If China manages to do this, then we will have people on Mars in under 2 years.
Competition from china is the only thing I can see spurring the USA into action.
Competition from china is the only thing I can see spurring the USA into action.
Also, China tends to be a fast copier, not a leader. They seem to leave the bulk of development costs to someone else. So I think it's unlikely that they will front the resources it'll take to make a Mars mission possible.
As an aside, as a Non-US citizen of the world, I applaud any effort to get outside of our planet, even more so if they are as ambitious as this one.
What a huge generalisation. This appears to be true in the consumer electronics world perhaps, but look outside of that and it's harder to justify.
For example, China has been building a lot of infrastructure in the past few decades, including the longest and highest bridges in the world[0][1]. There was a story on HN a few days ago about a Chinese company's plans to build what will be the tallest building in only 90 days[2].
Granted there is a lot of press about these bridges falling down, and maybe their rocket will blow up half way to Mars. But you can't say that they aren't pushing things themselves.
[0]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_highest_bridges_in_the_... [1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Longest_bridges_in_the_world [2]http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4807701
For an achievement to "count", I'd make the bold claim that it has to actually work.
* However, I do agree that often to make progress you absolutely have to push your engineering "comfort zone" and try dangerous things, in order to learn from your mistakes. But this does not change my definition of "success", it just acknowledges realities of R&D.
Aerospace and software are industries the West still dominates though. Since HN tends to focus on those this is a common impression for people here, it's not in some other industries.
I think the PRC do have technology and money to put things in outerspace in the near future, what they do not have yet is the know-how.
You could have said the same thing about the US in the first half of the 19th century, and look how innovative we ended up being by the start of the 20th. Or about Japan later on. Societies that are able to copy innovations quickly seldom have trouble generating innovations when they run out of things to copy.
Wasn't there a famous Chinese guy who said something like "never underestimate your adversary".
In the past that might have been true, but things change. Just one example A lot of people have been educated in the US, and are going back to china to start companies.
As a point of order: two year launch window, but a 6 month trip if you wait for that.