We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.

Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]

They’re here…

China has successfully launched Taikonaut Yang Liwei into low Earth orbit (LEO).

Buzz Aldrin thinks the Chinese could launch a circumlunar flight in a few years using a modified Shenzhou.

I’ve been watching the slow moving Chinese program for a very long time. They are the tortoise to the American hare. They are not intent on spending the next four decades in LEO with the other two go-nowhere space-faring governments.

We must remember the hardware that put Buzz Aldrin on the moon is forty year old technology. The ‘computer’ in Apollo capsules couldn’t even match the calculation abilities of a cheap 21st century wristwatch. The lunar orbit rendezvous which created the need for Von Braun’s giant Saturn V was not the best way to go to the moon even then. It was merely the quickest, most brute force method. Future lunar visits, whether by governments or tourist flights, will use Earth orbit rendezvous – something which can be done with existing launch vehicles.

All else being equal, the next footprint on the moon will be Chinese. With a bit of good luck they may arrive before 2020. That would be just in time to see the last traces of the American footprints fading into the lunar soil after half a century of wild lunar day and night temperature swings.

Of course all else is not equal. The dawn of commercial space tourism in entrepreneur built spaceships is not far off.

I’d love to be among the lunar tourists waiting to congratulate the Chinese on their arrival.

22 comments to They’re here…

  • Marcus Lindroos

    To me, Shenzhou 5 is mostly an indication of parity among the space-faring nations rather than a sign the Red Chinese are about to colonize the Moon or something. The main change since Apollo 11 has been that more and more nations/organizations have reached the same level as the Americans and Soviets. Today, five groups (the U.S., EU, Japan, China and Russia) possess broadly similar space transportation capabilities.

    I’d be willing to bet that the next men on the Moon will be the usual suspects from NASA/ESA/RAKA/NAXA… Note that the Americans and Europeans are also making manned space exploration plans as work on the International Space Station finally is about to end. E.g. ESA’s Aurora program calls for a “flagship” mission by 2013-15 to land astronauts and test in-situ resource utilization technologies on the Moon while NASA has its NeXT program. The Japanese also were producing fancy viewgraphs of lunar outposts and Martian colonies in the late 1980s and early 90s before their economy imploded.

    MARCU$

  • One thing that is interesting is that if you send computer hardware into space, it *can’t* be the more modern chipsets as they are more delicate– and the conditions in space can make them malfunction more easily. IIRC, the chipsets in the shuttles have been upgraded to 286 chips– and they aren’t getting any better, as that means smaller, and it takes less to have a jump between pathways.

  • Dave O'Neill

    I really really wished I believed that there is going to be a surge in private space activity and that tourism will really be about to take off.

    I’m still very unconvinced by the business at the moment.

    Europe could have been doing this 15 years ago with a capsule on Ariane 4 if people had gone that way. It would have made more sense than Hermes.

  • I also remain skeptical about the potential for private enterprise in space. It seems to me that there needs to be a revolution in the materials business before it can become viable.

    Of course, with nanotechnology promising so much, that day might not be so very far off, but I think we have to await the nanotech revolution first.

  • Dave O'Neill

    Of course, with nanotechnology promising so much, that day might not be so very far off, but I think we have to await the nanotech revolution first.

    Yup, pretty much my thoughts on it exactly.

    Of course, the problem with the nanotech revolution is that could have a pretty profound effect on everything that its hard to predict the outcome of it.

  • Scott

    Well, hopefully the successful winning of the X-prize or even a semi-successful attempt will get the money flowing toward commercial space exploration. Right now, no one sees it at feesible. However, if say, one of Burt Rutan’s boys pops up into space on a commercial platform (and none too expensive one at that); then investors might take notice.
    It strikes me as something that needs a breakthrough moment before the deluge begins.

    Also, kudos to the Chinese; BUT how great would it be to see the first private space launches just months after their vaunted launch?
    “What? You still rely on the guvm’t? How 20th centurty!”

  • Dave O'Neill

    I’m still not convinced that an X-Prize style hop like Rutan will almost certainly manage will do much towards actual orbital flights. Space Ship One is still some way off being orbital and there’s no obvious upgrade path.

