China's First Moon Rover Lands

CommanderFrank

CommanderFrank

Cat Can't Scratch It
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For the first time in nearly 40 years, there is alien movement on the moon: aliens being those pesky human neighbors who live just a few blocks away on Earth. China has successfully joined the United States and Russia in the the exclusive Moon Club of nations that have soft landed on the lunar surface. Next step for China will be to put a man on the Moon, followed closely by a Foxconn factory. :D
 
I'm happy to see other countries actively pursuing space travel since the US has all but dropped it from their priority list.

That said, with the way the world economy is going, IMO, we will more likely see BladeRunner/Aliens-esque megacorps funding space travel over government 100 years from now.
 
I don't like the idea of China looking for "natural resources" on the Moon. Otherwise, any country gaining space travel capability will help us all. When it comes to deep space exploration, like Mars and beyond, I think all off the space leaders on Earth will need to come together and share expenses, responsibilities, and the rewards in order to accomplish travel of that scale.
 
lilbabycat said:
I'm happy to see other countries actively pursuing space travel since the US has all but dropped it from their priority list.

That said, with the way the world economy is going, IMO, we will more likely see BladeRunner/Aliens-esque megacorps funding space travel over government 100 years from now.
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at the rate corporations consolidate the market and create legislation today, we'll have a dystopian post-democratic world ruled by megacorps and corrupt bureaucrats in two or so decades. we're pretty much only a few steps away and most of that already exists behind the scenes. orwell is ROFLing in his grave.
 
lilbabycat said:
I'm happy to see other countries actively pursuing space travel since the US has all but dropped it from their priority list.

That said, with the way the world economy is going, IMO, we will more likely see BladeRunner/Aliens-esque megacorps funding space travel over government 100 years from now.
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Doubt we'll make it. I really hate to see the world in 100 years, bad enough we're hitting 9-10est billion in population 2050 and we were 1 billion around the 1800s.
It's a total mind fuck that we're repeating what the Mayans did to themselves, but we don't have any other place to go.
 
it's almost 2014 -- nobody in china thought to outfit the rover with an HD camera?

Good for the chinese -- 40 years later, better late than never huh?
 
Have them send back a couple pics of our old shit still left there so we can quell that 'we never landed on the moon' bullshit.
 
Abditive said:
What other resources are (possibly) on the moon?
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The same sort of things you would find on earth really -- the moon is made up of the same basic things the earth is as the prevailing theory of it's formation is that a mars sized body collided with proto earth and the left over crap turned into

surface has lots of silica, lime, aluminum....

would be hilarious if they went there looking for some crazy ass amount of gold or something :-p
 
collegeboy69us said:
it's almost 2014 -- nobody in china thought to outfit the rover with an HD camera?

Good for the chinese -- 40 years later, better late than never huh?
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Well if US doesn't pick up the pace in its space exploration program, someday China may step into territories that are still "never" for the US, such as Mars landing.

Once you stop, it becomes difficult to start again. NASA is still no where near sending men back to the moon although we've done that many times decades ago, and IMO this is because we completely stop sending men beyond Earth's orbit. Had we not stopped, we may have already landed on Mars today.
 
QHalo said:
Have them send back a couple pics of our old shit still left there so we can quell that 'we never landed on the moon' bullshit.
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Why hasn't anyone thought of this sooner? Why hasn't NASA DONE THIS??????? THEY HAVE ROVERS ON MARS......
 
Falkentyne said:
Why hasn't anyone thought of this sooner? Why hasn't NASA DONE THIS??????? THEY HAVE ROVERS ON MARS......
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NASA have done this. With the LRO probe in the last few years. Plenty of photographs of all the landing sites.

Random news story here, with photos of the US flags still in the ground.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/30/lro_spots_apollo_flags_still_flying/

Plenty of other footage around. More on NASA's own site of course:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html


But photos don't mean anything to the idiot conspiracy nuts. Even without photos there is plenty of evidence of the landings. The deniers are just sheep who follow their leaders with their fingers in their ears and their "I've read it on the Internet so it must be true" beliefs. The good thing about this is you know that if some idiot is trying to convince you that man has never landed on the Moon, then you know that this person is certifiable and you can't trust anything else they say :)
 
Todd Hoffman and the Hoffman crew, after failing to find diamonds in Giana have teamed up with the Chinese to find GOLD!!! on the Moon. Parker Schnabbel is heading west, to the Asteroid belt in search of the mutha-load. :eek::rolleyes::p
 
lilbabycat said:
I'm happy to see other countries actively pursuing space travel since the US has all but dropped it from their priority list.

That said, with the way the world economy is going, IMO, we will more likely see BladeRunner/Aliens-esque megacorps funding space travel over government 100 years from now.
Click to expand...

