Chinese Crew Blasts Off for Space Mission

[SlowwHand]

I know the Chinese plans.

They intend to send all female babies to another planet, in an effort to stop an overage of procreation on earth.
What they don't understand is the effect of living in space will have on these women.
With no gravitational pull, they grow to a height of 50' With no males, they develop an inordinate curiosity based on legend/myth.

Wait just a minute. Never mind. I'm thinking of this "B" movie I saw.
My apologies. Please carry on with your trash flinging discussion.

[Serb]

You mean we should get back to the Soviet emblem on Mars?

[DanS]

Then grab a carbonaceous chondrite asteroid too...

I guess my point is that some of the heavy industry we have on earth is there because our structures have to cope with the effects of gravity. Having heavy (mass) structures in space wouldn't help you, even if it were economical. So it may make sense to truck everything from Earth for a while.

The lone obvious exception is water.

[Az]

No, but it's responsible for at least an order of magnitude of the cost differential.

If so, how about doing it with 2, competing, government operations? to cut costs?

[KrazyHorse]

Originally posted by DanS


The reason why it's on this anemic path is because it costs so much money to get out of the gravity well.

No, it's because we've lacked the will to do it.

We're keeping space flight half-alive.

The private sector won't do any better...

[Eli]

How about killing the Outer Space Treaty to get some real incentives to do space exploration?

[KrazyHorse]

What real incentive?

Either being the first with a flag gives you exclusive property rights in perpetuity, which simply encourages space-squatting or you make property rights dependent on continued exploitation of the area in question, in which case we're back to square one (since if exlpoitation is uneconomic then having exclusive rights to uneconomically exploit the area is no draw at all)

[Eli]

being the first with a flag gives you exclusive property rights in perpetuity

Exactly.

Edit:
The Outer Space Treaty blocks not only economic incentives, but also military ones which are as important.

[DanS]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
No, it's because we've lacked the will to do it.

We're keeping space flight half-alive.

The private sector won't do any better...

I think it will reduce the costs by an order of magnitude and will set us on a course to consistently lower the costs.

We will have to see. Later this month, there is an inaugural launch of a privately-developed rocket that will give us (the US) a 70% discount on current costs immediately, if successful.

Of course, I'm mindful of the fact that an order of magnitude reduction in costs is necessary, but not sufficient to do some of the cooler stuff in space. But we'll have to feel our way in order to know what we can do.

[SlowwHand]

Ronnie baby would be proud of you, Eli.
Star wars lives on!

[Eli]

Originally posted by SlowwHand
Ronnie baby would be proud of you, Eli.
Star wars lives on!

Star Wars was stupid in the 80s. In the 20s it might actually be smart, if not inevitable.

[_BuRjaCi_]

Serb get over that Russian emblem thing, it's a freekin' pice of plastic/alloy/whatever dumped on Mars to prove the superiority of the Soviet Union over the US (the same can be said of the American Flag left on the Moon )

And a Star Wars type project owned by any single state would just disturbe the wonderfull thing called MAD (mutualy assured destruction- or in English, politicians realizing they might look bad in the next election year if their country is covered in nuclear fallout). Because any such system is not 100% ( out of a few tousand nukes a few will always get throught ) protection.That's enugh to destroy several major cities and kill a few dozen million people.Of course one might argue that a "rouge state" (or in English a state that gives a f*** about US interests) might launch only a few nukes.But a country witch has only enugh resources&technology to build a few nukes, shurley dosen't have the capability to construct a nuclear shield and I am pretty confident it dosen't feel lucky enough to think a few tousand nukes (from the US/Russia/China/India/Whales/watheve) are just gonna mis it.One might argue that a Theocratic police state think's God is going to help them, but I have found that leader of such states are quite often calculating,cold & rational(rational in "you oppose me - you die" or "thes dupes belive in X wich gives me chance to rule them, by saying Y and claming to be representing X" - Just read Alamut by Vladimir Bartol. Wierd that the guy was soo right so many decades ago. Truly ahead of his time ).

And Sir Ralph, thanks! (I had to go offline yesterday, you know that whole bathing,eating taking notice of your familiy, friends thing ... to make it short the dull thing we call life)

[Sandman]

Originally posted by KrazyHorse
Because:

a) Robots suck compared to human beings when it comes to uncontrolled situations

b) Why the **** break the asteroid into pieces out there if you're going to be bringing it here anyway?

c) A mining operation requires much heavier equipment than a simple tug. You're putting us in a catch 22; we can't afford to mine the asteroids out there until we have a large infrastructure already in place, and we can't afford to put that infrastructure in place until we have asteroids to mine.

We need materials in HEO. We need mining operations up there to get at them. We need people up there to run the mining operations properly. We need factories up there to build spaceships from the materials we get. We need people up there to run those factories. We need orbital farms to feed those people and keep them happily breathing oxygen. We need nuclear power plants to keep the farms and mines and factories running.

Voila. You've got a self-sustaining community.

I don't think it's possible to knock a whole self-sustaining space community into place just by capturing an asteroid. An asteroid mine would be like an oil rig - only an order of magnitude more uninhabitable. Oil rigs have never developed any sort of autonomy, dependent as they are on manufactured goods from the land, and I can't see why an asteroid mining operation would be any different.

You're right about the space elevator. It's the only way forward for human exploration of space, IMO. Assuming its feasible.

[Darkstar]

Originally posted by DanS
We're using 50s propulsion technology, not 60s propulsion technology. The propulsion technology from Shuttle is being discarded. So what have we been doing spending all of those hundreds of billions of dollars the last 40 years?

Wrong. The new NASA replacement is just the SRBs with modified shuttle propulsion on the second and upper stages. The top stage is planned as being an oxy/methane (AIR) mix, so that they can use it on the Mars stuff. O/M isn't new (its 60s tech), but it was skipped because it doesn't deliver the power of Lox/Hydro. However, using the Shuttle Main Engines and modding them to use O/M will be new.

Of course, that's all if it isn't cancelled by the next president.

Although there is some serious new propulsion techs. You'd need to check out things like SpaceShipOne, SpaceX and the other companies. SS1 uses a Nitrox and Rubber engine, IIRC. A combination of solid (rubber) and Nitrox mix. As long as they poured in their liquid, it burned. Stop the liquid, stop the burn.

[Darkstar]

Originally posted by Urban Ranger
I don't see any evidence that the Long March series of rockets are "off Russian equipment and technology." Neither are the Shenzhou series of space capsules.

You mean, other then the Chinese Government's own statements? They are constantly defending their rockets and space craft, because they are Russian, designed by Russians, construction overseen by Russians, built by Chinese workers.

They have slowly been updating the space hardware, mostly with American space tech, to create a hybrid of Russian-American craft that are labelled in Chinese characters. And that's according to their own government's statements!

They aren't reinventting a thing. They are just learning to how operate their own.

The first truly Chinese design will be their Low Earth space station (which is taken from Russian plans, but never really developed). But, they look forward to being on the moon between 2010 and 2015 still. And claiming it for the Chinese people.

Now, it's not that the Chinese doesn't have the know how or intelligence to build, from scratch, their own space craft. But there is no need for that, and it is immensely time consuming and expensive. At this point, it's more of a practicality. But they have really acquired a tremendous amount of technical know-how from the Russians and Americans.