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Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

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Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#81

Post by xeroaura »

Nokinside wrote: post #73
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Aren't Chinese space travelers called Taikonauts? The title make it sounds like Americans are invading China's space station.

Taikonaut is the word sometimes used for Chinese astronauts in English language journals and Taiwan and Hong Kong. It's mix of Mandarin and Greek (naut = sailor in Greek). Chinese call their astronauts hang tian yuan.Indian astronauts will be vyomanauts. Astronaut is still valid name for crew member of a spacecraft in any nation.

Is taiko short for tai kong (太空) = space in Mandarin in this case?

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#82

Post by zhte415 »

freyfogle wrote: post #20
vinchuco wrote: post #17

Initially read this as "US astronauts enter China's space station". That would have been interesting.

Valid confusion. Correct headline would be "Taikonauts enter China's space station" Cosmonauts = Russian Taikonauts = Chinese Astronauts = Western

Astronaut translated to Chinese is 太空人 which is spelled by the romanisation system in mainland China as tai-kong-ren or taikongren. Not the extra 'g'.

A quick search of matches in actual translated texts returns 'astronauts' as the term in the vast majority, and a few cases of 'spaceman' and 'man in space'. 人 'ren' in Chinese is genderless.

Taikonaut is however used by the Global Times and China Daily, tabloid and broadsheet papers published in the mainland. Am pretty sure the term wasn't termed in China, however. Otherwise the pinyin would be correct.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#83

Post by Retric »

rtkwe wrote: post #80
Retric wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Having people in space is kind of pointless right now. Yes, it's a low G environment, but ISS is in such a low orbit that people in my state can be further from me than an overhead ISS 'Astronauts'. It's even protected by earths magnetic field making it a poor test of long term space flight.

Absolutely wrong. Having a manned station is a boon for the research taking place. Without a station anyone wanting to do research like the packed bed or the docking and refueling experiments would require the investigating institution to design and launch a vastly more complicated automated satellite or to rely on short manned missions that would have more competition for space and time. Instead it's much easier to…

ISS cost ~200 billion, saying we can't do the same research for less is kind of a high hurdle when it's close enough for minimal lag, nobody tried, and people need a lot of ridiculously expensive consumables.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#84

Post by kuschku »

Hondor wrote: post #50
kuschku wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The argument is that Astronaut means "sailor of the stars", but "Cosmonaut" means "sailor of the cosmos". As they’re obviously not sailing between stars, but in the cosmos, Cosmonaut is obviously the correct term.

Not according to dictionary.com: "Astro- a combining form with the meaning “pertaining to stars or celestial bodies, or to activities, as spaceflight, taking place outside the earth's atmosphere,” used in the formation of compound words:" It sounds like the Greek(?) meaning has been lost now in English, which is fine since it's a different language. Astronomers still sometimes look at other planets afterall.

According to that, literally means figuratively, too.

Sometimes linguistic prescriptivism is necessary to keep a language actually understandable, and to ensure it makes sense, and doesn’t just become thousands of independent statements that you have to learn by heart.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#85

Post by krschultz »

kobeya wrote: post #36
avar wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Countering "there's no economic reason to put humans into orbit" with "but look at these commercial programs 100% paid by the government" isn't really a rebuke, you're just making the OPs point for them. It's only commercial in the sense that say there's say commercial manufacturing of ballistic missile submarines. It's just an implementation detail of how the US (v.s. say China) does manufacturing for purely state-s…

They (SpaceX at least) are not 100% funded by the government.

That wasn't the argument.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#86

Post by rtkwe »

Retric wrote: post #83
rtkwe wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely wrong. Having a manned station is a boon for the research taking place. Without a station anyone wanting to do research like the packed bed or the docking and refueling experiments would require the investigating institution to design and launch a vastly more complicated automated satellite or to rely on short manned missions that would have more competition for space and time. Instead it's much easier to…

ISS cost ~200 billion, saying we can't do the same research for less is kind of a high hurdle when it's close enough for minimal lag, nobody tried, and people need a lot of ridiculously expensive consumables.

