31–40 of 74 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't get this. Are you saying someone who is a hypocrite 1% of the time is equal to someone who is a hypocrite 99% of the time?
Yes, they are both hypocrites :) (Seriously though, degree and frequency are different things)
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 pl…
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 pl…
Does anyone have a list of things China said they are going to do but haven't actually done? [Added] Just to be clear, I am actually interested in a list, not interested in disparaging China. I'm mainly curious.
One thing for sure is that the list is too long to fit into NSA's hard drives. Proud to be a Chinese!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The Chinese call one of theses lists their constitution.
This is hypocritical. US and the whole Western world is not any better on this.
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.
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…
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'.
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 pl…
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecr...
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 pl…
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.