While browsing the excellent HaoHao Report I was drawn to a story by Ian Sample of UK’s The Guardian. The USA’s retreat from space exploration last week, Ian writes, marks a new era in China and India led space exploration.
China has lifted astronauts into orbit and sent its first robotic missions to the moon. India found water on the surface with its first lunar mission last year, and plans to launch astronauts into Earth orbit in 2016. Japan, too, has sent a satellite to the moon, returning extraordinary HDTV video of the surface.
With the US space agency out of the running, the leading contender for a return to the moon is China. In 2004, government officials announced an unmanned lunar exploration programme that would put satellites in lunar orbit, touch down on the surface and finally bring home up to two kilograms of rock samples before 2020.
Sample goes on to point out how a mission to the moon in 2016 would be a different beast from a mission in 1960.
A crewed mission to the moon in the 21st century will be a different beast from the Apollo programme. The blurred images would be replaced by colour HDTV footage. The communications would be clear and frequent. From a permanent base, astronauts would truly explore the moon instead of only scratching the surface. The venture could be commercial and scientific in ways that were not possible 40 years ago.
Ken Pounds, professor of science at Leicester University is also cited several times waxing poetic about what this means politically for the United States.
Pounds said: “The Americans are the only ones who can say ‘we’ve been there, done that,’ but the point is they are not there now.
“The moon is very visible and any proposition by another country to set up a permanent presence there would be unacceptable to the Americans.”
Pounds basically argues that concerns over a China-led space race would become a sustained political issue. I disagree. I could fathom it being a story for a few weeks leading up to the launch maybe, but I doubt attention spans in 2020, focused as they are on more pressing concerns (like the, by that point, out of control health spending) will be long enough to put up with a story that’s any longer than that. It’s more believable that the landing would mark a cultural shift: it could become a way that China definitively brands itself as the country of the moment. The Olympics didn’t quite do that; they were more a lead in chapter. The article gets into this a little bit with pictures from a future mission trumping anything that Apollo brought back, but doesn’t go far enough. (disclaimer: this is all assuming that the mission is not pre-empted by a giant real estate bubble burst in China).
The article also mentions but fails to expound on what I believe to be the most interesting point. With NASA officially out of the picture in the foreseeable (due to mismanagement, financial and program wise, they were unofficially out of the picture long before Obama pulled the plug) countries like China and India are going to reap the benefits of the ongoing technological tidal wave. If they go to the moon in 2020, there is a good chance that building technological momentum could take them even farther, much sooner than we think.
When the Vulcans arrive, they might very well be speaking Chinese of Hindi.
China Healthcare Blog
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Given the paucity of historical knowledge on the part of the average carbo-scarfing, game console banging, laptop-slinging, Red Bull (or worse!) guzzling Gen Y'er set, I suspect that when the Chinese make their eventual 2020 lunar landing debut that their iteration of the monumental human endeavor will become the de facto "lunar landing," supplanting the original US push towards our lone satellite. Given how WWII embodied the worst of man's atrocities against man, previous gory slugfests (WWI, obviously) like the Boer War or even, say, fights between the Germans and the French from the late 19th-century, were condemned to history's dustbin in just a few short decades, there's no telling what the Chinese plan to do to actively erase mankind's recollection of things in which we could previously find solace.
The alarming part of what I just wrote is this: given that the Chinese are astute studies of the Western historical record, they know this intimately and are just patiently biding their time, like cheetahs set to pounce in the bullrushes (wait a moment, do cheetahs a) pounce, and b) find themselves ever near a marsh?)
Do I say Heaven help us now or leave that for when the event happens?
You know, that’s a great point I missed. THE Lunar landing would probably become the Chinese touchdown. This is perhaps the strongest argument for why the landing would mark China’s ascent as one of the world’s leading cultural trend setters. New achievements take the place of older history.
I just finished Rogert Crowley’s Empires of the Sea and I was amazed again and again by just how important the Ottoman empire was to the politics of Europe. For a long time, they were THE boogeymen of Europe. These guys murdered, skinned alive, abducted, and enslaved countless numbers of people in Europe over a period of 200+ years. Their dominance eventually led the greatest Alliance of European powers (Spain, Venice, and the Vatican) ever seen. Growing up, however, the only boogeymen that we were warned about in school were of the German variety, and THE Alliance people talked of was headlined by gun wielding GIs. Even though both the Nazi and the Ottoman menace defined the politics of Europe and led to equally momentous alliances, only one set of these occurrences matters – the newer one.