China's Shenzhou 11 blasts off on space station mission
bbc.com
bbc.com
[1] http://www.space.com/24208-international-space-station-exten...
I never understood this mentality that when the US is between launchers everyone suddenly has a renewed appreciation for last-gen achievements. We did the LEO psce bucket with the ISS. It leads to nowhere and had questionable space science utility. Its not a stepping stone to anywhere[1]. We're building the SLS and investing in SpaceX, Blue Origin, ATK, Sierra, and ULA to get out of LEO and to have a variety of spacecraft on tap. Nations still stuck in LEO with 60+ old launch systems are going to be left behind and they shouldn't be applauded for it.
A few years of downtime will be forgotten the same way we've forgotten the time between Apollo and the STS. Meanwhile, anti-US biased people will dance during this peroid and project questionable attitudes like the US not being interested in space (No one comes close NASA's achievements, missions, and budget) or how the US is declining because a pig like Soyuz can still fly to LEO.
[1] by the time the ISS was built we had enough know-how to do things like permanent moon bases and other achievements that were within our technical grasp but not within our political one. Its very easy to vote for splitting the bill on a space station with a bunch of other countries. Its a whole other thing to propose risky things like moonbases and to have them funded by Congress. Thankfully with the SLS and SpaceX we're back to doing risky things.
Russia is developing Angara-5, a new rocket that made its debut in 2014. Russia upgraded in 2016 its soyuz capsule and is working on a new design crewed vehicle.
Europe started developing its Ariane 6 next gen-launcher, following the success of its current Ariane 5.
Europe also landed on a comet earlier this year.
I am less versed in Japan launch schedules, but they also have a strong program.
During this time, US is developing reusable launchers that land on their launchpad.
Space is a global effort and every country is participating in this exploration. Each has strengths and weakness. For instance, USA can land rockets but cannot send crew in space.
There is no more a 'me versus them' situation in space development. Everyone works somewhat together. Russia sends US astronauts in orbit. US refuels the ISS with Cigna cargo. Antares engines are Russian RD-181. The service of the orion capsule is made in France and Germany. The Chinese spacecraft is derived from Russian Soyuz.
1. http://www.cnn.com/2016/05/23/asia/india-space-shuttle-succe...
There absolutely is and frankly its the only thing that's ever worked - competition. Before it was between nation states and now it will be between corporations, which is going to be much more efficient. We are entering a new age of space travel here where nation states take a backseat to big centrally planned government programs, at least in the US.
Losing the ISS will be a step backwards for space exploration.
We can also reapproproate tax dollars from failed programs to science.
Who is we? And by what standard is "plenty" measured?
Less tax revenue will result in less accomplished by government; it's inevitable. Already, important programs are cut in the US and UK. For example, as people were dying the US Congress wouldn't fund Zika virus research, and CDC (or NIH) shifted resources from Ebola research and/or treatment. The US military has clearly stated they cannot defend the country and accomplish their mission with current funding.
People can always claim they can 'trim the fat', etc.; it's just words; a promise of something for nothing, government services without having to pay for them. It's been used by politicians for as long as taxes have existed.
I'd be interested in serious research showing where such inefficiencies exist and what can be done, but the claim by itself isn't substantive.
If you use ion thrusters, the delta-V becomes larger (7km/sec), but with an Isp of 3000 sec you can do it with only about 4.5 falcons. So this plan could be reasonable.
The real problem seems to be that crewed missions to the ISS probably can't use ion engines, and so take a huge payload hit getting there and back, right?
Also, won't radiation be an issue that far from earth?
Here is a recent article that mentions a few possibilities: http://spacenews.com/companies-pitch-plans-for-commercial-sp...
Notably, the company Axiom plans on making their potential module be able to function independently after detaching from the ISS. Bigelow also has plans for using their inflatable technology, although they've been working on this for quite a while and I've heard rumors of that the management is dysfunctional so for them to be ready in time for 2024 seems unlikely to me, a layperson.
My guess: 2024 will come and there will be perhaps some commercial space stations or modules attached but they will lengthen the date until ISS decommission at least one time.
When the US stopped sending people to the moon it stopped to be capable of sending people past LEO. A space station at least ensures that we can still send people to space.
For manned spaceflight, NASA's top priority should be basic research into breakthrough propulsion technologies. It's pretty clear that we'll never be able to safely send a large number of people anywhere worthwhile using chemical rockets.
For a decade or so that might be worth it, but on a more long-term timeline it would be more efficient to just launch what you need when you actually need it.
EDIT: what I didn't think about is that one maybe could push it further out and reduce atmospheric drag and thus fuel needs that way, but I suspect the safety aspect still wins.
Now the shuttle's gone, there's no realistic proposal for delivering heavy components to the station, so it could be reboosted into a higher orbit. You'd end up spending less fuel on stationkeeping, but more fuel on routine deliveries and crew transfers.
I really have no idea whether this would be worthwhile. Anyone?