    So there might be a market for sub-orbital flights, I can’t see any of the current crop of challengers actually building something that could orbit and re-enter.

    I am happy to be very very wrong on this, but I still can’t see how its going to work from an engineering perspective. There are also lots and lots of regulatory uncertainties which could, at least, kill the US contenders – or at least shift them out of the States.

  • Marcus Lindroos

    > Space Ship One is still some way off being orbital

    To put it mildly! In fact, the air-launch mode is about the only thing that’s useful. Apart from that SS1 does not demonstrate any key capabilities. E.g. the thermal protection and propulsion systems appear to have nothing in common with those of orbital reusable launch vehicles or even the X-15.

    Still, this might be beside the point. Rutan (and the X-Prize founders) wants good P.R. and publicity. And the Wright Flyer One wasn’t that good a design either.

    MARCU$

  • Dave O'Neill

    And the Wright Flyer One wasn’t that good a design either.

    This is true, but I think that’s an analogy that can be overused 😉

    I have grave engineering concerns that for the private industry the upgrade route from any of the Sub-Orbital vehicles is highly unclear, and the route to an orbital one will be a lot harder and a lot more expensive.

  • Christopher Hlatky

    The lunar orbit rendezvous which created the need for Von Braun’s giant Saturn V was not the best way to go to the moon even then. It was merely the quickest, most brute force method.

    I have to disagree with that statement. “Direct Ascent” (one huge rocket carrying a single ship all the way to the lunar surface and back) was the most “brute-force” method available at the time. However, it would have required a monster rocket so large that NASA thought they’d have had to launch it from ocean barges. Earth-orbit rendezvous wasn’t much better, given that it needed two Saturn V rockets to work.

    Lunar-orbit rendezvous, by contrast, offered a much more elegant solution to the problem of payload weights, and could be accomplished with a single Saturn V. The danger was that rendezvous would indeed have to take place in lunar orbit, and at the time NASA was thinking about it (1961-1962) they weren’t even sure that they could perform rendezvous successfully in Earth orbit. It took a LOT of arguing among NASA managers before LOR was accepted as the way to go.

  • Jacob

    It seems the Chinese have arrived at last where the US and USSR have been 40+ years ago. So where is the big deal ? They have big plans for the moon – didn’t the US and USSr also speak about their big plans 40 years ago? Will the Chinese regime last until 2020 ? I wouldn’t bet on it.
    So what’s the big excitement about ?

  • Harry Payne

    Not quite the surprise the Americans had back in 1957, but it might stir things up a bit…

  • Ron

    “We must remember the hardware that put Buzz Aldrin on the moon is forty year old technology”

    Conspiracy theorists are still arguing that the Americans never actually set foot on the moon, but staged a number of flawed photographic sessions.

    Has anyone (preferably a country other than the US) done a sufficiently detailed overhead survey of the Moon and produced real pictures of the landing sites?

  • Dale Amon

    Ron: because it is too silly to even talk about. I know so many people who worked on Apollo, and also have met or served on a board of directors with many who have been to the moon.

    I quite enjoyed it when Buzz decked the arsehole who pushes this crap.

  • Dale Amon

    Harry: I love the material on the Minus 10 and Counting Album produced by Prometheus. I’ve actually still got a stack of their tapes in the closet left over from the ISDC I ran in Pittsburgh in 1987. Probably have a half dozen or so copies of that tape sitting there.

  • Dave

    It seems the Chinese have arrived at last where the US and USSR have been 40+ years ago. So where is the big deal ?

    Because in 10 years, the Chinese will be through the 1960’s and up to the 1970’s where the rest of us still are :-/

    Let’s face it, when the Long March 6 comes on line with the ability launch a Salyut/Mir style space station, China will be up with the rest of the world.

    The question is will they stop there?

