Our own Fault (verson 2)
Dear All,
The previous draft got deleted by a mistype. I will try to do it justice and write it again. A US senator recently said that the US is losing the space race to China. Many people were shocked by this idea. First they did not know that a new space race was on. I doubt it has made a lot of news back home on TV and such, so unless they read the news or are interested in space they would never notice. Second the thought that the US could be losing came as a huge shock. How could we possibly be losing to China? This is a country that just recently got into space. We have been going into space for almost 50 years. We have a small order of magnitude problem here.
This is one of those times where numbers are not actually in our favor. The US space effort was built mainly for the Moon missions. Since that time the infrastructure has not really been updated. So yeah we have really tall buildings and great machines, but they were top of the line almost half a century ago. China just built their entire effort from scratch. So their entire structure is new. It is top of the line. So they can build things faster and better once they learn how. This knowledge is actually fairly easy to get. Mainly because most of the knowledge they need is present in the minds of many scientists and books around the world. So it is really only a matter of time.
On the flipside this could be good for the US space effort. Money is the main problem facing the US space effort. The scientists are here. The knowledge is here. The desire is here at least on the ground from the people involved. The main reason the money is not here is because the desire is not present in DC. The reason the desire is not in DC is because the politicians do not believe that the space agency and it's supporters will not provide enough help to them in elections. Mainly because space is not receiving a lot of news right now.
If China gets to the moon first trust me space will be a much higher priority. China is not a signatory of the Outer Space Treaty. This means China can legally place weapons in space. It can also own territory. All signatories of the treaty make space an international territory. It is similar to the Antarctic as I understand it. It would not take a large engineering effort to make any settlement on the moon into something that could threaten earth. The moon has 1/8 the gravity of Earth. So it would be much easier to lunch a big rock/missile down at Earth. And once it got ot Earth, well distance and speed would mean a lot more destructive force on the planet.
The previous draft got deleted by a mistype. I will try to do it justice and write it again. A US senator recently said that the US is losing the space race to China. Many people were shocked by this idea. First they did not know that a new space race was on. I doubt it has made a lot of news back home on TV and such, so unless they read the news or are interested in space they would never notice. Second the thought that the US could be losing came as a huge shock. How could we possibly be losing to China? This is a country that just recently got into space. We have been going into space for almost 50 years. We have a small order of magnitude problem here.
This is one of those times where numbers are not actually in our favor. The US space effort was built mainly for the Moon missions. Since that time the infrastructure has not really been updated. So yeah we have really tall buildings and great machines, but they were top of the line almost half a century ago. China just built their entire effort from scratch. So their entire structure is new. It is top of the line. So they can build things faster and better once they learn how. This knowledge is actually fairly easy to get. Mainly because most of the knowledge they need is present in the minds of many scientists and books around the world. So it is really only a matter of time.
On the flipside this could be good for the US space effort. Money is the main problem facing the US space effort. The scientists are here. The knowledge is here. The desire is here at least on the ground from the people involved. The main reason the money is not here is because the desire is not present in DC. The reason the desire is not in DC is because the politicians do not believe that the space agency and it's supporters will not provide enough help to them in elections. Mainly because space is not receiving a lot of news right now.
If China gets to the moon first trust me space will be a much higher priority. China is not a signatory of the Outer Space Treaty. This means China can legally place weapons in space. It can also own territory. All signatories of the treaty make space an international territory. It is similar to the Antarctic as I understand it. It would not take a large engineering effort to make any settlement on the moon into something that could threaten earth. The moon has 1/8 the gravity of Earth. So it would be much easier to lunch a big rock/missile down at Earth. And once it got ot Earth, well distance and speed would mean a lot more destructive force on the planet.