China to Conquer Moon in 2026 While America
Makes Gender-Neutral Space Suits
American Greatness,
by
Brandon J. Weichert
Original Article
Posted By: earlybird,
1/9/2022 4:50:23 PM
Space is the ultimate strategic high ground. This domain is divided into various zones. First there are the orbits around the Earth: low-Earth orbit, medium-Earth orbit, and geosynchronous orbit. Ancillary to those orbits are the Lagrange points, which are the orbits separating the Earth from its moon. Next up is the Earth-Moon system. If you control the orbits around the Earth and the Lagrange points—as well as the moon itself—you effectively have total dominance over the Earth below. Today, China is poised to dominate not just the orbits around the Earth, but the entire Earth-Moon system. The Americans, despite having won the original space race with the Soviet Union, have
Reply 1 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/9/2022 4:53:47 PM (No. 1033328)
Article has a fair amount of detail on what the Chinese are doing, what we’re not doing, the incompetents leading our space program, and why the Chinese may beat us. And, oh yes, what we’re spending money on - foolishly.
9 people like this.
Reply 2 - Posted by:
earlybird 1/9/2022 4:57:57 PM (No. 1033333)
I forgot to mention the rest of what the writer talks about - the hookup between current #2 in space exploration - Russia - and China. Definitely not a good thing.
6 people like this.
Reply 3 - Posted by:
DVC 1/9/2022 4:59:06 PM (No. 1033336)
Copycats can do what we did over half a century ago. Big deal. Not impressed. Who remembers the second guy to "discover America"? Nobody. Columbus was the first, when nobody knew how to do it, and he and his men had to bravely go beyond the norms.
Fifty years later, anybody with a ship could get here. It was still difficult to stay here, but the travel wasn't the issue.
4 people like this.
Reply 4 - Posted by:
SweetPea3 1/9/2022 5:11:58 PM (No. 1033347)
Let them. We'd have to borrow the money from China to fund our mission anyway.
6 people like this.
Reply 5 - Posted by:
BeatleJeff 1/9/2022 5:30:19 PM (No. 1033365)
Lagrange points? I hear there's a lot of nice girls there ...
4 people like this.
Reply 6 - Posted by:
DVC 1/9/2022 5:31:07 PM (No. 1033367)
I'm a huge space buff, lived near the Cape when the moon shots were launched, watched a number of them go up from the closest points you could reach. A Saturn V launch, especially a night launch is truly awe inspiring. I have had many friends and collegues in the space industry. My thesis prof in my engineering masters was one of the designers of the second stage engines for the Saturn rockets. I know the designers and leaders and the first civilian astronaut personally....SpaceShip One. One of my roommates was part of the design team for the rocket motor for SpaceShip One. I;ve been around big league aerospace my whole life, love it....and know a couple of things about it.
However, until we have a fundamental paradigm shift in propulsion technology, access to even the nearby moon will remain EXTREMELY expensive, and far beyond any sort of commercial ventures by other than millionaires and billionaires who are just enjoying playing in space.
The Chinese analogy in the article of "the moon is like the South China Sea and Mars is like the Phillippines" is hilariously ignorant. With current propulsion technology, it takes almost two years to get to Mars, and the difficulty of carrying enough rocket fuel for a return trip tends to make most Mars landings with the available technology of chemical rockets, largely a one way trip. Is a return possible, yes, but with a very, very much more costly mission to deliver enough rocket fuel and consumables to launch again and come back. Without running any calcs....my guess is that a return mission from Mars would cost 10-20 times what a one way mission would cost. It might be 100 times what are already eye-watering cost numbers.
Dinking around in the Earth-Moon system, out to the two near LaGrange points, sure . L1 and L2 are very "reachable" and you can build stable space platforms there. OK....now what? HUGE costs to deliver goods, and there is NOTHING there at L1 and L2. A military outpost....OK, for what? Like having a big military base on Tierra del Fuego....you can do it, but WHY?
A Moon base? Sure, pretty doable. And maybe we find some water on the Moon....MAYBE, and maybe there is something valuable there. It's going to have to be ULTRA valuable to make it economically worth going and getting. Shipping it back to Earth might be possible with long linear motor driven electric catapults, and a minimal guidance package for a hard impact recovery in a shallow ocean where the splash doesn't cause a lot of damage, assuming that it's basically a solid chuck of metal that you are shipping.
I'd love to ride on one of the space tourism trips to the edge of space for a few minutes, but this hard nosed engineer doesn't see a lot of serious commercial use for space until we come up with a fundamentally better propulsion system.....like warp drive or something. That isn't even a glimmer in the eye of the wildest physicists yet.
7 people like this.
The Chinese have a reputation of building low quality over time. The last 10 years have seen over 4200 dam failures. Infrastructure is a mess. Pollution are higher than our 1985 standards. While the Chinese are showing off to the world that they can go to the moon, Musk will already be on Mars.
10 people like this.
Reply 8 - Posted by:
columba 1/9/2022 6:08:48 PM (No. 1033398)
The President of the Russian Federation appeared on nationwide TV last week. His primary message was easy to believe. He said that a man is a man and a woman is a woman.
9 people like this.
And after they get the gender-neutral space suits, they have to design pregnancy space suits for all the pregnant tranny men...
10 people like this.
Reply 10 - Posted by:
Ashley Brenton 1/9/2022 6:52:33 PM (No. 1033429)
We conquered the moon back when men like Neil Armstrong walked the earth.
Stop screwing around.
6 people like this.
Reply 11 - Posted by:
hershey 1/9/2022 9:17:32 PM (No. 1033523)
Oh and don't forget the maternity space suits for the transgender females...
3 people like this.
Reply 12 - Posted by:
Catherine 1/9/2022 10:59:59 PM (No. 1033593)
Well have a nice time. Stay for a while. Bring lots of people with you. Wave as you go by.
2 people like this.
Reply 13 - Posted by:
Trigger2 1/10/2022 4:58:51 AM (No. 1033680)
China takes action while the USA worries about being gender neutral. That's how far this country has sunk.
1 person likes this.
Reply 14 - Posted by:
F15 Gork 1/10/2022 6:26:35 AM (No. 1033714)
We’re it not for Bill Clinton these Commies would still be trying to put a tin can in orbit.
2 people like this.
Reply 15 - Posted by:
bigfatslob 1/10/2022 1:54:22 PM (No. 1034170)
It's time for Russia to clean and paint the used hot water heater put a nose cone on it to get in the space race with Sputnik II. The good old days are here again. Let's go China.
0 people like this.
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Article dated January 3, 2022, posted with permission