  • Doug Collins

    A question on air launch technology for the adept among you:

    In a discussion of the Chinese launch at work yesterday, the possibility of a combined jet/rocket engine came up. We wondered why the expanding hot gases in a ramjet engine only go out the back and not the front too. If there is something in the design that forces the expansion backward only, why couldn’t an oxidizer be substituted for air at high altitudes, extending the range of an aircraft launch vehicle? It could provide a much longer and faster taxi ride for the space vehicle, then return to Earth to ferry up another. When you consider the weight of the ordinace load on a modern fighter, we obviously have the ability to carry oxidizers in a fast, high altitude jet. Is a hybrid engine feasible?

  • Dave

    Doug,

    Its a good question which has, you’re probably not surprised to hear, been asked before.

    The basic problem is when you start to work out the optimum options for a hybrid, you find a number of things. Sadly, the equations basically say that the optimum is actually 100% standard rocket to hybrid. Then when you look at more estoric engine designs (like Alan Bond’s Hotol) you find you need a bunch of really novel technologies to make it work.

    The next usual logical step is to fly to high speed in the atmosphere where you don’t need the oxidiser, but then you hit huge drag problems in the effective porridge we call an atmosphere.

    The sums I’ve done, and friends who are rocket scientists for real, basically say that rockets work best.

    Somebody from the private space ventures groups might come up with an alternative, but as things stand I am not holding my breath.

    However you look at it, to reach orbit you need to accelerate a mass to over 11,000KPH. That’s a problem.

    It would be easier if we lived on Mars. :-/

  • Dale Amon

    Absolutely. The US also spent a great deal of money on NASP before it finally got put out of its misery. This kind of craft requires truly insanely heroic engineering. The entire underside of the aircraft effectively becomes part of the SCRAMjet engine; the structural heating at such high speeds becomes so great that cooling is needed… the fuel is liquid hydrogen, so they proposed running capillary tubes through the surfaces. The idea was the H2 cooled the surfaces by absorbing the heat and by warming up before going to the engine it improved the ISP… there was of course one tiny problem with this idea. Have you ever tried to contain H2? It is a very small atom and requires virtual perfection to prevent leakage. Hard enough but solvable in a normal rocket. But… in literally miles of small tubes in a vehicle that is supposed to fly regularly, that is going to go through massive temperature swings with structural expansion far beyond that of Concorde, not to mention re-entry stresses…

    And Alan Bond’s LACE engine is even worse because you’ve also got LOX flowing through small tubes to get preheated, and a lot of other problems I hate to even think about.

    Elegant on paper, but a nightmare to build and it probably would require NASA multitudes to keep it flying 6 times a year…

    Sort of like the Space Shuttle.

  • Dale Amon

    Technical correction: In a LACE the ram air is run through a heat exchanger with the H2 which warms the H2 and causes the O2 to liquify out, so you’ve got lots and lots of H2 and O2 that you don’t want mixing in the wrong place interleaved in capillaries. Solvable, but not a good way to build a reliable, maintainable, economical, and regularly flying commercial spaceship.

  • Marcus Lindroos

    > why couldn’t an oxidizer be substituted for air at
    > high altitudes, extending the range of an aircraft
    > launch vehicle?

    As an aside, DARPA (an American defense research agency) is currently working on a proposal called RASCAL. It will feature a jet aircraft with a modified engine inlet plus liquid oxygen injection system for high altitude operation. The idea is to spray oxygen into the jet engine as the aircraft leaves the dense atmosphere

    In practice, the aircraft and propulsion system is too heavy and the engine exhaust velocity too low for RASCAL to get anywhere near orbital velocity. It will serve as a reusable first stage carrier aircraft for launching small rocket motor-equipped military satellites from ~70km altitude.

    MARCU$

  • David Mercer

    Going back to something touched upon WAY up the comments: Au contraire, there are much more advanced space-hardened microprocessors, what the hell do you think they put in satellites? They are mostly space-hardened versions of embeded CPU’s, and tend to not be Intel x86 based.

    And nanotech in space seems to me to be a bad recipie: Think chips suffer from cosmic waves? Nanotech could get it’s fatal ‘grey goo’ causing mutation from them if in orbit (at least the self-replicating nanobots fantasized about in scifi).