Can somebody help?
I'm translating an article on China's plans to go to the moon, and the things they could do once they get there. I've been trying read around the subject, but for some reason it seems very hard to find any information.
I would like very much to know:

Where can I find out more about China's space program?

What difference will it make when China has a capacity for manned space missions?

How much will China realistically be able to do?

This started as a university project, but my interest now goes a long way beyond that. Any advice/comments would be wonderful!

Ni hao a?
I just tried google (china space program moon) and got several hits. I don't know if that's what you're looking for or not. Good luck.

I heard they still have problems with nose cones flying apart in the upper atmosphere despite the, um, freelance work that Loral did for them so, given their enormous manpower resources, they will just build about a gazillion (I think I translated that right) rockets and hope one gets there. If not, they can stack up the empties end to end and just climb to the Moon.

Hmm. I think I'll have orange chicken for lunch. 8)

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa!!! Ni ye hui jiang zhongwen a! (Gabbles excitedly in Chinese for half an hour) Plainly, the people who post here are more talented than I could have imagined...
Yes, there are just one or two hits on the subject in Google when using those keywords, aren't there? Plainly, my googling skills leave much to be desired. Excuse bumbling and shy new person.
Thank you for telling me about the nose cone, Galaxy Trio. Enjoy your lunch!

Go to this link - It has some excellent material on China as well as the Soviet space program

http://www.astronautix.com/

Hi,Long March!

I am Chinese and write for Space Exploration magazine,which is published by Chinese Society of Astronautics.

Your questions are not easy to answer.There have been lots of materials about Chinese space programs,but they are written in Chinese and printed on newspapers and magazines(not online).

However,anything I can help,just tell me.

If you can read Chinese,you may download a QQ(similar to ICQ),so we can chat online.

http://soft.shangdu.com/query/down1....2000c1230b.exe

My QQ number is 15981150.

We talked about the Chinese space program here. There are a lot of good links on that thread,

I can't answer all of your questions but will answer the ones I can.

It will give the same differences in rocketry as the US had from its' manned space program. It will give them VERy HIGH reliability rockets. This reliability will enclude launch surety, guidence surety and re-entry survival surety. It is my understanding that their guidence systems are copies supplied by our ex-president Bill Clinton and his fellow treasonists.
They will be able to do any of the things that the US was able to do after the Apollo program. This would include, but no be limited to, lifting very high capacities of nuclear weapons per launch vehicle, sending said weapons anywhere on Earth, and have these weapons survive re-entry & reach their target with high accuracy.


I do not know if these are the results the Chinese intend but it is what they will have none-the-less. :roll: If it is what they intend, the world will be a lesser place for their efforts. If it is not their intent, then I wish them the best of luck on Luna.

__________________
It's just one of those damn things of which there are many few. -- Dan Blocker

JimO did a good article here. and you have probably seen these.

Thank you to the people who took the time to reply - this information is going to be really useful - not to mention interesting!

There may be ulterior motives.
Claim the moon on the basis of 1st colony?
The moon will have a colony far before space stations/mars/other.
Western nations are short term thinkers, China is not.
The 1st colony will have first rights to democratically declare independence from Earth.
Stock that satellite with friendly votes. It may be already too late for Antarctica!

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Well, the Chinese could try to claim the moon. But I doubt they will have much success in the long run. If the people on the Moon really wanted independence, there is little that nations on Earth could do, because enforcing authority over an unwilling populace becomes expensive.

Antarctica is covered by several treaties that say various nations will give up territorial claims -- at one point the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Argentina were all saying they had claims to territory. In 2001 the US and Russia reserved the right to make claims and not recognize others claims. The CIA world fact book lists the following: Argentina, Australia, Chile, France, New Zealand, Norway, and the UK.

The Moon could be administered in a similar way, at least initially.

Man, this is getting ridiculous! I was going to post last week my opinion that Russ was being overly negative, but it is a fact that almost everyone with a rocket program (and certainly those who are manned-lunar capable) developed them with military showing-off in mind. So I concede some apprehension might be reasonable.

OTOH, declaring "independance" on the moon is just plain silly - what are you going to do? "Hey! We're declaring ourselves a new country! Nya!..... say, wouldja mind sending up some burgers? Algae's getting boring. And some oranges if you've got them. Some aspirin wouldn't hurt either..."
Not gonna happen.

Nanoda--

Well, I was thinking that once a colony is self-sufficient, insofar as that is possible, they could in theory declare independence from the mother country and go to someone else for supplies -- historically that is what Americans did when we had trouble trading with the Brits. Of course, some British companies continued to do so, for all kinds of reasons. But trade routes with France ad Spain were opened up after the Revolution, and that served the United States well until fences could be mended with Britain. (This is a terrible over-simplification, by the way).

The moon has a lot of stuff on it. The biggest resource crunches would be in heavier metals and water, methinks, unless it turns out there is more than we thought, no?

Actually, it was Loral, Hughes and Boeing who made the unfortunate transfers of tech, and they were brought to task by the Justice Department for it. Last I heard Loral had ponied up $20 million in fines.

What I heard through my own aerospace sources, and I never saw reported in the media, was that China was having nosecone issues- issues in the form of their nosecones flying apart into tiny little pieces when they hit the upper atmosphere. I have never been able to reliably confirm this.

Personally, I allowing China *ANY* presence, much less any sort of control, at the Panama Canal was a bigger strategic blunder than anything to do with rockets.

