It's only a bit hypocritical. There are actual degrees of hypocrisy!
The US constitution frequently prevents the US government (and US State governments) from enacting laws or enforcing previously enacted laws. This can be good or bad depending on your point of view, but it's a simple fact that in the US we have constitutional rights that are actually pretty potent. Do the police in China have to read people their rights? Guantanomo is a travesty, but it's a travesty precisely because the US Constitution is difficult for the government to ignore.
A more interesting example is many former British colonies, such as Australia, and Britain itself manage to have quite free societies despite having almost no constitutional protections. In China I'd say you don't even seem to have the basic rights people in the English system and its descendants enjoy thanks to the Magna Carta (Habeas Corpus, for example, or the right to a fair trial. Wasn't there just a very high profile case in China where the accused was very vocal one day and then suddenly had nothing to say the next?)
It's only a bit hypocritical. There are actual degrees of hypocrisy!
I don't get this. Did you mean there are 50% hypocrites and 90% hypocrites? And the 50% hypocrites can always laugh it out at the 90% hypocrites, because he/she may think he/she has a moral high ground due to less hypocrisy. Heck, that's mouthful.
It's a matter of degree. The difference between a thief who steals bread, a thief who steals cars and a thief who steals %10 of GDP through political and financial trickery.
Hold on. The US may have many faults, but claiming that it's not "any better" than China in regards to human rights or protection of individual liberties is just asinine.
China put down a peaceful protest using tanks. Hundreds of protesters and dissidents were killed. Some by being shot on the spot, some by being run over by tanks, many more by being executed for the crime of protesting the government. People in China have a legitimate fear that criticism of their leaders could lead to arrest, imprisonment, or even execution. That's a rational fear borne out by decades of evidence showing the consequences of being a political activist in China.
With how many countries did the US engage in pre-emptive wars with false premise and without much if any support from rest of the world in the last few decades, which resulted in 100s of thousands of death? Lets not forget the US financed dictators that killed many more and the topplings of democratically elected governments that resulted in civil wars and more deaths...
And now compare that with Chinese record, or does it not fall under "human rights" category?
American exceptionalism is the most disgusting theory if there ever was one.
All good points, but we're talking about how a country treats its _own_ citizens. And in this regards, the US is far better than most other countries, most certainly China.
USA has the highest incarceration rate than any country in the world. I have lived in USA for 12 years of my life, perception of having freedom and actually having freedom is not the same thing. At least from my experience I can tell you that most americans don't even know the difference.
So much so that most americans will somehow find a justification for all the international crimes against humanity that the american government has done over so many years, sleeping well at night thinking their government actually cares about them and their flimsy perception of freedom.
Well, why don't you pack your stuff up and go home? It's terrible here after all.
It gets old, people coming to the US because they see opportunity, and then being entitled sanctimonious fools. Never lifting a hand to make it better, but quick to pipe up when it's time to critique, making broad statements about how everyone here is so misinformed.
You think the average person in China is any different than the average American? Over 110M+ Chinese people can't even read. I really doubt they are over contemplating all of the human-rights abuses in the world by nation-states, including their own. And I bet they sleep just fine too.
I did pack my stuff and go home... But something to remember, having a problem with the American Government doesn't mean having a problem with the american people. Too many people confuses that.
You weren't talking about the American Government when you said "most Americans" and then went on to basically say that their attitude is disgusting. I didn't confuse anything.
Lets break it down and I am sure I might have been a little confusing myself.
- I condemn the American Government.
- I condemn most of the American people for their general apathy towards the human rights violations of their government both outside and inside their country.
- But I also realize that the American Government have most americans either too busy, too distracted or have them misinformed through propaganda campaign to have any serious widespread opposition to their action. The Government have all powerful multiple secret service organization that works full time to make sure there is no serious threat to the government status quo (among other things), under the pretence of national security.
