However, the article makes many good points. The Chinese are clear on their own objectives regardless of the boastful lies they may send our way. Once they see viable land, they are going to claim it regardless of the OST. While there is so much land it’s hard to imagine, they will also want to control others.
So they may be only racing with themselves, but that’s still a race.
The big mistake people are making about space is only looking at the supply problem. They totally ignore the potential for industry once you have enough hands in place to do the work.
Settlement is not going to be about a couple of people doing research living in a tuna can. It may be, who’s willing to get the most bodies at the cheapest cost to settlements. Who will take the most risk with their citizens?
Would the Chinese government accept losing 50million people to settle 100million on Mars? Yes. The other associated costs of such an operation might stop it.
It may stop it. The point is once the people are there; what they do is more important than what is done for them.
I see nothing about Commercial Crew in there. ISS must be ‘chopped liver,’ too…
We are going to see more success all around. Things are going to get exciting.
As Rand and others have noted here many times previously, the Chinese entree into space is more like a leisurely amble than a race. The current Chinese regime no doubt imagines that it is playing the long game much attributed to its ancestors, but the large number of dynastic transitions in Chinese history argue that simply being Chinese confers no special power of prognostication. Even the dynasties that reckoned their tenures in centuries eventually ended. Right up until those ends, the doomed emperors were, doubtless, imagining the futures of their own regimes stretching into the indefinite future. The Chinese, as a people, almost certainly have a significant future in space. As a vanguard of the current unfortunate Chinese regime, however, not so much.
I have previously enunciated here, and elsewhere, what I now modestly call Eagleson’s Summer Olympics + 9 Law of Totalitarian Eclipse. Nazi Germany: Summer Olympics in national capital – 1936; Fall of Regime – 1945. Soviet Union: Summer Olympics in national capital – 1980; Fall of Berlin Wall – 1989. Chinese People’s Republic: Summer Olympics in national capital – 2008. We may expect the current Chinese regime to suffer an existential blow of some kind in 2017. I do not rule out the possibility that the regime may struggle against its certain doom for a year or two as did the last masters of the late USSR before formal interment takes place, but be alert as 2017 approaches. Big doings in store away East.
That’s not a lot of data points. What about all the other nations that hosted the summer Olympics, did they suffer an existential crisis roughly 9 years later? If not, how are they different?
Nazi Germany and the late USSR were, like China, totalitarian police states with imperial ambitions. The other nations that have hosted a Summer Olympics in the modern era were neither of these things.
2017 is the 20th anniversary of the takeover of Hong Kong by mainland China…
There’s no one-sentence goal mentioned. JFK had one, and it sufficed to bring about our preeminence in space.
But that’s been said to be it’s weakness rather than it’s strength.
Ouch. And Greece is on schedule for disaster in 2013. But what horrible thing happened to Atlanta in 2005? Or Australia in 2009? 🙂
Reading comprehension, people! Recheck the name of the law. Pay particular attention to the last two words in its name.
Any space race of US vs. China will be more a race between ideologies than between programs. Failing to grasp that makes any article ring like hollow cheerleading. Ownership in very sparsely populated areas is 99% occupation, regardless of common or sovereign law underpinnings. If you want my regolith, come get it. If China does make footfall before the waves of Western private industry, it will be a historical footnote.
Love these pop quizzes: Free enterprise?
However, the article makes many good points. The Chinese are clear on their own objectives regardless of the boastful lies they may send our way. Once they see viable land, they are going to claim it regardless of the OST. While there is so much land it’s hard to imagine, they will also want to control others.
So they may be only racing with themselves, but that’s still a race.
The big mistake people are making about space is only looking at the supply problem. They totally ignore the potential for industry once you have enough hands in place to do the work.
Settlement is not going to be about a couple of people doing research living in a tuna can. It may be, who’s willing to get the most bodies at the cheapest cost to settlements. Who will take the most risk with their citizens?
Would the Chinese government accept losing 50million people to settle 100million on Mars? Yes. The other associated costs of such an operation might stop it.
It may stop it. The point is once the people are there; what they do is more important than what is done for them.
I see nothing about Commercial Crew in there. ISS must be ‘chopped liver,’ too…
We are going to see more success all around. Things are going to get exciting.
As Rand and others have noted here many times previously, the Chinese entree into space is more like a leisurely amble than a race. The current Chinese regime no doubt imagines that it is playing the long game much attributed to its ancestors, but the large number of dynastic transitions in Chinese history argue that simply being Chinese confers no special power of prognostication. Even the dynasties that reckoned their tenures in centuries eventually ended. Right up until those ends, the doomed emperors were, doubtless, imagining the futures of their own regimes stretching into the indefinite future. The Chinese, as a people, almost certainly have a significant future in space. As a vanguard of the current unfortunate Chinese regime, however, not so much.
I have previously enunciated here, and elsewhere, what I now modestly call Eagleson’s Summer Olympics + 9 Law of Totalitarian Eclipse. Nazi Germany: Summer Olympics in national capital – 1936; Fall of Regime – 1945. Soviet Union: Summer Olympics in national capital – 1980; Fall of Berlin Wall – 1989. Chinese People’s Republic: Summer Olympics in national capital – 2008. We may expect the current Chinese regime to suffer an existential blow of some kind in 2017. I do not rule out the possibility that the regime may struggle against its certain doom for a year or two as did the last masters of the late USSR before formal interment takes place, but be alert as 2017 approaches. Big doings in store away East.
That’s not a lot of data points. What about all the other nations that hosted the summer Olympics, did they suffer an existential crisis roughly 9 years later? If not, how are they different?
Nazi Germany and the late USSR were, like China, totalitarian police states with imperial ambitions. The other nations that have hosted a Summer Olympics in the modern era were neither of these things.
2017 is the 20th anniversary of the takeover of Hong Kong by mainland China…
There’s no one-sentence goal mentioned. JFK had one, and it sufficed to bring about our preeminence in space.
But that’s been said to be it’s weakness rather than it’s strength.
Ouch. And Greece is on schedule for disaster in 2013. But what horrible thing happened to Atlanta in 2005? Or Australia in 2009? 🙂
Reading comprehension, people! Recheck the name of the law. Pay particular attention to the last two words in its name.
Any space race of US vs. China will be more a race between ideologies than between programs. Failing to grasp that makes any article ring like hollow cheerleading. Ownership in very sparsely populated areas is 99% occupation, regardless of common or sovereign law underpinnings. If you want my regolith, come get it. If China does make footfall before the waves of Western private industry, it will be a historical footnote.