The new Space Launch System is under budget and ahead of schedule for its first flight around the Moon in 2017. SLS can be used for whatever manned program we may want to persue in the near-future: Skylab 2 in lunar orbit, lunar surface missions, asteroid missions, and/or missions to Mars' moons.

The US didn't abandon spaceflight. Congress did choose not to shift additional funding to NASA for rocket development when the Shuttle was nearing end-of-life. A successor couldn't be developed until the Shuttle program wound down and we ended up with a gap like the period between Apollo and the Shuttle program.
 
I wonder if this is anything like my first successful Mun landing in Kerbal Space Program: My first official landing was a success, but there were many craft (and Kerbals) turned into paste on the face of the moon of which my government is denying any existence.
 
Its an impressive achievement but people here are knocking America down. NASA landed a rover on Mars recently, deploying it by atmosphere carrier. I would say that shows that America is still pretty far ahead in robotic space exploration. Meanwhile the private sector is doing some amazing things, too.

As for poster #5: why else would anyone colonize space? There has to be economic incentives like mining for precious resources or applied science to offset the cost. Otherwise its just a fancier version of mal-investment/misallocation of capital like the housing bubble.
 
bigdogchris said:
I don't like the idea of China looking for "natural resources" on the Moon. Otherwise, any country gaining space travel capability will help us all. When it comes to deep space exploration, like Mars and beyond, I think all off the space leaders on Earth will need to come together and share expenses, responsibilities, and the rewards in order to accomplish travel of that scale.
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I disagree.

Every species on Earth has advanced from single cell organisms to what they are today thanks to competition.

When competition is fiercest, such as life and death total warfare scenarios, is when scientific progress is at its most magnificent.

If we want to explore space, there needs to be a commercial purpose found and competition between nations for more than just national prestige. Everyone holding hands and working together results in no one pushing any envelopes and massive stagnation. And when those moon and orbital resources become high in demand and we have space warfare, that's when we'll really see massive advances!
 
collegeboy69us said:
it's almost 2014 -- nobody in china thought to outfit the rover with an HD camera?
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Since it doesn't seem to have been answered...

The device probably *does* have an HD camera on it.

However, you know how when you are using cell phones in some mountains, elevator, distant rural area, etc? Data crawls to a stop, even pulling up plain text web pages is a pain in the arse?

Now, imagine that A THOUSAND TIMES SLOWER. Signal from Earth -> Moon is relatively poor, owing to the staggering distance. The moon is 1.279 light-seconds from Earth! (IE., assuming your network was laser-based, measuring pure transmitter-to-transmitter, your ping would START at 1279ms as the lowest-possible-ideal. It'll usually be much, much higher that that. And that's just latency!)

So what you usually find for probes of this nature is that they will take high-res shots, and start transmitting them...but it may take a day or so to get the set of high-res images back. Which sucks. So they do that, but also send highly-compressed, lower-res images back first - as they are much lighter on bandwidth, and for time-sensitive things, the only realistic option.

Space is really big, yo!
 
dderidex said:
Since it doesn't seem to have been answered...

The device probably *does* have an HD camera on it.

However, you know how when you are using cell phones in some mountains, elevator, distant rural area, etc? Data crawls to a stop, even pulling up plain text web pages is a pain in the arse?

Now, imagine that A THOUSAND TIMES SLOWER. Signal from Earth -> Moon is relatively poor, owing to the staggering distance. The moon is 1.279 light-seconds from Earth! (IE., assuming your network was laser-based, measuring pure transmitter-to-transmitter, your ping would START at 1279ms as the lowest-possible-ideal. It'll usually be much, much higher that that. And that's just latency!)

So what you usually find for probes of this nature is that they will take high-res shots, and start transmitting them...but it may take a day or so to get the set of high-res images back. Which sucks. So they do that, but also send highly-compressed, lower-res images back first - as they are much lighter on bandwidth, and for time-sensitive things, the only realistic option.

Space is really big, yo!
Click to expand...

Are they using a laser? I wouldn't think Latency would be a big deal. Sure it takes a second to get there, but the transfer rate would be pretty fast. A recent test put the max bandwidth for laser communications at around 600 Mbs (give or take). The test was done from earth orbit, but I'm sure they intend to use this tech for communications from the moon, mars and perhaps beyond.

Nevertheless, your pose was illuminating and got me to do a brief look up on the laser bandwidth (and I doubt the Chinese are using that tech).
 
lilbabycat said:
I'm happy to see other countries actively pursuing space travel since the US has all but dropped it from their priority list.
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For a country that has dropped space travel as a priority, we sure do get a lot of missions launched, seriously. It's been less than a month since MAVEN launched. MAVEN, if you don't know, is another mission to Mars.
 
