A bad moon rising — what if China beats US back to lunar surface?
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/bad-moon-rising-china-ted-cruz-n0xp3ldvm
A bad moon rising — what if China beats US back to lunar surface?
https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/bad-moon-rising-china-ted-cruz-n0xp3ldvm
19 Comments
Right now we’ve ceded China the advantage on just about every area, so it wouldn’t surprise me in the least. If we keep slashing science and education budgets, and turning our allies into adversaries, then I would expect China to make far more progress than us.
That race was won a long time ago. Can’t lose a race we already one and we’ve repeated multiple times.
It does not matter. Changes to NASA, science funding, universities and others are tanking the US. They already begin to see a brain drain.
China is going to the moon first, probably to mars first (except if elon has enough money and lives long enough).
It’s the end of the american hegemony, especially in space (science missions and interplanetary travel, putting more satellites to earn more money will be US’s only space achievements).
What do you mean “if” At this point I don’t see the US beating them unless there is a huge push. Starship is still a long ways away and they have not even started on their lunar lander. Blue origin is just a pipe dream and their lander is a horrible design.
If they get there before we get back they will claim it as their own and threaten any craft that approaches the moon. It’s what they do down here so what makes me think anything else. Lolz.
I’d applaud it. Even though their program is not cross-national it may end up expanding. That is good. Just like the ISS is multinational and the world benefits from it.
I mean, that’s literally impossible unless China starts developing time travel technology, which… I’m not discounting entirely, but…
I though that OP tried to write
>A bad moon rising — what if China **bring** US back to lunar surface?
But auto corrector messes with their title…
Who gives a shit as long as humans settle there ?
China is number one in all aspects. Most are too delusional to see it.
OK? Not like the United States government cares about science right now.
I’ll be surprised if China doesn’t beat us back to the moon.
Then they make it back to the Moon before us.
The advancement of science and humanity should not be locked behind your race.
What if? Why does it matter? As long as someone cares to study and explore space, I don’t give a shit who does it.
This is the problem when you treat space exploration as a glorified competition and then treat your “win” as a glorified PR stunt. Then again, I don’t even value the rhetoric of the “space race”, because it is pathetic that the victory condition seemingly is “who gets to plant the flag on our natural satellite” and nothing more. It just goes against what exploration and what being human is supposed to be.
We don’t just give up the search for more as soon as we beat our neighbour in one race, even when the neighbour isn’t even competing with us on the same thing, we continue to search for more and strive further. The only space race that I acknowledge is the one where the end goal would be to colonize the planet in the next galaxy or something equally impressive, not merely do a few trips to the moon.
SpaceX has had dozens of successful Starship tests, on the ground and in space. Orion has done a Lunar flyby mission, launched on the SLS. The Long March 10A and Long March 10 have not launched once. The Chinese crewed lander has one successful test on the ground. Suddenly it’s a close race. There does seem a double standard here.
The reality is China has multiple steps they must do in order to land on the Moon. They will have to launch the Long March 10A, analogous to the Falcon 9, multiple time. Then the Long March 10, analogous to the Falcon Heavy, will have to do test launches. That is going to be by far the largest rocket China has ever launched. The Long March 10 will have to do two operational launches right after each other, one for the lander and one for the crew capsule, in order to land on the Moon.
There was 8 years between the first Saturn 1 launch and the first Apollo landing on the Moon. There was 9 years between first launch of the Falcon 9 and the first year with the Falcon Heavy doing two launches. Rockets take time to develop and scale up production. China is not launching any of the hardware that they’re actually going to use. They will have to do years of launches, for tests and scaling up production, before they’re going to be able to land on the Moon. Any discussion about the timeline has to be focused on the launch vehicles.
At the end of all that, what have they accomplished? The Long March 10 is a poorly designed expendable clone of the Falcon Heavy. They haven’t demonstrated reuse. Even once they do, that’s a decade or more of iteration before they can match the Falcon 9 right now. China will have completed a flag-planting mission analogous to Apollo. But Apollo is a dead end. They can’t build a base with a tiny crewed lander.
The US is launching and reusing orbital rockets right now. This isn’t hypothetical. SpaceX is developing and launching a methane-fueled rocket, the most powerful rocket ever built, designed for full reuse. Starship is suitable for landing giant payloads on the Moon, for building a base. Starship is suitable for landing people on Mars, for transitioning into building propellant depots on Mars. Starship is designed to be far more economical long term than Apollo, because it will be fully reusable. Starship is not a dead-end mission architecture.
As an aside, Europe and the UK are irrelevant in this discussion. This is despite ESA member countries having a substantially larger GDP than China. There should at least be a mention here of how far behind ESA is compared to the US and China. It’s almost as if Europe has just given up. I mention this because that’s a British newspaper.
We won the “space race” , so no matter if they get there tomorrow, it’s still second place.
I’d say …. What took you so long ?
The modern race is finding life on other planets and we have rovers on mars.
Are we falling behind ! Sure enough , but that could change as well.
There’s a good chance they will. If they do, it will kill a lot of the enthusiasm for following the space program’s moon effort. Additionally, it will show the supremacy of their space program.
The telescope they’re building in Chile is already groundbreaking. China is moving forward FAST.
>Some experts have argued that one reason it might be good to get to the moon first is the claim that whoever wins the race can then set the rules. Space is already governed, though, by the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, said Mosteshar, who is sceptical. “It’s not clear to me why standing on the poles before the US means they can then set the rules.”
Well said. I mean, if China is as bad as they say, does the US landing a few years ahead of them really matter?