China to launch space station by 2023

The cost now in such infrastructure expansion isn't "only" the human expense of civil/personal liberties in China, it's increasingly the planet itself. The sooner China, the US, and other industralizing countries start taking that seriously, the better.

The 'bureaucracy' has just put the man behind the Chinese high speed railway behind bars.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liu_Zhijun

I find China a particularly fascinating country in this regard, very little true visibility into their capabilities and a very different culture.

When they said they would put a man on the moon, I believed they would do everything they could to make that happen. A friend of mine disagreed saying it was "too expensive", except expense doesn't really work at the nation state level except in terms of understanding allocation of GDP. So what percentage of GDP is being allocated to space ? Hard to say, there is that whole transparency issue.

Sounding like a broken record here, the folks who put on-orbit refueling stations up are going to rule space for a while. That is because the use of space today is constrained by pre-planning a mission and pre-loading all your fuel on the ground. Can't change plans, can't change the mission. If you can refuel while in orbit then a single ship can do multiple missions, with only orbital fuel costs, and that would be exceptionally more efficient. Basically anyone who can do that can out build, maneuver, and occupy orbit and the Moon, any other competitor. People who can't get gas on site are forced to bring it up from the ground with them. Sending up fuel tankers for on-orbit refueling stations can have only a 90% success rate and still be very effective. Bottom line, the owner of the gas station will be king.

Now once that happens. And it will. The music stops on other folks getting into space. It will just be so cheap for the gas station owner to put things up and move them around that no one will be able to economically compete. So the country that does that is the next super power in the third age.

Given the stakes, China has to try to be 'that country'.

I think it's dumb to "compete" with a new space station, when the Earth already has a space station that could use some more support and innovation.

I can't wait for China's leadership to get through their "look, we're a power too" phase. The world would be a much better place, and I would argue China would be a better place, if China's leadership was not so obsessed with the optics of whether or not they are a superpower.

The U.S. and Russia spent decades as opposing superpowers, and so what? That's not the culture of the world anymore. Now U.S. astronauts ride to the International Space Station on Russian rockets, and that's ok.

The title doesn't say they're launching their first space station; it says they're launching _a_ space station.

But it would be such a huge positive political asset that can feed so many people for years.

You explained how much it costs, which is a lot, but not why it's a bad investment. We get quite a lot of tech and science out of the space statio + the experience to go further.

It's hard to really quantify scientific returns as a per-dollar measure. The space station has provided a place to do countless experiments that could only be done by people in space. Of course, the results of these experiments rarely make it into pop science articles so they're not often publicized. But they do happen and it's important not to just brush them aside as not worth the cost of the station itself.

More than $800 billion has been requested by the president and appropriated by Congress for the war in Iraq over the last 10 years.

It is impressive that for just over 1% of that budget we've measured the age of the universe and its rate of expansion. I'm happy for my tax dollars to go to any type of scientific advancement rather than killing other humans.

This all seems quite good value for money compared to the money wasted bailing out the world's banks over the past few years, or the money spent in those Iraq and Afghanistan misadventures and "the war on terror".

Lets kill two birds with one stone and just land the ISS on the moon. ISS done. Moonbase done.

Flaming remarks. Removed

Probably won't happen. China will probably take a clear lead within a couple decades. There isn't enough return on investment in a space race and the US won't have the extra money.

Kudos to China for taking the lead in the 21st century. Look at how they built the world's biggest high-speed rail system in such as short period of time. Next year it will carry more people than the US domestic airlines.

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/chinas-high-speed-rail-move...

That's not going to happen. At least not due to China's space program.

Manned spaceflight in China is a program of national prestige (though that's no different than any other country). But because of China's culture, their government, and the fact that almost all of what they are doing in spaceflight is retreading old ground they have been and will continue to be extremely cautious, moving at a slow pace. China's first manned spaceflight was a decade ago. In that time they've launched a grand total of 5 manned missions. Recently they've accelerated to a rate of about one every year. Meanwhile, they plan to spend the next decade slowly building a larger space station (similar to Mir though with only 3 permanent modules) and developing automated resupply spacecraft.

They aren't trying to trailblaze new eras of space exploration, they're just trying to play the manned spaceflight game to show that they are a country capable of doing so.

Fortunately though there will be considerable competition among private companies in the US, in both launch vehicles and manned spaceflight. Two companies have already developed unmanned cargo resupply vessels (though Orbital has not yet fully demonstrated theirs yet), at least 3 companies are building manned spacecraft for putting crew in orbit, and several companies are working on yet more advanced technologies for sending crews beyond Earth.

China never asked to participate in the ISS. If they had wanted to, they could probably have joined. "The west doesn't want us to join their space station project" was pure politburo PR bullshit. (Source: I worked at NASA at the time)

The Chinese call one of theses lists their constitution.

One thing for sure is that the list is too long to fit into NSA's hard drives. Proud to be a Chinese!