RE: While the US is fighting over the debt, China is planning to go to the moon
January 4, 2012 at 12:16 pm
(January 4, 2012 at 10:47 am)Chuck Wrote: To be honest, Chinese plan does not set a date for manned lunar landing, which seems to me to be a hedge against a later changing of the mind familiar to NASA. Also, Chinese plan appears to be purely prestige-seeking in style, doing absolutely nothing that has not been done by someone else before, even though by going to the moon at all, they demonstrate the possession of capability to break new ground. This tells me the grandiloquent goal of furthering human space exploration is the last thing on chinese minds. They want only the maximum prestige for the minimum risk and minimum cost, without a single extra dime spent on pursuing genuine exploration.
I don't think the Chinese will be the first to send a man to mars. It does not fit their style. They want to use the paths others have hewn for the minimum cost. They are not interested in hewing a path to where non have gone before.
Break new ground? Much of China's technology to put men in space came from the Russians (their capsule is a Russian design). And their computer technology came from the United States.
'The difference between a Miracle and a Fact is exactly the difference between a mermaid and seal. It could not be expressed better.'
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
-- Samuel "Mark Twain" Clemens
"I think that in the discussion of natural problems we ought to begin not with the scriptures, but with experiments, demonstrations, and observations".
- Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
"In short, Meyer has shown that his first disastrous book was not a fluke: he is capable of going into any field in which he has no training or research experience and botching it just as badly as he did molecular biology. As I've written before, if you are a complete amateur and don't understand a subject, don't demonstrate the Dunning-Kruger effect by writing a book about it and proving your ignorance to everyone else! "
- Dr. Donald Prothero
