Yeah but the U.S. did manage to safely land men on the moon and "return them safely to earth..."
The Chinese have a way to go before they accomplish that, even the Russians didn't manage to do it. But the U.S. will always have the distinction of having done it first.
As for it being a perfect mission, good for them. The fact their electronics worked mean they're using western technology.
For a country that supposedly places a high value on honor, they have very little. Greed, on the other hand?
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Honour? You're thinking about Japan. China and greed have always gone hand in hand, along with innovation and intelligence. Think "1300 million Jews"
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Which, in the long term, will likely be the only thing for which the USA will be remembered.
All it needs is 1960s technology.
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Dirk
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The entire US economy is based on stacked-up 1900-year-old Chinese technology invented by a eunuch named Cai Lun.
Best regards, Spehro Pefhany
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That's even worse, isn't it. We design it and then they sell our stuff back to us.
I guess the blinders will stay on until our troops can't operate their high tech weapons because all the instructions are written in Engrish
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Possibly iridium. I hear it said enough that Earth (surface and near-surface portion thereof) is generally so low on iridium compared to naturaly occurring objects from space that a concentration of iridium at a crater or explosion scene or in a suspected meteorite is strong evidence that an object from space landed there.
This makes me suspect that other "platinum group" metals may be more abundant on asteroids than on or within a couple miles of the surface of Earth.
A significant problem in space may be energy requirements for extracting such metals. Without free oxygen to burn fuels, the cheapest energy is either solar cells or nuclear reactors.
Most of the asteroids are 2-3 times as far from the Sun as Earth is. Vesta has a slightly elliptical orbit with perihelion at about 2.15 A.U. and aphelion at about 2.55 A.U. Ceres is father, with perihelion at about
2.55 A.U. and aphelion at almost 3 A.U. 1 A.U. is average distance of center of Earth from center of the Sun. So solar cells have about 155-290 watts per square meter to work with at about 10% efficiency. Any major solar energy facilities there may need to use large concentrating reflectors and sun-tracking systems. Aluminized mylar with a little structural ribbing is lighter and cheaper and less fragile when thin than monocrystalline semiconductor grade silicon, but getting large area bulky objects - even if foldable and unfoldable - will be a major engineering challenge just to get the cost of transportation and deployment to an asteroid to a smaller number of orders of magnitude past a megabuck.
Nukes may be cheaper than on Earth if deployed and operated 10's to
100's of millions of miles away from where anyone has to live or spend much time working, but transportation and set-up costs for anything requiring fission (as opposed to a little thing working from heat of mere radioactive decay, maybe with halflife in decades) sounds to me to be monumental.
I would think that a profitable asteroid mine would have to be on "small space colony" scale, even if staffed by robots and not humans. That sounds to me like gigabucks, and I wonder if that can bring back iridium by the ton. I do realize that getting a ton of something from an asteroid to Earth costs a lot less than the other way around, but velocity change of a few thousand meters per second is still necessary to get an object to drop towards the Sun to Earth's orbit from the Asteroid Belt. So fuel and oxidizer has to be transported from Earth to whatever asteroid is in question - or else use ion rockets powered by nukes, probably assembled in Earth orbit - at cost probably an order of magnitude or 2 more than that of a Space Shuttle. Maybe the Chinese can get cost of transportation to Earth orbit to an order of magnitude or 2 less than USA has now, but I still wonder if a ton of iridium can be brought to Earth from an asteroid for less than the cost of getting it from Earth. And how many tons of iridium have been extracted in our history so far anyway? And what is it used for - mostly to alloy with platinum to harden it for jewelry and some mass standards (such as the IPK and some copies thereof) and a few standards of linear measurement such as the IPM (no longer the definition of the meter)?
Notice how the Chinese space program advanced in the past decade? China got a big boost from the US (thanks to Clinton) which gave them analysis on their failures. When this news hit the streets, it was quickly silenced by the Monica thing. Easy to dupe the 'merican pulic.
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