Comment by javindo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by javindo | Hacker News Reader

Thought I'd comment before the typical anti-Chinese-Engineering brigade shows up.

In my opinion, Chinese engineering is a wonder to behold in an era of modern western bureaucracy killing amazing projects. I realise Chinese politics are so far the other way they can be just as bad in different ways, but if China had the same level of bureaucracy as the west their insane Beijing-Shanghai high speed rail link would have never happened. In the process of creating this, they built 3 of the top 5 longest bridges in the world.

China have a lot of wealth, a lot of manpower, a lot of ambition. Sure, there is a high cost, but there was a cost to the pyramids, the great wall, skyscrapers in any top tier city, castles around the world and so on.

I'm not trying to glorify the obvious human rights abuses which lead to such amazing monuments of modern engineering but I find it difficult not to be enthralled by the wonderful creations of China of late and look forward to how they compete with a new space station.

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'.

This implies a fuel mining and refinery process that is off-planet. Otherwise, you have to launch the fuel, and that is an extremely expensive prospect. If a mission is going to be engineered to operate for a long period of time, you'd either launch the mission with all the fuel it needs or plan refueling launches specifically for that mission, as is done with the ISS.

So, who will be the first to mine off-world and refine into usable rocket fuel? This seems pretty far off considering the exotic materials needed for rocket fuel, like hydrazine.

I think it's too far out to make a reasonable bet on who will provide the first in-orbit refueling station.

Actually not at all. It implies you can send cost reduced rockets up with tanks filled with cryogenic fuels (LH/LOX), if you lose them their cost is amortized over all the expensive rockets you didn't have to send up with a full fuel load.

One of the most interesting talks at the AMW conference one year was ULA talking about cryogenic fuel depots [1]. Not Hydrazine, these are not hypergolic fuels just "regular" liquid oxygen and hydrogen.

The change in the cost dynamics is quite compelling though. Consider a 'space tug' which is in orbit and only needs fuel to meet up with a satellite, and move it into any orbit (supply the 'delta V' as it were). Now launching a satellite doesn't have 'launch windows' nor is it constrained by geography. Costs go down, response rate goes up.

Going to the moon and back? No need to launch all the fuel you need. A vehicle that 'lives' in orbit can take your service module/lunar module and put it on a trans-lunar injection orbit with enough gas to land and return. Catch you on the return and put you in an orbit ready for re-entry.

[1] http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd...

Why does being first to put up a gas station matter? What stops other countries from putting up their own?

Because once you've got a gas station up there you can do things faster, and less expensively than folks who don't have that capability.

Anyone "can" do it, but there are a bunch of technologies that have to be mastered before it can be done (sort of like the nuclear fuel cycle). So the US has the lead here but with a sprint I don't doubt the Russians could do it as well, and eventually the Chinese.

Note it is an active investigation at NASA as well for on-orbit propellent operations: https://flightopportunities.nasa.gov/technologies/3/

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

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

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.

Well...

to be fair...

China has to build their own space station because the US objected to China's participation in the ISS program.

Wow, you're right. I did not know that. That definitely changes my opinion of the situation. I understand the U.S. reasons for concern, but now I also understand why the Chinese are going it alone. Thanks.

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.

And meanwhile Fukushima has been dumping huge volumes of radioactive waste water into Pacific for the past two years, the western world seems to be OK with that. Maybe space is more valuable than oceans.

We seem to generally (east, west, whatever) lack the collective capacity to care about these things unless we can't ignore it in the short term.

I agree. This is the tragic commons of the human beings.

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