China to launch space station by 2023

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24282060

by Libertatea • 13 years ago

85 73 13 years ago

bbc.co.uk

wtvanhest• 13 years ago

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.

bayesianhorse2• 13 years ago

The Chinese call one of theses lists their constitution.

cygwin986• 13 years ago

This is hypocritical. US and the whole Western world is not any better on this.

djvu9• 13 years ago

One thing for sure is that the list is too long to fit into NSA's hard drives. Proud to be a Chinese!

dcc1• 13 years ago

Considering that the hard drives are likely to be made in China who is to say they dont already have a copy!

rposborne• 13 years ago

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiangong-1

Edit: The original article has the misleading title.

morley• 13 years ago

The title doesn't say they're launching their first space station; it says they're launching _a_ space station.

melling2• 13 years ago

The BBC story says that it's their first space station.

ximeng• 13 years ago

They're also planning a lunar rover soon with potential goal to retrieve fuel for nuclear fusion.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Progr...

Loughla• 13 years ago

I am genuinely hoping that this type of thing leads to a cold-war style space race with increased investments into science and technology.

melling2• 13 years ago

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.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-move...

pm902• 13 years ago

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

InclinedPlane2• 13 years ago

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.

velodrome2• 13 years ago

Orbital space debris is a real problem. I hope China will be a little more responsible than they have in the past.

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.

cygwin986• 13 years ago

Flaming remarks. Removed

podperson2• 13 years ago

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.

velodrome2• 13 years ago

Active Satellites / Non-Active Satellites / Orbiting Space Debris:

US: 453 / 683 / 3258

Russia/USSR: 86 / 1310 / 2690

China: 40 / 29 / 2690

javindo• 13 years ago

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.

infinotize2• 13 years ago

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.

cygwin986• 13 years ago

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.

ttflee2• 13 years ago

The 'bureaucracy' has just put the man behind the Chinese high speed railway behind bars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

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'.

bdamm• 13 years ago

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.

melange2• 13 years ago

Why does being first to put up a gas station matter? What stops other countries from putting up their own?

ChuckMcM4• 13 years ago

Note it is an active investigation at NASA as well for on-orbit propellent operations: https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/technologies/3/

snowwrestler2• 13 years ago

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.

bilbo0s• 13 years ago

Well...

to be fair...

China has to build their own space station because the US objected to China's participation in the ISS program.

peter303• 13 years ago

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.

maaku3• 13 years ago

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)

huhalu• 13 years ago

http://www.justice.gov/olc/2011/conduct-diplomacy.pdf

SCAQTony• 13 years ago

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.

ttflee2• 13 years ago

But it would be such a huge positive political asset that can feed so many people for years.

noselasd• 13 years ago

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.

readme• 13 years ago

It won't be a bad investment when some aliens come to visit. At least they won't think we're that stupid.

Scriptor• 13 years ago

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.

trafficlight• 13 years ago

Not only that, but it's a first step in learning how to construct large objects in space and then live up there fulltime.

varjag• 13 years ago

The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space.

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.

ecto• 13 years ago

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.

teh_klev• 13 years ago

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".

rodedwards• 13 years ago

Lets kill two birds with one stone and just land the ISS on the moon. ISS done. Moonbase done.

chiph• 13 years ago

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.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Docking_and_berthing_of_spacecr...

LiweiZ• 13 years ago

Just another misallocation of the crucial resource to military power. When there is little resource, end game comes.

China to launch space station by 2023

Related Stories