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Comment by decimalenough | Hacker News Reader

China's stated goal is to get people on the moon by 2030. This may slip by a year or two, but probably not much more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Lunar_Exploration_Prog...

The main hurdle is the CZ-10 rocket, which has not flown yet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_10

But they have plenty of rocketry experience and the YF-100K engine they'll use for CZ-10 has successfully flown on the CZ-12:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_March_12

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YF-100

(Yes, Chinese rocket numbering is weird, and CZ = Changzheng = Long March)

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I’m still wanting a great explanation why we could do it in the 60s, but China can’t do it until 2030s.

The reason I’m told we don’t do it today, is that we don’t want to. OK, China does, so what is the hold up that applies now?

2030 is just a little over 4 years away. They have a lot of hardware to develop and test. It takes time to develop good hardware, as the US is also realizing (again). It was about 7 years between the first flight test of any Apollo related vehicle and Apollo 11.

Who's to say they haven't been working on this for years already? They basically spun up an entire silicon fab industry in the past 5-6 years.

Exactly.

No one is ever able to explain why now, and doubly so why when now is still in the future.

1. It still took nearly 7 years to after JFK's speech in the 60s.

2. The institutional knowledge of working directly on the Apollo program has largely been lost in the US, and certainly isn't present in China.

Those are the unimportant pieces. The real reason is:

3. The US was actively at war with Russia. While it was a cold war (except for the proxy wars), the Apollo program had a wartime budget (spent nearly half a trillion in today's dollars), and a wartime risk tolerance (Neil Armstrong thought they had a 10% chance of not making it back).

1. Ok, and China has had how many decades?

2. Uh huh. The knowledge for 1960s tech is limited, agreed, but the tech is so much more superior now, and China as a nation has a high understanding. What does China not have that would be of any relevance?

3. Cool, China is in an economic Cold War with the USA.

I remain unconvinced.

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