China now equals US in space

few years.

via satellite).

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.

Reply to
T
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last few years.

(Hotbird) via satellite).

For a country that supposedly places a high value on honor, they have very little. Greed, on the other hand?

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Reply to
Michael A. Terrell

You sure it wasn't special effects? China's pretty good at that from what I hear.

Reply to
Jon Slaughter

last few years.

(Hotbird) via satellite).

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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Reply to
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

last few years.

via satellite).

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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Reply to
Dirk Bruere at NeoPax

last few years.

via satellite).

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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Reply to
Spehro Pefhany

failures?

Does that mean zero people that can talk about failures from prison? ;)

Reply to
sky465nm

failures?

Anyone can "fire" rockets without heavy, delicate, multi-billion dollar payloads attached to them to worry about.

Oh boy... another one that didn't blow up on the pad...

Meaningless.

They are still a long way off.

This all reminds me of all the things the Russians claimed to have "invented" back during the cold war.

I am sure the Chinese would say that the effort was "A piece of Pie"...

Bwuahahaha!

Reply to
Archimedes' Lever

the last few years.

otbird) via satellite).

What can you get from an asteroid that is not available on earth for less money?

Reply to
Richard Henry

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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Reply to
Paul Hovnanian P.E.

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)?

- Don Klipstein ( snipped-for-privacy@misty.com)

Reply to
Don Klipstein

last few years.

Then why is it going to take another 12 years to get back?

Reply to
The Real Andy

last few years.

Why go back? There's nothing very interesting happening on the moon.

John

Reply to
John Larkin

Of course! It's newer! ;-)

Cheers! Rich

Reply to
Rich Grise

Scwewy wabbit.

Reply to
UltimatePatriot

few years.

via satellite).

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.

Reply to
qrk

You ain't real bright, KlipsTard.

The "K-T Layer" covers the entire planet.

It is a well known... for decades... fact, that we know what most of them are comprised of.

Reply to
Archimedes' Lever

They got big boost from Russians rather than US. Well, US provides the money by buying chinese crap, Russians provide the technology.

Sure, they launched the Monica thing just to silence that. Put your tinfoil hat back on :)

M
Reply to
TheM

Nope. Platinum is mined chiefly in two locations on the planet, and BOTH of those are massive volcanic up-spurt locations.

It comes from deep in the Earth's mantle.

Reply to
Archimedes' Lever

Um how many people were caught selling our secrets or infiltrating our government to/for china?

I guess for chinese it's easier for them to steal it then come up with it on their own?

Reply to
Jon Slaughter

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