Just so you know, the Chinese are not on their knees begging for access to the ISS. There're doing fine on their own, and are likely happier with it that way.
Probably moving forward, China will move into the top tier of space powers alongside Russia, the U.S., Japan, and western Europe, and ahead of India (which has its own program albeit with a lower budget).
At that point, cooperation between China and the West would be mutually beneficial. One thing China brings to the table is a very low cost program; they seem to be able to do launches for one tenth the U.S. budget.
This is incorrect. SpaceX Falcon 9 has lower launch costs than Chinese Long March, and it's as American rocket as they get.
Good job on China for pulling this off and helping Mankind.
The American space program has been doomed for so long that it's hard to imagine a single speech would turn anyone around.
More generally, this outlook is part of why the TTP is staggeringly unpopular -- developing a soft power base in Asia, independent of China, simply isn't worth sacrificing _anything_, no matter how small, in the eyes of both the American public and it's current major party nominees.
So did the first space race, and it went pretty well, and cooperation between the US and Russia still took place eventually.
There really shouldn't be an use vs. them with China. That's incredibly toxic thinking (trying to create an new Cold War)
I never said there should be. All I said is that nationalism and fearmongering did not prevent the first space race from going well, and did not prevent eventual easing of tensions.
It may be obvious but there are plenty more Americans who are back and walking around on planet earth than there are Chinese astronauts who have been put into orbit.
tell me in what way the current US capacity of launching men into space is ahead of China's?
If the US wanted/needed to, they could put a man up tomorrow (seriously just strap a capsule to Antares 203). The only difference is that we are taking time to safely transition to a commercial market for spaceflight.
I'm not trying to knock China, more power to them, but they are definitely not "ahead".
You get to peek inside the capsule and realize a few things:
- The Soyuz is amazingly small and cramped
- The Soyuz looks and feels amazingly old compared to modern everyday expectations (the iPad is basically Star Trek TNG technology)
- Going to space is really, really difficult and expensive if this scary '60s tin can is still the best real-world tool we have.
In the Soyuz the crew sits almost with their knees against their chest.[1] The Space Shuttle flight deck basically felt like an airliner, but in space (at least as someone unfamiliar with airliners) [2].
Even in 2010 knowing that the program was being canceled, it was basically how I'd imagine space flight from the future. Although in reality the tiny-metal-can approach seems like it's still the safest and most cost effective way to get back from space.
[1] http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/gallery/images/station/crew-26/h... (this is before putting on the bulky pressure suit)
[2] http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/442024main_s131e006074_hi...
The sojuz program
http://astronautix.com/s/soyuz.html
also relevant are the Kamanin diaries (head of the cosmonaut corps from 1960 to 1971)
I think of the Soyuz system as the "B-52 of space capsules", conceived in the 50's, first flown in the 60's, and kept flying by incremental avionics updates to the present day. Which makes for a well understood system.
In many ways the Chinese system is an offspring the Soyuz system, while great efforts are made to stress it is a completely Chinese design, clearly they have made many design choices which were directly inspired by the Soyuz capsules, from how the solar panels are attached/deployed to the mass fractions allocated to various parts of the system.
I expect that is for the same reason that Boeing's CST looks like a bigger version of Apollo, because Boeing had all of the Apollo data already and it was perhaps easier for them to start from there and tweak rather than take it from the a blank sheet. I find it particularly interesting that SpaceX's Dragon, Blue Origin's New Armstrong, and SNC's Dream Chaser manned capsules are quite a bit different both from each other and previously flown designs.
So what I see is that the US will shortly (as in within 12 - 18 months) have a variety of manned space launch capabilities, some of which will have targeted return to base capability.
The odd duck out here are the Russians as they really don't seem to have a replacement for Soyuz either in the works or anywhere close to being deployed. That surprises me as they certainly have the expertise to build such a system and they will be at a tactical and strategic disadvantage when both the US and China can launch crews with greater on orbit maneuvering options.
Perhaps this is because they don't really see a need for a new vehicle (Soyuz meets mission requirements just fine), let alone the benefit of having partially re-usable rockets?
Partially re-usable rockets require special launch/recovery procedures (ie. a "smart" barge parked in the ocean somewhere, or worse, over land someplace risking the population), a whole lot of R&D, a new untested vehicle, and no guaranteed payoffs (SpaceX's cost reduction and re-usability claims are yet to be proven).
The Soyuz, as you've pointed out, is fairly inexpensive (given it's mission), and is very well understood. From their perspective, it seems, the Soyuz is the ideal craft for the job, and any new build would largely result in a new craft meeting the same mission goals, ie. a waste of time and resources when they already have a vehicle that fills that need.
As of ~2013, Soyuz has about 939 successful launches, 24 failures, for a total of 963 launches[1]. Seems to be a "recipe" one doesn't want to tinker with.
[1] http://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2138/how-many-succe...
Just a bit of a nitpick, your overall point here is entirely sound.
This might be questionable. Soyuz (as the name implies) was built in USSR, not Russia.