- I can go on say that the actions of the government should not make the people of the country complacent of their crimes. After many generations of the same old foreign policy, this line of talk starts of get a little old, at some point someone need to stand up say you should also be just as liable as your government because even after knowing their crimes, you didn't do anything about it.
So yes, I do have a problem with the American Government, and I do think most americans are fault for not checking their government - BUT I don't have any problem with american people in general.
Well I agree with a lot of what you said there, almost all of it in fact. I do think we have problems and I do hate the apathy also. I am very critical of government and when I see others ignoring issues I get incredibly annoyed. Now that you've expounded on it I think I agree. At first I took it as just another guy bashing the US, which these days is an easy target. But I was wrong.
So essentially, because the whole western world isn't perfect, we are not any better in terms of human rights and democracy than the PRC which hardly even tries?
Misleading Title, China has had a space station since Sept 29, 2011 called the Tiangong 1. The article is reference a large orbital station similar to the Mir in size.
Tiangong 1 could be compared to Skylab but is still most certainly a space station.
Probably won't happen. China will probably take a clear lead within a couple decades. There isn't enough return on investment in a space race and the US won't have the extra money.
Kudos to China for taking the lead in the 21st century. Look at how they built the world's biggest high-speed rail system in such as short period of time. Next year it will carry more people than the US domestic airlines.
Really? You're just gonna give up that easily, huh?
I don't mean to poke fun at you, but the competitive spirit was what made it possible for America to be where it is now, technologically. That, and a lot of money, of course
That's not going to happen. At least not due to China's space program.
Manned spaceflight in China is a program of national prestige (though that's no different than any other country). But because of China's culture, their government, and the fact that almost all of what they are doing in spaceflight is retreading old ground they have been and will continue to be extremely cautious, moving at a slow pace. China's first manned spaceflight was a decade ago. In that time they've launched a grand total of 5 manned missions. Recently they've accelerated to a rate of about one every year. Meanwhile, they plan to spend the next decade slowly building a larger space station (similar to Mir though with only 3 permanent modules) and developing automated resupply spacecraft.
They aren't trying to trailblaze new eras of space exploration, they're just trying to play the manned spaceflight game to show that they are a country capable of doing so.
Fortunately though there will be considerable competition among private companies in the US, in both launch vehicles and manned spaceflight. Two companies have already developed unmanned cargo resupply vessels (though Orbital has not yet fully demonstrated theirs yet), at least 3 companies are building manned spacecraft for putting crew in orbit, and several companies are working on yet more advanced technologies for sending crews beyond Earth.
I think you're missing the point of the "big brothers". The dark translucent outer circle represents debris. China has a huge amount of debris (thanks to deliberately blowing stuff up) compared to countries with far larger numbers of satellites.
Thought I'd comment before the typical anti-Chinese-Engineering brigade shows up.
In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world.
China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on.
I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.
The cost now in such infrastructure expansion isn't "only" the human expense of civil/personal liberties in China, it's increasingly the planet itself. The sooner China, the US, and other industralizing countries start taking that seriously, the better.
And meanwhile Fukushima has been dumping huge volumes of radioactive waste water into Pacific for the past two years, the western world seems to be OK with that. Maybe space is more valuable than oceans.
I find China a particularly fascinating country in this regard, very little true visibility into their capabilities and a very different culture.
When they said they would put a man on the moon, I believed they would do everything they could to make that happen. A friend of mine disagreed saying it was "too expensive", except expense doesn't really work at the nation state level except in terms of understanding allocation of GDP. So what percentage of GDP is being allocated to space ? Hard to say, there is that whole transparency issue.
Sounding like a broken record here, the folks who put on-orbit refueling stations up are going to rule space for a while. That is because the use of space today is constrained by pre-planning a mission and pre-loading all your fuel on the ground. Can't change plans, can't change the mission. If you can refuel while in orbit then a single ship can do multiple missions, with only orbital fuel costs, and that would be exceptionally more efficient. Basically anyone who can do that can out build, maneuver, and occupy orbit and the Moon, any other competitor. People who can't get gas on site are forced to bring it up from the ground with them. Sending up fuel tankers for on-orbit refueling stations can have only a 90% success rate and still be very effective. Bottom line, the owner of the gas station will be king.
