China in Space: Threat or Menace?

[james_davis_nicoll]

The answer is "which can we use to scare the USG into funding more space stuff?"

As touted here: Leonard David's "Is China's Space Program Shaping a Celestial Empire?"

Comments

[harvey-rrit.livejournal.com]

After Shoemaker-Levy, if they're not scared enough yet they're too stupid to be affected by any mere human hazard.

[scott-sanford.livejournal.com]

Natural disasters are underfunded, often to the extent of creating a secondary disaster.

Stuff done by 'enemies' is profitable; witness a trillion dollars spent to take down a single third-world dictator, or the ongoing millions at every US airport to guard against a few hundred people living in Middle Eastern tents, caves, and hovels but still getting on the internet occasionallhy to rant about how they'll Get America one of these days, really.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

The interval between successive extinction level impacts is longer than the average lifespan of a species. I'm willing to back-burner that concern (although I support efforts to locate all possible potential impactors).

Groan

[(Anonymous)]

we've *already* found most potential impactors. That work will be substantially completed within another decade, two at the most.

bringing asteroid impacts into a discussion of space has been a stupid marker for a while. it's getting more so every day.


Doug M.

[captaincrowbar.myopenid.com (from livejournal.com)]

"Saying that it takes two to tango is a poor excuse for losing because international space politics isn't a tango. Instead, it is a conga line,"

...You know, if I worked for the Onion, I'd probably be contemplating suicide by now.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Would it be rude to point out to the Planetary Society that there was a time when a vast autocratic power enjoyed a long-standing lead in crewed space activities and what it got them was Cosmonaut 3rd Class Sergei Krikalev trapped in orbit when the autocracy collapsed and the space program budget went with it?

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Yes, but so far the _new_ vast autocratic power seems to have an economic model which isn't composed of moonbeams. Not that I'm worried about Chinese! In! Space!, but dismissing the competition on the basis of "our competitors in the past have all screwed themselves over, so the current Potential Menace will probably do the same" seems to partake in the common SF fallacy of projecting previous trends indefinitely into the future.

[down-lin.livejournal.com]

You're scared that China could be a threaten becauce you never know about China,their culture,their Nation characteristics.What they did just protect them from being aggressed again.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

I am afraid you are interrogating my text from the wrong perspective. I am making fun of the attempts to drum up support for an insufficiently popular activity by appealing to xenophobia, not trying to drum up support for an insufficiently popular activity by appealing to xenophobia.

[neowolf2.livejournal.com]

I worry a whole lot more about law-ignoring presidents who command the largest military on the planet.

[sean o'hara (from livejournal.com)]

The last time America was forced to participate in a space race, Hickman said, America managed "a come from behind win" in large part because the U.S. had the advantage of a much larger and more efficient economy than the Soviet Union.

Yes, of course America won the space race because it's the better country. It's not like the Soviet space program was built around one brilliant engineer whose death severely crippled the project. Or that the N1 project was a complete failure that set the Soviets back by years. Or that Khrushchev was more interested in using the program to score PR victories by claiming the Soviets had done something first despite it not having much practical value, such as putting two ships in orbit at the same time.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The funny thing is that the Soviet Moon program seems to have been the one with more internal competition between rival teams, whereas the US program, once it really got in gear, retained a lot of focus by deciding early on (possibly suboptimal) approaches by top-down diktat. Clearly the American success in landing astronauts on the Moon demonstrates the superior efficiency of a socialist command economy.

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

Which as I recall was one of the points made in 1991's Fellow Traveler; the Soviet Union's ability to ignore the profit motive made it superior to the US and fated to win. IN SPACE!

[james-nicoll.livejournal.com]

SF: the genre whose authors, given the choice between a successful democracy and a doctrinaire, brain-sporking autocracy, will go for brain-sporking autocracy...

[tandw.livejournal.com]

Compare with RAH's claim, later in life, that Japan's strong profit motive made it superior to the US and fated to win. IN SPACE!

The thematic resemblance between the treatments of the space program by space puppies and tax cuts by the GWB administration is doubtless a coincidence.

Building a Black-Water Navy

[beamjockey.livejournal.com]

Leonard David is a very good reporter. Perhaps PlanSoc should really be interviewing the author of the rabble-rousing piece Leonard discusses in the middle part of his article, namely John Hickman, associate professor of government and international studies at Berry College.

If I were a regular reader of Foreign Policy*, I would probably have heard of "the dominant Constructivist Theory of International Relations" and I might even be worried about whether or not it was wrong. (It doesn't seem to have much to do with constructing spaceships.)

Here's Hickman, writing "China Is Winning the Space Race" in Foreign Policy** (warning: behind begwall):

But there is much more to be gained from a Moon base than satisfying honor. Remember that manned space missions are an escape from a perceived geopolitical encirclement, comparable to that felt by German political and military elites in the late 19th century. Berlin's solution was to build a blue-water navy and colonize parts of Africa. Establishing a Moon base would not only represent an escape from perceived terrestrial encirclement, but also be the effective occupation necessary to assert territorial sovereignty in international law. Granted, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty expressly prohibits extraterrestrial annexations. However, if China emerges as the leading spacefaring power, it will have the opportunity and motive to rewrite the international legal regime for space. In its territorial disputes back on Earth, Beijing insists on its own interpretation of the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea. What would prevent it from being even more assertive if it becomes the only spacefaring power with boots on the regolith?