After USSR dissolved some experts were outside Russia. And since several decades passed most people with Soviet knowledge are already retired.
For example, are these islands owned by the PRC?
https://www.google.co.jp/maps/dir//21.1143616,115.9785889/@2...
1. Need enough distance to populated area. This has to take into account of the situation where something goes wrong in soon after the launch, when rocket is still close enough to the ground to cause damages. The launch location that you see is in the middle of the desert, so it is suitable.
2. Need to consider the landing location. The choice of landing location is limited by the launch location. This launch location allows for suitable landing location which are safe and far from populated area.
For anyone who uses reddit, the launch will be discussed here: https://www.reddit.com/r/ChinaSpace/comments/57zhk5/shijian1...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexei_Alexeyevich_Abrikosov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolay_Bogolyubov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pavel_Cherenkov
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ludvig_Faddeev
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Fock
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vitaly_Ginzburg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Gribov
The best and worst thing about authoritarian / totalitarian / one-party systems may be their focus. Few people making all the important decisions lead to few things being pursued vigorously. If they happen to be good things, great; you get an Academy of Science or a national space program with plenty of resources and social support. If they happen to be bad things, you get national disasters like Lysenkoism [1], "Deutsche Physik" [2] and the shuttering of Chinese schools and universities during the Cultural Revolution [3].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lysenkoism
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deutsche_Physik
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cultural_Revolution#Education
Countertexamples: Saudi Arabia, UAE, Haiti, China vs India, China vs Brazil, Authoritarian South Korea vs Democratic South Korea.
Generally, it's not simple - there's a lot of factors at play that influence a country's economic prosperity.
Indeed considering that India's literacy rate is bettered by regimes like Myanmar and DPRK, one wonders why India is being played up, when in reality the only real comparison at this point is with other lower-middle income nations in Africa. This is not to say there is prosperity in cities which are essentially brought up to serve English-speaking nations, but to replicate this across the country[1] will likely lead to a further fall in education levels (this obsession[2] gets back to my "feudal" point). Unlike manufacturing in China, India can't ever extend the service economy (other than e-retail) to its own market.
While some may romanticize Modi's plebeian origins [3], it must be inferred from his policies that he remains yet a handmaiden of the feudal powers that put him into power. I have been to (native?) universities in India, and level of ignorance/acceptance of the current situation baffles me to no end. It should be noted that, considering the stiflement of economics in India, a job in the state apparatus is seen often as the entire point of life outside the IT realm.
Don't fall for all the propaganda being spewed from India for self-flattery, and from America for its "Asian pivot". The reality is much more nuanced and murkier.
[1] http://www.business-standard.com/article/economy-policy/indi...
[2] http://www.forbes.com/sites/realspin/2014/11/06/the-problem-...
[3] http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/opinion/sunday/how-english...
Words, words, words, how they trap us all.
In other words, they have the same problems that American researchers complain about on HN all the time, only worse. It's fine to find the quality of Chinese research intolerable, but there should be more awareness that that's where we're headed.
Yes. If you look through just a college-level algorithms class curriculum, you'll find:
- Leonid Levin, who discovered the concept of NP-completeness in the early 1970s (as did Stephen Cook, independently)
- Georgy Adelson-Velsky and Evgenii Landis, who invented the AVL tree, the first self-balancing binary search tree, in 1962
- Andrey Kolmogorov, who did a bunch of things including Kolmogorov complexity, an important concept in information theory that underlies our understanding of entropy and compression
- Vladimir Levenshtein, another information theorist who gave his name to the concept of Levenshtein distance
There were plenty of passionate and talented Soviet researchers - although it also helped to work in a discipline that was promoted, as opposed to repressed by the state.
[0] http://www.nature.com/news/2011/110720/full/475267a.html
[1] https://www.thechinastory.org/key-article/how-fares-chinese-...
The article reports that their space budget is $2 billion a year, an impressively modest budget (assuming it's accurate).
This should be a kick in the pants to the U.S. to get its own manned space program back in operation, after a hiatus of 5 years.
"It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country."
I understand that you do not like certain aspects of my country, but do you really need to squeeze in comments like that when covering a spacecraft launch?
Edit: It was referring to the visit to the "secret launch base", so it is technically a fair statement. Still, the tone bothers me.
You can identify a good publication because everyone, on all sides of an issue, thinks the publication is out to get them. Both the Clinton and Trump camps think that about the NY Times, for example. In a way, a good way, it's true.
My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting.
>>> "It's not something a journalist is normally allowed to experience in this country."
> My only complain is that sometimes the narrator's personal sentiments get mixed up with the factual reporting.
The statement you quoted doesn't seem personal to me; it's not about the reporter's experience but about the experiences of journalists in general. And it's factual, not opinion or sentiment.
The best journalists are aware of that and try to present a neutral story, but it's inevitable. In this case, BBC is a media company and its in their best interests to be able to "experience" more of these types of events.
I would hope that foreign press covering news in the United States (my country) would place events in context for their viewers, and be equally fair and factual about it.