China will beat the USA back to the moon, but 2030 is a little ambitious.
Reds will win the second space race just like the first :xigma-male:
Sorry, Mr. Xi. The new bar for space exploration is landing a dead monkey in a Tesla on Mars.
:xigma-male: "We have launched Elon Musk to Mars."
:so-true: "So cool, when is he coming back?"
:xigma-male: "He's not."
A crewed moon landing all hinges on Long March 9 flying reliably, and flying years ahead of schedule. That rocket, if and when it flies, will be a Saturn V-class rocket. Nothing else that China has or will have comes close to doing an Apollo-style crewed mission. There's the theoretical option of doing in-space construction using a lot of Long March 5 launches. But that brings in a lot of engineering challenges, and would require ramping up Long March 5 production literally today.
China is first preparing for a "short stay on the lunar surface and human-robotic joint exploration," Deputy Director of the Chinese Manned Space Agency Lin Xiqiang told reporters at the rare briefing by the military-run program.
Realistic, and the safest way to do crewed exploration. The Moon is a horrific place from a human health standpoint. The dust is the worst. There's no weathering like on Earth or Mars, so lunar dust is made up of microscopic flakes of jagged rock blasted out in meteorite strikes. Solar radiation interacts with the lunar surface to electrostatically levitate dust, so even the most careful astronaut is going to track it back into their ship. And that dust is awful stuff. It slices up your lungs and airways, it's conductive so it can cause shorts in electrical systems, and it also likes to slice up spacesuits. Keep the people inside (except for emergencies) and let them run robots by remote.
A crewed moon landing all hinges on Long March 9 flying reliably,
That's what I thought too and it's not going to be ready until after 2030. But apparently they have an SLS-like Long March 10 in development that will be ready before 2030?
even the most careful astronaut is going to track it back into their ship
I remember several years ago there were American concepts for crewed Mars rovers that had spacesuits as part of the vehicle. Instead of climbing into an airlock, the suits are the airlock. That way you don't bring in any dust. I'll try to find a picture or video.
edit: Suitport!
Even Long March 10 would require at least two launches to put the various pieces off the ground. Its design payload mass to a trans-lunar injection would be about the same as the Apollo CSM alone, no Lunar Module in tow. Modern crewed spacecraft haven't really gotten much lighter than older-design spacecraft (gains in compactness of electronics is often offset by improving safety margins in other systems), and the Apollo CSM engine was a pretty darn efficient one for its day, so I think it'd be fair to assume that a Chinese Apollo-style mission would have an architecture roughly equivalent to Apollo - including similar masses for similar ships.
Suitport is a fascinating idea. It would be a great idea for "disposable" hardware like an Apollo-style mission. One of the big challenges in longer-term missions would be suit maintenance. My favourite suit design is the good old USSR-derived Orlan suit. It has only one opening, the back, where cosmonauts slide in. The fabric panel behind the cosmonaut is actually just a cover for all the suit's systems. Pretty easy to maintain by space-tech standards.
Christ, I didn't realize it was that hazardous, that's like some videogame bullshit
Silicosis from hell. Mars is the same but not as bad bc it has atmosphere and wind to move the dust around and grind the edges off a little, but it's still living in a world made of abrasive grit. It's impossible to overstate how insanely hazardous and unsuited for life anywhere else in the solar system is. All of this manned flight stuff is a hubristic waste of resources. Just send more robots ffs.
Mars' atmosphere also means that so as long as you've got electricity, you can use regular air compressor tech to blow a worksite relatively clean of dust, or blow most of the dust off a suit before closing up an outer airlock, etc. To try the same thing on the Moon means hauling along big tanks of some sort of inert gas, and carefully rationing usage.
Lunar colonization is an insane idea. The Moon is fantastic for a lot of science proposals. EM telescopes of all wavelengths on the far side where they're permanently shielded from Earth and shielded from the Sun for 2 weeks out of 4. Gravitational-wave detectors on tectonically stable ground that don't need vacuum tunnels built because above-ground is a natural vacuum. Infrared telescopes in the permanently-shadowed polar craters. Etc, etc, etc. The Moon is an amazing place for automated observatories. And of course the geology (selenology?) would be invaluable to understand how the Earth-Moon system evolved. But the Moon is a completely stupid idea from a colonization perspective.
I don't get why people still have to be sent into space with all the advancements in robots and satellites. Especially when it comes to risking some of the PLA's finest when AUKUS are starting to close in on China.
2030 is a little ambitious.
ehh we were a lot further from landing on the Moon than China is right now when Kennedy set the deadline at 1969. The major slowdowns to space progress in the US right now are all artificial, which is why a company like SpaceX which doesn't have to deal with a million different contractors the way NASA does can throw out multiple launches a week but there's a huge delay in between every step in the Artemis program.
SpaceX which doesn’t have to deal with a million different contractors the way NASA does can throw out multiple launches a week
They can launch rockets as quickly as they can build launch pads.
