASA's?
I understand an appreciate Rand's take on this. There truly is a race between the bureacracies and small companies to demonstrate capabilities. But that does not mean that a space race doesn't exist between the U.S. and China.
I found this article to be fairly assinine. Look, I don't know if China is interested in "beating" the U.S. back to the moon. Whether they are or they aren't, that would only reflect one aspect of the space race.
Foust suggests that all of this space race talk is all just a big misunderstanding. As proof of this Foust quotes Jeffrey Lewis as saying:
?I would caution people against thinking there was a message intended with the [ASAT] test,? Lewis said. ?I think the thing that comes out of the bureaucratic account is that the Chinese didn?t think they were sending a message, or that they didn?t understand the content of the message. If they had thought they were sending a message, they would have paid more attention to the delivery of it.?
I find it heard to believe that China wasn't trying to send some kind of signal to the rest of the world. Just as a nuclear test says to the world, "We have arrived!", so to does this test. It tells the world that Chinese engineering in the field of knocking out enemy sattelites is coming along quite nicely, thank you very much.
Flush with the wealth that comes from becoming the manufacturer of much of the world's goods, China wants the prestige that comes with being a major if not dominant space power. Notwithstanding Foust's spin on our "misunderstandings", does anybody really believe that, in the wake of their recent ASAT test, China is NOT attempting to match or supercede U.S. space capabilities?
I agree that we need to be concerned about what China is doing in space militarily. I just think that it's pointless to worry about them beating us back to the moon.
does anybody really believe that, in the wake of their recent ASAT test, China is NOT attempting to match or supercede U.S. space capabilities?
No, they're not attempting to do so with the ASAT test. It seems to be one in a long string of cheap weapon systems designed to provide a partial counter to an expensive US weapon system. If there's any military significance to such a test, it's that it drives up the costs of future US weapon systems, since those systems have to be designed to counter China's future cheap weapon systems. That's a game that plays to China's advantage since it has the higher growth rate GDP and lower spending per capita.
Rand
The DOD shares your worries.
DOD Annual Report on the Chinese Military
http://www.defenselink.mil/pubs/pdfs/China_Military_Report_08.pdf
News Article
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/03/03/AR2008030301586.html?hpid=moreheadlines
Pentagon Cites China Space Focus
By ROBERT BURNS
The Associated Press
Monday, March 3, 2008; 3:19 PM
I wonder how SpaceShipThree would look in USAF Blue?
I'm kind of agog at the idea of Rand Simberg making common cause with the Union of Concerned Scientists, an official of which Jeff for some reason used as a source. In any case, what makes anyone think that China's lunar ambitions and its drive to build space weapons are not part of the same strategy?
I'm kind of agog at the idea of Rand Simberg making common cause with the Union of Concerned Scientists
And if I didn't have so much experience with you, I'd be "agog" that anyone could draw such a stupid and false inference from anything I wrote.
I wonder how SpaceShipThree would look in USAF Blue?
The problem, Tom, is that ever since the 1960's, we've had an unofficial, unwritten policy that human spaceflight is the exclusive province of NASA -- not the military.
It will take Presidential leadership to change that. I don't exclude the possibility that it might even be a Democratic President. (Remember, it was Bill Clinton who finally got Congress to approve ballistic missile defense. In some ways, these things are easier for a Democratic President, because they can ignore the arms control crowd and get away it.)
Mark, you wrote:
In any case, what makes anyone think that China's lunar ambitions and its drive to build space weapons are not part of the same strategy?
First, space weapons are a reasonable fit to a military strategy. They can be applied in space now against existing threats to China. China's lunar ambitions, whatever they may be, don't have a direct military application. The Moon is not a valuable military asset at this time. Even if it does turn out to be so in, say a century, there's still no reason that investing in a manned lunar effort now will support that goal then. There are two problems. First, a sustained lunar effort requires resources that could have been spent elsewhere. And second, there is the time value of that potential asset. Just because it's worth a lot in a century doesn't mean it is or should be worth a lot now.
Why is the moon so important? Been there, done that, got the rocks. If a presence on the moon is such an imperative, we'd still be going there. My opinion is to lightly fund the moon, and get there again, just to have a small presence, and then fund projects to Mars. If we continually reach for what we've already done, there is no growth. We need to continue doing what has made our space program so awesome. We need to do the impossible, which is what the moon was in the sixties. Dreams are not built on concrete achievables, so let's get Quixote on this and dream big, then accomplish it.
Mac there's an awful lot of things that haven't been done on Luna (or anywhere else outside Earth) that needs doing if one wants to be able to survive without an enormous monster of a logistics chain, including on Mars or Phobos or Deimos. That might not be sexy and it shouldn't be too hard but it still seems to be almost unachievable the way things are being done. Luna fits for most of those things.
I don't see the point in touch and go missions (except manned asteroid visits; but please stick some decent transponders in the thing before leaving) and unless the required groundwork has been put in place first that's all we'll get, anywhere.