China set to launch own space station within days | Hacker News Reader

China set to launch own space station within days

wired.com

28 pointsanigbrowl17 comments

I'm glad that China seems to be picking up the USA's slack on this.

It helps to alleviate http://www.xkcd.com/893/

I wouldn't mind extending that graph with "with number of robots that have walked on other worlds." It might even have a positive slope.

Launch report: http://bloomberg.com/news/2011-09-29/chinese-launch-of-space...

Didn't it happen already yesterday or today?

gogogaget space race: Redux?

If only... A space race might revitalize the economy, and is thus political.

Dare I say this? A space race is a massive waste of money. We should be combining resources on large scale projects, not duplicating them.

Competition is great to find the fundamental technology but we should unite to build a massive vehicle.

Seeing that you are being left behind is a great motivator. The USA went to the moon to make sure that Russia would not get there first.

When you simplify it like that it makes the US look exceptionally petty.

... Does anyone want to tell the American public that the Chinese are going to beat them to Mars?

And do what when they get there?

It is, in fact, a heck of a lot more complicated than that. Mostly the U.S. went to the moon to provide civilian cover for R&D investments in I.C.B.M. and satellite surveillance technology. If you are interested I suggest reading "Red Moon Rising", which covers quite accurately the early players and their politics and motivations on both sides (from the V-2 in WW2 to Yuri Gagarin and Kennedy's declaration).

A google search gives a lot of results, but I think you mean this: http://www.amazon.com/Red-Moon-Rising-Sputnik-Rivalries/dp/0...

Is this true?

The manuscript I read had a different cover, but I think it's the same book.

And yes, it's true. I work at NASA and some of my managers were there as early as the Apollo program. The connection to the military is an open secret that is well-known but has always been divorced from the mythic of the space race. It wasn't until the players retired, memoirs were published, and the fall of the U.S.S.R. that historians were able to put the pieces into a cohesive whole, telling the story from both sides. Matthew Brzezinski draws upon this more recent research for the book.

The resources required to build and send a rocket into space are very expensive. A lot of money would be going to something like rocket fuel instead of a paycheck.

You'd revitalize the economy if you spent money on projects that had a better ratio of jobs created to dollars spent.

That's right, because rocket fuel just comes out of a vending machine.

There are a lot of jobs behind the extraction and refinement of rocket fuel.

More jobs are created in other manufacturing and construction jobs. Better value for the money elsewhere is my point.

Why the obsession with creating "jobs"? I'd rather be investing in robots that eliminate manual labor and paying people for more intellectual pursuits.

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