Long March 10 may be ready in 2027, Artemis 3 will be late 2025. China's not getting there first unless NASA is really unlucky. Looking forward to them both though!!!
A delay would not surprise me, but have they actually run into issues yet or is this just pessimism?
It also wouldn't be the first time NASA has had to delay and then scuttle another moon mission between bduget cuts and the reality of American private provisioning. Constellation was supposed to return to the Moon by 2020.
I dunno if the US has the same juice it did as a state to organize another crewed moon mission like they did in the 60s and 70s. Maybe with the pressure of the PRC doing it they will, but it's just not the same cold war and not the same rate of profit they had.
I dunno if the US has the same juice it did as a state to organize
This is it right here. The US just doesn't have the ability to organize the insane resources needed for a lunar mission, let alone Mars, anymore.
It's insane the national unity and concentration of common effort the US had to put a man on the moon in 1969. Kennedy's speech was in 1961. No freaking way the corrupt US empire could pull something like that again. The MIC had not expended to its current state, back then it looked like a tick before feeding. The gov't can allocate all the money it wants, it will simply be inhaled by the tick which will bloat to dozens of times its size to consume all available resources.
I mean it was supposed to be 2024 so they already delayed it.
The Starship test was a failure that will continue to knock things back.
I'm not sure I'd call that test a failure. SpaceX learned a lot. And a lot of the systems worked exactly as planned.
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The rocket and the launch mount did not collapse under the weight of a full fuel load. Fully fueled, the rocket weighed almost double that of the Saturn V (5000 tonnes vs 3000 tonnes). That's seriously impressive engineering. You have to know what you're doing to have a 5000 tonne rocket resting safely on a ring itself supported by six pylons just a few meters wide each.
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The engine failures, likely caused by cement debris at launch bouncing upwards, did not cascade like the N1. The failed engines failed safe, and the rest operated normally and maintained course.
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They didn't know if they needed some sort of launch water suppression system. Now they know. Lesson learned.
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The rocket cleared the tower and flew straight on its planned course until stage separation was to happen. The guidance systems and engines' TVC seem to be working exactly as intended.
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The heat shield tiles only started detaching well after launch. Now they know that launch vibrations are not going to be an issue for the tiles, but airflow is. Lesson learned, time to examine the tile attachment method more closely.
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The rocket, with 1st and 2nd stages still attached to each other, did multiple cartwheels and stayed intact until ground control commanded a self-destruct. Most rockets shred themselves to pieces the moment they go broadside to the wind. If Starship could handle tumbling through the air end-over-end while attached to the booster, chances are it's going to be able to handle aerobraking just fine.
I think this was actually a very successful test flight in terms of learning lessons. Didn't make the near-orbit they were hoping, but it got a lot farther than most other prototype rocket launches do. And now they have a gold mine of telemetry to go through.
(Lest anyone thing this is praise of the melon, it's not. It's praise for the engineers and technicians who actually do the real work at SpaceX.)
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long march is just such a baller name for a rocket that brings people into space.
It reminds me of that fucking long running meme on cth where all the candidates were being added outside the pearly gates in the last election.
:che-poggers: :ferret-poggers: :turtle-pogger: :lenin-pogger: :CommiePOGGERS:
This is just dick waving, right? It's a dead ball of silicon and alunimun why is anyone bothering to send human there?
Earth has limited resources of most of the really fun elements, and mining those resources is, even in the least impactful ways possible, really destructive and toxifying. Capitalism wants to expand into space to gain more resources to exploit, communism wants to expand into space to avoid exploiting earthly resources.
The moon is an interesting place to establish a forward operating base for acquiring the resources of the solar system. It has gravity, so humans can theoretically live there without their bones dissolving, but the gravity is much weaker than Earth so spacecraft can come and go more easily. No atmosphere helps a lot there too. There's water on the moon and helium, both of which are very useful if you want to do rocketry.
Also, landing humans on the moon is an achievement that everyone on the planet will understand and admire. It's a testament to the engineering and science efforts of tens of thousands of people. Big morale gains made when you livestream an astronaut hitting a golf ball over the horizon.
I think there's another angle here to consider too.
The owner of the first moon base is a deeply powerful strategic position to be in if the move into further space activity is truly genuine, especially if the capitalists are intent on doing it through private companies.
Once one base is there, they won't build a new one they are much more likely to try and make deals to use China's facilities or to make additional wings to those facilities run by themselves. China can get a lot out of that, especially if various companies come to rely on it as a staging post for further operations.
Probably cool to throw rocks off the moon on to American military bases
Jobs program that has a giid result. After you've built cities and trains you gotta aim higher
A large permanent satellite full of helium has a host of potential uses for the industrialization of the exosphere.
China built its own space station after it was excluded from the International Space Station, largely due to U.S. objections over the Chinese space programs' intimate ties to the PLA.
I don't see why that is a concern when roughly 2/3 of US astronauts are/were ex-military themselves, by my count.
:frothingfash: :grillman: :amerikkka-clap: "Muh moon!"
:xigma-male:: "Not anymore."