Say, maybe Foreign Policy is more fun to read than I'd thought.




* Or, needless to say, a student of government and international studies at Berry College.

** Not as good a title as that of Leonard David's article, "Is China's Space Program Shaping a Celestial Empire?"

Re: Building a Black-Water Navy

[timgueguen.livejournal.com]

So, China claims the Moon, then proceeds to...spend money on a moonbase that will be abandoned when there's a budget crunch, After all it has no military use(barring the need to build the Chinese equivalent of SHADO) and there doesn't seem to be anything on the Moon that current or near future tech would allow anyone to make money on.

I notice nobody's quoting any actual numbers

[(Anonymous)]

here are some

China's National Space Administration budget: $1.3 billion
NASA's budget: $17.8 billion

now, some of China's space budget is really shouldered by the military. on the other hand, so is a fair chunk of the US space budget. (That LADEE probe going to the Moon next week, for instance, is riding an Air Force rocket.)

PPP suggests we should roughly double that -- Chinese engineers and astronauts are paid less, so China gets more bank for the buck. So, $2.6 billion. NASA is still outspending China 6 to 1.

let's note that China conspicuously lacks a manned space station, rovers on Mars, orbiters around Mercury and Saturn, a dozen different sorts of space telescope, half a dozen different sorts of Earth-monitoring satellite, or missions en route to Pluto, Jupiter or Ceres. in fact, so far China has shown zero capacity to send anything beyond Earth orbit.

that said, if the upcoming Chinese unmanned moon landing -- currently scheduled for December -- gives a nudge to space spending in the US, sure, I won't say no.


Doug M.

Re: I notice nobody's quoting any actual numbers

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, they have Tiangong 1, which maybe counts as half a manned space station.

Re: I notice nobody's quoting any actual numbers

[gohover.livejournal.com]

Hi Doug,

I agree with your overall conclusion, but I disagree with your reasoning. In short, I'm quite persuaded by the New Space folks who argue we could be accomplishing a lot more while spending a lot less.

Sticking to the facts: it is incorrect to say that China "has shown zero capacity to send anything beyond Earth orbit."

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chang'e_2

"After completing its primary objective, the probe left lunar orbit for the Earth–Sun L2 Lagrangian point, to test the Chinese tracking and control network, making the China National Space Administration the third space agency after NASA and ESA to have visited this point. It entered orbit around L2 on 25 August 2011, and began transmitting data from its new position in September 2011. In April 2012, Chang'e 2 departed L2 to begin an extended mission to the asteroid 4179 Toutatis, which it successfully flew by in December 2012. This success made China the fourth spacefaring entity to directly explore asteroids, after the United States, the European Union and Japan. As of 2013, Chang'e 2 is conducting a long-term mission to verify China's deep-space tracking and control systems."

Note that the encounter with Toutatis went very well! See http://www.planetary.org/blogs/emily-lakdawalla/2012/12141551-change-2-imaging-of-toutatis.html

Maybe more later, time permitting. It took quite a few contortions to post this due to my 8 month old future astronaut of a daughter on my lap really wanting to be upside down, as James understands!

You're right about Chang'e and Toutatis

[(Anonymous)]

when I posted that, I was thinking, no Mars orbiter, nothing to Venus, nothing heliocentric... yet I still have the feeling I'm missing something...

So, one asteroid flyby -- fair enough.


Doug M.

as to NuSpace

[(Anonymous)]

I think we have to call that one "not proven", at least for the moment -- especially if you include all the money that's been thrown at private-sector space ventures that didn't pan out.

but anyway, if you want to count NuSpace, I won't object; since China has no private space enterprise yet, that just makes the imbalance even more lopsided.


Doug M.

Re: as to NuSpace

[gohover.livejournal.com]

The argument goes something like this: NASA missions are designed to be expensive, to spend as much money in as many different congressional districts as possible. Google "Senate Launch System" to see how things are currently going horrifyingly wrong with NASA's crewed plans. (Ignore, of course, all anti-Obama nonsense you'll no doubt encounter. If you can't ignore it, we can into why people who are racist and libertarian might be worth listening to every once in awhile, but I'd rather not! ) Private Space (particularly SpaceX) shows how wonderful things might be done much more cheaply. I don't know how the Chinese government allocates spending to please different power centers, but presumably they could avoid the anti-productive spending patterns that NASA missions have, and thus, like private space companies, could do more wonderful things with less money.

Re: as to NuSpace

[gohover.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify: I think NASA's problems have nothing to do with Obama or his predecessors, other than perhaps their understandable lack of focus on NASA. I'm only saying "ignore the racists" because there is no pro-Obama or anti-Obama argument which is even relevant.

Re: as to NuSpace

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I think that in this context, the one criticism I'd make specifically of Obama is that he particularly doesn't care that much about the uncrewed planetary program; the White House budgets usually slash it brutally and then Congress maybe puts some of that back in.

Of course this is all a small part of the ritualized drama that is the budget process. And it's not as if any administration in recent history has made robotic planetary exploration a major priority; they'd usually like to propose some grandiose crewed space exploration project, whether or not it can actually be funded.