For a very believable treatment of the topic of the Moon declaring independenca, read The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein. 8)

__________________
Any day you wake up on "the right side of the dirt" is a good day.

T. Anderson

To TheGalaxyTrio and Russ--

Before we start bandying about words like treason, a few words are in order about technolgy in general. When I studied physics in college, there were a whole lot of Chinese students, and Indian ones, and in fact people from all over the world. While any country is well within its rights to try to prevent transfers of technology where they think it appropriate, I would submit that the whole exercise is not very effective. After all, Chinese people can read. They can subscribe to the aerospace trade pubs. They go to conferences and share ideas with all their colleagues, insofar as they are allowed to.

Anything they got from Loral might save them time and development money, but little else. And I would further submit that since the actual technology of getting a capsule into space is old (40 years now) and well-understood, and a part of some aerospace engineering course curricula at every university that has it, it would be almost inconcievable to me that the Chinese -- or anybody else with the money (a key point) -- wouldn't develop space vehicles eventually if they wanted to.

I am not going to get into whether the Chinese are a threat or not, or how to respond or not, that's a whole other issue. I'm just saying that every time any product goes abroad, or even to people within the U.S., somebody has probably reverse engineered it. I mean, you can't tell me that Apple and Microsoft don't do this to each other to figure out what makes the other company's technology good -- or bad, as the case may be -- and how to do it better, even if they don't "steal" from each other.

So whatever the motivation, and I have no idea what it is beyond the obvious prestige issues -- the Chinese are planning to be a space-faring nation in some fashion or other, and there is little any other nation could do to stop it. I'd be interested to see how they go about it, and what methodologies for getting to the moon (if that is what they are after) they decide on.

By the way, a bit OT, but given the poor state of science education in the US, and the dearth of students who choose those careers, is it any wonder that other countries might start developing technologies in these areas, and investing in it, while we sit back and do little, and far less than we are capable of? I have had the opportunity (if you can call it that) of speaking to many policy makers at the local and state levels. Like the public they represent, they have, often, only the vaguest understanding of science and how it works. That might explain why funding is given in the haphazard way it is, and why the idea that requiring every high school student to have a full four-year science curricula, same for math, and a foreign language (and I mean competent foreign language) is so alien to many Americans, who see often science and philosophy as a frill when they are core subjects in the rest of the world. And it might explain why the Chinese are going to space with the kind of enthusiasm we haven't seen here for thirty years.

Emspak, you touched on something that's been bugging me for some time and that's the fact that our manned missions haven't got out of orbit since Apollo. I know we were motivated to beat the Soviets to the moon but I never expected the loss of interest after our '69 triumph that I've seen. I can't damn the Chinese for showing some initiative. I just wish we could recapture some public interest in initiatives of our own, whether it takes a modification in the educational process or increased funding. Unfortunately, I think most people are too caught up in more earthly matters to look skyward.

The only good thing about a Chinese space program is it may spur NASA and the military back into a space race Cold War style.

Other than that, a large Chinese presence in space may be a threat to the United States, regardless of what the kumbaya crowd says.

__________________
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"Something unknown is doing we don't know what."
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Epsilon--

You just hit on a major problem. If the only motivation to go into space (or anything else) is to "beat" whoever else is at it, then such programs will peter out in short order.

Let me put it this way: when Columbus went west, he did so to gain immediate and personal posession of wealth. It was also to find an alternate route so that Spain could avoid having to cut in every petty king between China and Istanbul on the silk and spice trade (talk about tolls!). Beating the Italians, Portuguese or Dutch was less of an issue. Not even technology was an issue -- the technology needed existed already. Nobody cared about crossing the ocean for its own sake.

Once we beat the Russians to the Moon, there was no reason to do it again and no reason to stay interested. And where will we "beat" the Chinese to? Mars? Beyond that, so what?

The military of any country also has a decidedly poor record for creating self-sustaining colonies in remote places on Earth. Think of the Caribbean -- all those forts are gone. People that live there are doing something else like growing sugar or some other commodity -- as well as tourism (remember the latter is a relatively recent phenomenon). Basically, there was some other reason to be there besides the fort (which might have been put there to protect that very commodity).

You need a more compelling reason, one that is there whether or not the Chinese, or Japanese, or even the Albanians have a space program. I can think of some that are right now politically hard sells because of the way people in the US tend to think of resources and project horizons. But such a reinvigoration of purpose can be done. After all, Cathedrals -- big, expensive public projects --got built for centuries, and there was some pretty cutting edge technology at the time. And you know what? They all became the centers of towns, many if not most of which are still around.

Stephen Baxter, in Time also describes a pretty good way of getting the exploitation of space resources underway, as a private venture. Maybe that's one way to go.

Point is, you need a reason, and the will. After that, the rest will foillow.

I'm not saying that we need to rely on the military to construct and oversee space colonies or the like. I believe scientific research in space is very important, as is colonization. But from a strategic point of view space is the ultimate high ground, and will likely be a battlefield for the next millennia. The United Nation’s Outer Space Treaty declaring that no country will own ‘land’ on other planets will be repealed eventually. Weapons will be (if they haven’t already been) introduced into space, eventually en masse. Wherever the colonists go the military will eventually follow, and wars will inevitably erupt. But the country that develops the capability to deny space access to another country with a space program in the early 2000s will be in a much better position then one that is held under the specter of having its satellites and space-based infrastructure wiped out if it decides to do anything foolish.

I believe China represents the country most capable of achieving a broad reaching space (scientific and military) program that is not forced to rely on American, Russian, or European launches. And since we are friends with most of Europe, and relatively close to the Russians, the Chinese pose the greatest threat. Their space program clearly has military implications. They are in the process of trying to modernize and update the antiquated technology and tactics employed by the People’s Liberation Army/Navy/Air Force. Part of that goal is to study recent conflicts like Operation Iraqi Freedom, where space-based infrastructure was used extensively for