China’s Great Leap Someward
Posted by Matthew on Tuesday October 14, 2003 @10:33PM
from the We'll-see-you-when-you-get-back dept.
Matthew writes: China launched it’s first manned mission to space aboard a Long March rocket with a capsule that will orbit the Earth 14 times in it’s bid to become the just the 3rd Nation in the world to do so, after the former Soviet Union and the United States.
“This shows to the world that we are now just 40 years behind the United States,” said Defense Minister Zhan Li Zhao. “At our current rate of development, we’ll be just 20 years behind them in another 40 years, and ready to begin testing our own Space Shuttle. Our projections show that within 100 years, we’ll be at technological parity with them, and will have abandoned Space development completely.”
Subject:No Subject Given
Sorry about the biting satire when I'm supposed to be funny all the time. I'm just feeling insecure out Humanity's reach into space. The Chinese will almost certainly be more tenacious about it that we or the Russians were.
Comment by Matthew — October 14, 2003 @ 10:43 pm
Subject:Re: Biting Satire
I'm a big fan of biting satire. I read a couple paragraphs by a British author who, having been to the USA, wondered why a country that he found to be so full of people of scathing wit kept electing people with no sense of humor whatsoever.
Comment by Tyson — October 15, 2003 @ 11:49 am
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Why have we abandoned space development? Too expensive? Not enough motivation? It very much reminds me of Sylvia Engdahl's The Far Side of Evil, which 'is based on the concept of a “Critical Stage” during which a species has the technology to expand into space, but hasn’t yet implemented it, and in which that same level of technology enables it to wipe itself out.' She also wrote a very nice article about why we should expand into space.
Comment by Geekette — October 17, 2003 @ 2:32 pm
Subject:Re: No Subject Given
My guess is “because there's so much room still left in Nevada,” but I'm no expert.
Comment by Michael — October 19, 2003 @ 2:41 am
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I found it quite funny, actually. The last paragraph looks like it's reaching for a sarcastic jab at the Chinese for being far behind, then turns it around with an unexpected punchline. Biting satire is good.
Comment by Michael — October 19, 2003 @ 2:43 am
Subject:Re: No Subject Given
We've abandoned space because it's no longer fashionable to waste money on the long term while there are still hungry children. Actually, all the children are being fed now, but there are still endangered whales. Well, now that I think of it, whale populations are up dramatically across the board. Okay, there's still economic disparity between the rich and the poor. That's why we're not in space. Oh, and a lack of universal healthcare.
The real reason is that beyond the moon, everythign is so damned difficult that nobody can achieve anything within their own lifetime, so why bother?
Comment by Matthew — October 20, 2003 @ 11:42 pm
Subject:Re: Why? Because…
…it costs a tremendous amount of money. It really does. It's true that it's really, really cool, but to get to Mars and back would cost $ 200 billion dollars. Maybe more. That's 14 years' of NASA's entire budget. Politicians don't have any trouble spending $ 200 billion dollars, but what if the astronauts didn't return safely? Who wants to get anywhere near that kind of political liability? No one in h(is/er) right mind because even if it succeeded then after all the euphoria died down we'd be stuck in the after-Apollo rut for another 30 years.
I once computed the amount of energy it would cost to send a Mazda Miata to Alpha Centauri one way, taking 15 years for the journey. As I recall, it amounted to about 100 million 1 megaton hydrogen bombs. Stop. Think about that. 100 million hydrogen bombs. We're not going anywhere any time soon, guys. Sorry. Especially since the Miata isn't shielded against solar radiation or cosmic rays.
Lay people just don't understand the staggering cost and energy requirements to do these things, yet they still don't support it. Imagine what the support would be like if they did understand.
For now it seems right to go it slow until we've driven the cost of shipping a pound of stuff into space down to something somebody would be comfortable putting on a credit card. Oh, and figured out some way to shield a space ship from radiation, because that's a huge problem nobody's got a decent answer for.
Comment by daan — October 21, 2003 @ 3:55 pm
Subject:Re: Why? Because…
Ignore the rads, cure the cancer.
Comment by Tyson — October 24, 2003 @ 4:18 pm
Subject:Re: Why? Because…
Compare the energy differential between what it will take to send the mazda miata to Alpha Centauri to the energy differential between what King Henry the 8th could weild and what it takes to send a man to the moon.
Ignore our fossil-fuel concerns. Henry had no oil worth speaking of; we don't have what we will have in a few (perhaps hundreds of) years.
I'm sure somebody somewhere has calculated the global energy output of all us humans over time. I wonder what kind of curve it makes. I'd be suprised if it's not exponential.
Comment by Jorgen Hansensensen — October 28, 2003 @ 7:04 pm
Subject:Re: Why? Because…
You're also off by about 8 orders of magnitude or so. How exactly are you accelerating this thing? Destroying the Moon and choosing to be on the most rapidly moving miata sized chunk moving in the correct direction?
Don't assume traditional rocket engines, 'cause we wouldn't be using those to go anywhere significant.
The raw energy required by a 100% perfect engine assuming you start in orbit winds up being about equivalent to a “mere” one hydrogen bomb.
Comment by Tyson — October 30, 2003 @ 10:08 am