Now once that happens. And it will. The music stops on other folks getting into space. It will just be so cheap for the gas station owner to put things up and move them around that no one will be able to economically compete. So the country that does that is the next super power in the third age.
Given the stakes, China has to try to be 'that country'.
This implies a fuel mining and refinery process that is off-planet. Otherwise, you have to launch the fuel, and that is an extremely expensive prospect. If a mission is going to be engineered to operate for a long period of time, you'd either launch the mission with all the fuel it needs or plan refueling launches specifically for that mission, as is done with the ISS.
So, who will be the first to mine off-world and refine into usable rocket fuel? This seems pretty far off considering the exotic materials needed for rocket fuel, like hydrazine.
I think it's too far out to make a reasonable bet on who will provide the first in-orbit refueling station.
Actually not at all. It implies you can send cost reduced rockets up with tanks filled with cryogenic fuels (LH/LOX), if you lose them their cost is amortized over all the expensive rockets you didn't have to send up with a full fuel load.
One of the most interesting talks at the AMW conference one year was ULA talking about cryogenic fuel depots [1]. Not Hydrazine, these are not hypergolic fuels just "regular" liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
The change in the cost dynamics is quite compelling though. Consider a 'space tug' which is in orbit and only needs fuel to meet up with a satellite, and move it into any orbit (supply the 'delta V' as it were). Now launching a satellite doesn't have 'launch windows' nor is it constrained by geography. Costs go down, response rate goes up.
Going to the moon and back? No need to launch all the fuel you need. A vehicle that 'lives' in orbit can take your service module/lunar module and put it on a trans-lunar injection orbit with enough gas to land and return. Catch you on the return and put you in an orbit ready for re-entry.
Because once you've got a gas station up there you can do things faster, and less expensively than folks who don't have that capability.
Anyone "can" do it, but there are a bunch of technologies that have to be mastered before it can be done (sort of like the nuclear fuel cycle). So the US has the lead here but with a sprint I don't doubt the Russians could do it as well, and eventually the Chinese.
I think it's dumb to "compete" with a new space station, when the Earth already has a space station that could use some more support and innovation.
I can't wait for China's leadership to get through their "look, we're a power too" phase. The world would be a much better place, and I would argue China would be a better place, if China's leadership was not so obsessed with the optics of whether or not they are a superpower.
The U.S. and Russia spent decades as opposing superpowers, and so what? That's not the culture of the world anymore. Now U.S. astronauts ride to the International Space Station on Russian rockets, and that's ok.
Wow, you're right. I did not know that. That definitely changes my opinion of the situation. I understand the U.S. reasons for concern, but now I also understand why the Chinese are going it alone. Thanks.
China was not invited to participate in the ISS-1 due to fears it would steal Western aeronautical technology. Well, it looks like they have taken anything they wanted. So we might just build the post 2025 ISS-2 with them.
China never asked to participate in the ISS. If they had wanted to, they could probably have joined. "The west doesn't want us to join their space station project" was pure politburo PR bullshit. (Source: I worked at NASA at the time)
? Not sure the relevance. That post-dates the China/ISS issue by years, and anyway is about NASA doing it's own diplomacy, which it shouldn't have been. That's State Department's business - just like it was when Space Station Freedom turned into ISS and the Russians got on board.
The Chinese could have worked with the State Department, Russia, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians to join the ISS program and it would have been legal. They deliberately chose not to.
A space station is a bad investment for any country.
The annual cost of the ISS is $3-billion-year. It will cost an additional 24-billion for the next 6-years to keep it up
The total budget cost of the Kepler Spacecraft was $0.6-billion and discovered something like 2,740 planets outside our solar system.
