Engineers unveil China moon rover – News.BBC.co.uk: The Chinese are displaying a prototype of their Lunar rover. Oooh, so cool and shiny ;)
The 1.5m (5ft) high, 200kg (440lbs) rover should transmit video in real time, dig into and analyse soil, and produce 3D images of the lunar surface.
China is working on a three-stage plan for exploration of the Earth’s Moon, which includes sending a lunar orbiter called Chang’e-1 some time this year.
This will be followed by a soft landing in 2012 and the return of lunar samples in another five years.
The US has outlined its vision for the exploration of the Moon, which will involve returning humans to the lunar surface by 2020.
Any competition for the anemic U.S. space program is a good thing. Especially China – I still think it will ultimately be the Chinese who finally get humans off this rock and out into space.
… rover should transmit video in real time …
Wow! Looks like those smart Chinese have figured out how to get around those pesky speed of light transmission delays !! Must be that shiny foil coating… 🙂
NASA should be busy creating cheap and safe ways to launch satellites, get people into space, and replace the Concorde.
Why doesn’t China develop a super\hyper sonic passenger plane? That is what the world needs!
#3 – The “bigger, faster, cheaper” was a bad policy that has often been blamed for the Space Shuttle Columbia’s tragic end. I don’t think we’ll be down that road again anytime soon.
Looks like a copy of the successful Mars rover – stick with a tried & true design.
#3, no, the world needs a clean energy source.
I still think nuclear is the best way to go.
With companies like Virgin Galactic, they could load radioactive waste into another booster in LEO and send that off in a 500yr collision course with the Sun.
Or, if cheaper, what that Israeli did, with plasma + gasification, of radioactive waste.
The only REAL reason to gather info from the Moon, is to investigate H3 deposits and possible extraction.
We need a major energy breakthrough that will make even the poorest nation have unlimited wattage, and pollution free travel, and travel between the planets.
Hydrogen-3 could be the key. It’s easy to send down from the Moon, into LEO, with a simple catapult. Heck, the Moon doesn’t even rotate on it’s axis…
I’m sure existing nuclear power plants can be adapted for H3.
Anybody can build a mylar-covered wagon with brushed aluminum wheels and drive it around in the cat’s litter box. Getting such devices to their intended destinations seem to be the hard part.
In a way US citizens are paying, since we pay the Chinese to manufacture damn near everything. Americans wanted low prices on crap, welcome to that reality.
“Hydrogen-3 could be the key. It’s easy to send down from the Moon, into LEO, with a simple catapult. Heck, the Moon doesn’t even rotate on it’s axis…”
It would be just as easy to throw rocks… as per a Robert A. Heinlein science fiction novel.
But in two hours it will need to be refueled again.
#8, The Moon is a harsh mistress
(never understood the Cat walks through walls reference…)
Heinlein was too far off, by the time we start building structures on the Moon, AMD & Intel will have at least 32 cores on a single chip. Imagine all that processing power, inter-linked with 802.11q, with thousands of “nodes”.
However, the maglev catapult, in it’s humble beginnings, will be tiny. The Chinese should build one at the same time they send their rover. Just shooting 1CM capsules of, say, 2-3 grams, wouldn’t need that much energy to break Moon orbit. Then something in Moon orbit to suck these “pellets” and redirect to Earth.
Even if they take a year to travel to Earth (to minimize risk), once the chain is going, it’s the gift that keeps giving.
So, the Moon Vacuum Cleaner, creates tiny black pellets, defecting into the 1km long solar powered maglev tube, to the Moon Orbiter Sucker-Spitter, to Earth LEO.
// Huge SF fan…
// Maglev could be a very long tube that’s inflated with compressed CO2
// Cold conditions on Moon helps for the cheap low-cold superconductors
5, Mark, the moon does actually rotate on its axis — about once per month. Its rotation is tidally locked to the earth, so that its ‘day’ is the same as its ‘year’:
Lunar Sidereal Period: 27.3 days
Lunar Synodic Period: 29.5 days
8, Fred, Heinlein was a great author. Now all we need is the space elevator from Clarke’s ‘Fountains of Paradise’.
5. You are dead on. Gee the Chinese have caught up with us so quickly. I think not. What did we give them in that big 8 billion trade deficit besides cash? I’m telling you folks need to learn Chinese instead of Spanish for the long term.
11, Some of us are working on that space elevator thiing.
We only need Dvorak to write about it – one of those famous ‘it will never happen columns’ – to bring on the magic juju and make it so.
Brian Dunbar
LiftPort
Now that they’re going, can we cancel our own plans? That would save us billions.
10 Mark and 11 BubbaRay,
Thank you for ‘The Moon is a Harsh Mistress’ reference and also I think Clarke’s space elevator would also a great project, once we get done spending all our cash on ‘other things’.
You know, I can grok (I mean, I can picture) rocks being thrown from the moon to the earth but as cool as it is, I just can’t imagine standing at the bottom of that space elevator, looking up.
I sometimes think Heinlein appreciated the fact he wasn’t excellent at portraying male/female relationships but he made stabs at it, like ‘The Cat Who Walks Through Walls’. He stabbed at it but he missed (sorry, Robert A.).
Comment by Fred Flint — 4/4/2007 @ 6:09 am
[off topic and will,unfortunately, never be read]
Fred , I miss Asimov and Heinlein. And Clarke is retired. No one yet can replace them. What horizons they crossed!! The 3 Laws of Robotics, the synchronous comm satellites, etc. Dreams for us all. Visionaries each.
According to Ouyang, the lunar-rover should be able to advance, reverse, swerve, climb, fetch things, collect samples and right itself (turn over after toppling). In addition to these basic functions, it should also have elementary artificial intelligence such as identifying objects, as well as climbing and steering clear of barriers.
The Moon does rotate. It does it once for every time around the Earth. If it didn’t there wouldn’t be a far side.