Decibel said:
For a country that has dropped space travel as a priority, we sure do get a lot of missions launched, seriously. It's been less than a month since MAVEN launched. MAVEN, if you don't know, is another mission to Mars.
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Considering every other technological advance since the 70's, the space program hasn't done much. Mars missions in the grand scheme have been just a longer trip of the same thing, with little work done to expand lunar exploration. There should have been a base on the moon by now. An order of magnitude larger than ISS, equal to an Antarctic Base setup. More research into battery, fuel, lightweight metals, etc tech (which many companies have pursued but with government incentive would do so even more readily). You know the speech, space research benefits in hundreds of tertiary discoveries and technologies, blah blah blah.

But its true. The world is going to fill up quicker than we have a means of expanding from its borders.
 
Amazon flying in their deliveries by drone? HA! The Chinese will just send you the next iDevice by re-entry straight to a crater in your backyard!
 
Hornet said:
Well if US doesn't pick up the pace in its space exploration program, someday China may step into territories that are still "never" for the US, such as Mars landing.

Once you stop, it becomes difficult to start again. NASA is still no where near sending men back to the moon although we've done that many times decades ago, and IMO this is because we completely stop sending men beyond Earth's orbit. Had we not stopped, we may have already landed on Mars today.
Click to expand...

There's a reason we stopped going to the Moon. After we did it once or twice it rapidly became a gigantic waste of money that really didn't "accomplish" much. I fail to understand why people want to waste even more money on manned work, when probes do far more science per dollar.

You get to Mars and then what? There's a bunch of red soil there and not much else. Then what? Your space-ego handjob having been done, why keep blowing money on it? No one thinks about this.
 
this moon landing gives China a huge boost in terms of domestic stability and international diplomatic power. It's basically an announcement of power to the rest of the world.
 
triarii3 said:
this moon landing gives China a huge boost in terms of domestic stability and international diplomatic power. It's basically an announcement of power to the rest of the world.
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And who lives in a cave enough to think China has a shit ton of power economically and politically...moon landing or no?
 
it's really cool that both the lander and rover are equipped with their own instruments for observing the moon. since they're working independently, they should be able to photograph each other. the mission overall is "kind of a big deal" because this marks the 3rd country to place some entity on the surface of the moon. it's the first in ~4 decades.
 
Skripka said:
There's a reason we stopped going to the Moon. After we did it once or twice it rapidly became a gigantic waste of money that really didn't "accomplish" much. I fail to understand why people want to waste even more money on manned work, when probes do far more science per dollar.

You get to Mars and then what? There's a bunch of red soil there and not much else. Then what? Your space-ego handjob having been done, why keep blowing money on it? No one thinks about this.
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I hope you're kidding. The number of synthetics, electronics, unique materials, etc that were repurposed after being created to solve space-travel-related problems is countless.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Tell me that anything on that list isn't worth the price we paid for the program.
 
collegeboy69us said:
it's almost 2014 -- nobody in china thought to outfit the rover with an HD camera?
Click to expand...

Hopefully it does have another better HD camera on it somewhere, even the freaking mars science laboratory only has a woeful 2 megapixels! It seems like this is something that is constantly overlooked... granted these projects usually start 5-7 years before they actually get sent out, but really.... can you imagine what a decent DSLR snap of mars would look like? It would be amazing! instead they have to take about 20 shots and stitch them together to get anything sort of high detail. I shouldn't criticize so much because I am totally incapable of sending something to mars, and what they have achieved is absolutely incredible already.
 
If we had a space program still, and a sense of humor.... we'd send an Astronaut up tot he moon, to walk over to the Chinese rover with a Chinese restaurant menu and a sign saying he'd like a #5, but no pork. Now THAT would be some funny shit. :eek::rolleyes::p
 
BlueMeanie said:
NASA have done this. With the LRO probe in the last few years. Plenty of photographs of all the landing sites.

Random news story here, with photos of the US flags still in the ground.
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/07/30/lro_spots_apollo_flags_still_flying/

Plenty of other footage around. More on NASA's own site of course:
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/LRO/multimedia/lroimages/apollosites.html


But photos don't mean anything to the idiot conspiracy nuts. Even without photos there is plenty of evidence of the landings. The deniers are just sheep who follow their leaders with their fingers in their ears and their "I've read it on the Internet so it must be true" beliefs. The good thing about this is you know that if some idiot is trying to convince you that man has never landed on the Moon, then you know that this person is certifiable and you can't trust anything else they say :)
Click to expand...

You mean like the same nuts that think everything we say and do is being watched and recorded?
Oh wait..
 
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