The Mars Science Laboratory cost was $2.5-billion and as of last month revealed that Mars once was a habitable planet.
The Hubble space telescope in all cost $9.6-billion over the decades (plural) and sincerely over-delivered by refining the predicted age of the universe and validating that the universe is indeed expanding faster and faster.
I would rather they launch more probes, telescopes, and comet samplers than a space station that costs more than it delivers.
You explained how much it costs, which is a lot, but not why it's a bad investment. We get quite a lot of tech and science out of the space statio + the experience to go further.
It's hard to really quantify scientific returns as a per-dollar measure. The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space. Of course, the results of these experiments rarely make it into pop science articles so they're not often publicized. But they do happen and it's important not to just brush them aside as not worth the cost of the station itself.
If humans like Elon Musk and the rest are serious about becoming a spacefaring nation that can actually travel to Mars, this wealth of experimental data would be invaluable when the time comes, if the time comes. Let's not presume that it would never be useful (and besides that, who knows if there ever could be use applied down on earth too).
ISS has made a lot of progress on learning and ameliorating the effects of 0g on humans. It's only about this year that techniques to control bone loss over the long term have gotten really good. Astronauts can now routinely return after six months not crippled, which is a huge advance on the state of knowledge circa Mir.
Yes, most of the science on ISS is human science, related to 0g, and it is pretty expensive, but there's not much other way to do it. I'm not sure that 0g habitation has a long-term future (it's still not very good for you) but we wouldn't really know that without the ISS.
It also hosts plenty of materials science and remote sensing experiments along with the biology and space medicine. It's a weird environment that we're only just beginning to figure out.
More than $800 billion has been requested by the president and appropriated by Congress for the war in Iraq over the last 10 years.
It is impressive that for just over 1% of that budget we've measured the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. I'm happy for my tax dollars to go to any type of scientific advancement rather than killing other humans.
This all seems quite good value for money compared to the money wasted bailing out the world's banks over the past few years, or the money spent in those Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures and "the war on terror".
Looks like the Chinese have their own docking mechanism, of unknown compatibility with an older Russian design. I think it'd be a good idea if they collaborated with NASA and Roscosmos on a design.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 130 ms ] thread[Added] Just to be clear, I am actually interested in a list, not interested in disparaging China. I'm mainly curious.
The US constitution frequently prevents the US government (and US State governments) from enacting laws or enforcing previously enacted laws. This can be good or bad depending on your point of view, but it's a simple fact that in the US we have constitutional rights that are actually pretty potent. Do the police in China have to read people their rights? Guantanomo is a travesty, but it's a travesty precisely because the US Constitution is difficult for the government to ignore.
A more interesting example is many former British colonies, such as Australia, and Britain itself manage to have quite free societies despite having almost no constitutional protections. In China I'd say you don't even seem to have the basic rights people in the English system and its descendants enjoy thanks to the Magna Carta (Habeas Corpus, for example, or the right to a fair trial. Wasn't there just a very high profile case in China where the accused was very vocal one day and then suddenly had nothing to say the next?)
I don't get this. Did you mean there are 50% hypocrites and 90% hypocrites? And the 50% hypocrites can always laugh it out at the 90% hypocrites, because he/she may think he/she has a moral high ground due to less hypocrisy. Heck, that's mouthful.
(Seriously though, degree and frequency are different things)
China put down a peaceful protest using tanks. Hundreds of protesters and dissidents were killed. Some by being shot on the spot, some by being run over by tanks, many more by being executed for the crime of protesting the government. People in China have a legitimate fear that criticism of their leaders could lead to arrest, imprisonment, or even execution. That's a rational fear borne out by decades of evidence showing the consequences of being a political activist in China.
And now compare that with Chinese record, or does it not fall under "human rights" category?
American exceptionalism is the most disgusting theory if there ever was one.