The lag isn't the hurdle it's making the robotics on the satellite to run the experiment. The closest analog is probably the robot that's used to service the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy [0]. With a station for some types of failures with experiments an astronaut can work around or heavily reconfigure the equipment to still get good data. Without a person up there every experiment launch would have to either just accept failures and write off the whole thing or include whatever system we're talking about that would replace the repair and reconfigure ability of people. Instead the various governments front the cost of having a person in space and it's way easier and cheaper for companies to package and run their experiments. It's a subsidy that opens up the ability to do microG science more easily.

Also there's no good alternative way to study the long term microG effects on humans other than a station since you need both space for people to live for up to a year and space for the various experiments on how to combat the deterioration that happens. Having a station up there also teaches us how to work and repair things in space and how things break when they've been running for 15+ years.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IrtGp8hv-0Y

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#87

Post by MrZongle2 »

jcoffland wrote: post #2

China has now done 6 crewed missions to space in the last 3 years. In that time, Russia has had 13 manned missions many of which NASA astronauts have hitched a ride on. NASA is still on the ground since discontinuing the shuttle program in 2011.

Well, you could look at it that way.

Or you could also look at it like this: the Chinese have made it to the early-70s "Skylab" stage (minus the Apollo program that came before it), the Russians are content to stick with 1990s Soyuz/Mir/early ISS technology and their orbital shots. NASA has little to show of their manned space program since the shuttle retired in 2011, but still leads the world in robotic exploration of the solar system.

Hardly as dire a situation as you paint.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#88

Post by exDM69 »

smileysteve wrote: post #66
exDM69 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The big difference between the execution of the US and Soviet space races is that the Soviets produced the Soyuz - a very capable space craft and launch vehicle that still flies today. On top of that they pioneered space stations and long duration manned space missions. The US on the other hand built an impractically large moonshot rocket that was too expensive to keep on producing. Then the US moved on the the Space…

By going directly from the moon to shuttle, you conveniently forget Skylab. Also, something about hubble.

I didn't mention them (but I'm very well aware of them) because they're not very relevant to the point.

Skylab was a great project and good utilization of leftovers from the Apollo program (although the Soviets did much better with Salyut -> Mir -> ISS when it comes to technology reuse). The end of Skylab was a bit embarrassing as it did not survive long enough to be serviced by the shuttle and there were no more Saturn launchers remaining. Although the damage sustained at launch/deployment makes it arguable whether it would have been a good idea in the first place.

Hubble is also neat (and a testament to the capabilities of the Shuttle as it was repaired twice), and JWST is going to be a good successor.

But there's still very little continuity in the American space program compared to their Russian counterpart. I guess it's partly to blame on the fact the the NASA budget and goals change dramatically when the occupant of the White House changes but I've read some news that they're trying to establish longer term goals. I'm afraid that whoever is the next president will again move the goal posts and set back the SLS + Orion program, which is closest to being the first manned deep space capable space program after the Apollo program.

My point of comparison is the fact that variants of the Russian Soyuz rockets and space craft have been in continuous operation since 1966.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#89

Post by seanmcdirmid »

leojg wrote: post #71
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Aren't Chinese space travelers called Taikonauts? The title make it sounds like Americans are invading China's space station.

I think so... anyways I find stupid the need to differentiate the "space worker(?)" by country of origin. They all do the same awesome thing.

The Russians invented the job, yet us Americans decided to go with Astronaut rather than Cosmonaut.

Re: Astronauts enter China's space station [video]

#90

Post by [deleted] »

leojg wrote: post #71
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #68

Aren't Chinese space travelers called Taikonauts? The title make it sounds like Americans are invading China's space station.

I think so... anyways I find stupid the need to differentiate the "space worker(?)" by country of origin. They all do the same awesome thing.

[deleted]
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