China's reusable experimental spacecraft returned to Earth on Friday morning after completing its 268-day orbital journey, according to the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the country's northwestern desert.
It really is inspiring to see this stuff, and I agree regarding showing failures as well. It gives people a more realistic idea of the challenges involved. China has the opportunity to use space as a big national vision for technological advancement. This is a frontier that we're just starting to explore, and it's at the bleeding edge of our technological advancement. There's just something that calls to us collectively in the idea of establishing a foothold somewhere new.
There's a huge opportunity with the moon base China's planning in 2030s. I imagine it'll get a huge number of people excited to go into STEM fields and could really kickstart a new space race where we actually start making serious outposts on the moon. When the US did their moon landing, they had no further vision beyond just planting their flag and going home. I really hope China will use the base as a start of a program to create permanent presence on the moon.
There's so much that could be done from there. If manufacturing can be set up to mine and process resources on site, then moon could act as the gateway to the rest of the solar system. Launching spacecraft from the moon is way easier than launching from Earth, and eventually it would even be possible to build a space elevator there. Since surface gravity is low, the engineering requirements for constructing a lunar elevator system can be met using materials and technology already available. At that point, sending stuff to orbit becomes extremely cheap. This would facilitate construction of large habitats in space, and space ships that are designed to stay in orbit permanently.
It really is inspiring to see this stuff, and I agree regarding showing failures as well. It gives people a more realistic idea of the challenges involved. China has the opportunity to use space as a big national vision for technological advancement. This is a frontier that we're just starting to explore, and it's at the bleeding edge of our technological advancement. There's just something that calls to us collectively in the idea of establishing a foothold somewhere new.
There's a huge opportunity with the moon base China's planning in 2030s. I imagine it'll get a huge number of people excited to go into STEM fields and could really kickstart a new space race where we actually start making serious outposts on the moon. When the US did their moon landing, they had no further vision beyond just planting their flag and going home. I really hope China will use the base as a start of a program to create permanent presence on the moon.
There's so much that could be done from there. If manufacturing can be set up to mine and process resources on site, then moon could act as the gateway to the rest of the solar system. Launching spacecraft from the moon is way easier than launching from Earth, and eventually it would even be possible to build a space elevator there. Since surface gravity is low, the engineering requirements for constructing a lunar elevator system can be met using materials and technology already available. At that point, sending stuff to orbit becomes extremely cheap. This would facilitate construction of large habitats in space, and space ships that are designed to stay in orbit permanently.