So much so that most americans will somehow find a justification for all the international crimes against humanity that the american government has done over so many years, sleeping well at night thinking their government actually cares about them and their flimsy perception of freedom.
It gets old, people coming to the US because they see opportunity, and then being entitled sanctimonious fools. Never lifting a hand to make it better, but quick to pipe up when it's time to critique, making broad statements about how everyone here is so misinformed.
You think the average person in China is any different than the average American? Over 110M+ Chinese people can't even read. I really doubt they are over contemplating all of the human-rights abuses in the world by nation-states, including their own. And I bet they sleep just fine too.
- I condemn the American Government.
- I condemn most of the American people for their general apathy towards the human rights violations of their government both outside and inside their country.
- But I also realize that the American Government have most americans either too busy, too distracted or have them misinformed through propaganda campaign to have any serious widespread opposition to their action. The Government have all powerful multiple secret service organization that works full time to make sure there is no serious threat to the government status quo (among other things), under the pretence of national security.
- I can go on say that the actions of the government should not make the people of the country complacent of their crimes. After many generations of the same old foreign policy, this line of talk starts of get a little old, at some point someone need to stand up say you should also be just as liable as your government because even after knowing their crimes, you didn't do anything about it.
So yes, I do have a problem with the American Government, and I do think most americans are fault for not checking their government - BUT I don't have any problem with american people in general.
Tiangong 1 could be compared to Skylab but is still most certainly a space station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1
Edit: The original article has the misleading title.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Progr...
Kudos to China for taking the lead in the 21st century. Look at how they built the world's biggest high-speed rail system in such as short period of time. Next year it will carry more people than the US domestic airlines.
http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-move...
I don't mean to poke fun at you, but the competitive spirit was what made it possible for America to be where it is now, technologically. That, and a lot of money, of course
PS: 100% Self sustaining colonies have value but that takes 100,000+ people which nobody is talking abut sending to space any time soon.
Manned spaceflight in China is a program of national prestige (though that's no different than any other country). But because of China's culture, their government, and the fact that almost all of what they are doing in spaceflight is retreading old ground they have been and will continue to be extremely cautious, moving at a slow pace. China's first manned spaceflight was a decade ago. In that time they've launched a grand total of 5 manned missions. Recently they've accelerated to a rate of about one every year. Meanwhile, they plan to spend the next decade slowly building a larger space station (similar to Mir though with only 3 permanent modules) and developing automated resupply spacecraft.
They aren't trying to trailblaze new eras of space exploration, they're just trying to play the manned spaceflight game to show that they are a country capable of doing so.
Fortunately though there will be considerable competition among private companies in the US, in both launch vehicles and manned spaceflight. Two companies have already developed unmanned cargo resupply vessels (though Orbital has not yet fully demonstrated theirs yet), at least 3 companies are building manned spacecraft for putting crew in orbit, and several companies are working on yet more advanced technologies for sending crews beyond Earth.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelpaukner/4314987544/sizes...
http://www.space.com/3415-china-anti-satellite-test-worrisom...
http://www.space.com/20138-russian-satellite-chinese-space-j...
In any case, I hope more countries put more space stations up. It would be great for space tourism and other human endeavors.
US: 453 / 683 / 3258
Russia/USSR: 86 / 1310 / 2690
China: 40 / 29 / 2690
Also the number is a bit misleading. Most of the China's debris were probably generated by the ASAT test in 2007, which is not a common case.
In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world.
China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on.
I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun
When they said they would put a man on the moon, I believed they would do everything they could to make that happen. A friend of mine disagreed saying it was "too expensive", except expense doesn't really work at the nation state level except in terms of understanding allocation of GDP. So what percentage of GDP is being allocated to space ? Hard to say, there is that whole transparency issue.
Sounding like a broken record here, the folks who put on-orbit refueling stations up are going to rule space for a while. That is because the use of space today is constrained by pre-planning a mission and pre-loading all your fuel on the ground. Can't change plans, can't change the mission. If you can refuel while in orbit then a single ship can do multiple missions, with only orbital fuel costs, and that would be exceptionally more efficient. Basically anyone who can do that can out build, maneuver, and occupy orbit and the Moon, any other competitor. People who can't get gas on site are forced to bring it up from the ground with them. Sending up fuel tankers for on-orbit refueling stations can have only a 90% success rate and still be very effective. Bottom line, the owner of the gas station will be king.
Now once that happens. And it will. The music stops on other folks getting into space. It will just be so cheap for the gas station owner to put things up and move them around that no one will be able to economically compete. So the country that does that is the next super power in the third age.
Given the stakes, China has to try to be 'that country'.
So, who will be the first to mine off-world and refine into usable rocket fuel? This seems pretty far off considering the exotic materials needed for rocket fuel, like hydrazine.
I think it's too far out to make a reasonable bet on who will provide the first in-orbit refueling station.
One of the most interesting talks at the AMW conference one year was ULA talking about cryogenic fuel depots [1]. Not Hydrazine, these are not hypergolic fuels just "regular" liquid oxygen and hydrogen.
The change in the cost dynamics is quite compelling though. Consider a 'space tug' which is in orbit and only needs fuel to meet up with a satellite, and move it into any orbit (supply the 'delta V' as it were). Now launching a satellite doesn't have 'launch windows' nor is it constrained by geography. Costs go down, response rate goes up.
Going to the moon and back? No need to launch all the fuel you need. A vehicle that 'lives' in orbit can take your service module/lunar module and put it on a trans-lunar injection orbit with enough gas to land and return. Catch you on the return and put you in an orbit ready for re-entry.
[1] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...
Anyone "can" do it, but there are a bunch of technologies that have to be mastered before it can be done (sort of like the nuclear fuel cycle). So the US has the lead here but with a sprint I don't doubt the Russians could do it as well, and eventually the Chinese.
I can't wait for China's leadership to get through their "look, we're a power too" phase. The world would be a much better place, and I would argue China would be a better place, if China's leadership was not so obsessed with the optics of whether or not they are a superpower.
The U.S. and Russia spent decades as opposing superpowers, and so what? That's not the culture of the world anymore. Now U.S. astronauts ride to the International Space Station on Russian rockets, and that's ok.
to be fair...
China has to build their own space station because the US objected to China's participation in the ISS program.
The Chinese could have worked with the State Department, Russia, Europeans, Japanese and Canadians to join the ISS program and it would have been legal. They deliberately chose not to.
The annual cost of the ISS is $3-billion-year. It will cost an additional 24-billion for the next 6-years to keep it up
The total budget cost of the Kepler Spacecraft was $0.6-billion and discovered something like 2,740 planets outside our solar system.
The Mars Science Laboratory cost was $2.5-billion and as of last month revealed that Mars once was a habitable planet.
The Hubble space telescope in all cost $9.6-billion over the decades (plural) and sincerely over-delivered by refining the predicted age of the universe and validating that the universe is indeed expanding faster and faster.
I would rather they launch more probes, telescopes, and comet samplers than a space station that costs more than it delivers.
Most of these experiments though were about effect of space on humans, no? It's a bit of circular reasoning.
Even with those, I'm not sure there was really any big discovery since the previous Mir/Salyut/Skylab decades of orbital hanging around.
Yes, most of the science on ISS is human science, related to 0g, and it is pretty expensive, but there's not much other way to do it. I'm not sure that 0g habitation has a long-term future (it's still not very good for you) but we wouldn't really know that without the ISS.
It also hosts plenty of materials science and remote sensing experiments along with the biology and space medicine. It's a weird environment that we're only just beginning to figure out.
It is impressive that for just over 1% of that budget we've measured the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. I'm happy for my tax dollars to go to any type of scientific advancement rather than killing other humans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecr...