Tuesday night’s launch of Shenzhou 6 hasn’t had anywhere near the effect of Shenzhou 5, China’s first manned spaceflight, two years ago, but there is still some debate about the overall nature of China’s space efforts and how the US should react. On one side are those who see China’s manned space activities as cover for more nefarious military ones: an example is this Tech Central Station column by Melana Zyla Vickers, who points to such signs as increased development of satellites by China, as well as rumored development of ground-based anti-satellite lasers. Her suggestions to the US: develop a “long-range, stealthy bomber [that] would be capable of flying deep into an enemy’s territory and destroying his anti-satellite-warfare weaponry”, as well as “a program to stockpile replacement satellites [and] to launch them extra-quickly”. How the former differs from the B-2, or the latter from Operationally Responsive Space, isn’t specified.
On the other hand, there are those who instead want to work together with China. In an editorial, Florida Today argues that the US should “encourage Chinese space efforts toward mutual goals of peaceful exploration, rather than space militarization.” How to do that? Invite China to participate in the ISS program. The editorial doesn’t state, though, whether China would even be interested in the ISS, given its stated plans to develop its own, albeit much smaller, space stations in the years to come.
The way we overcame the Soviet Union was by demonstrating the power of capitalism over socialism. Funny how we seem to be doing the exact opposite with the Chinese. I wonder how that will turn out?
There’s also this:
http://www.thespacereview.com/article/473/1
Dfens: The way we overcame the Soviet Union was by demonstrating the power of capitalism over socialism. Funny how we seem to be doing the exact opposite with the Chinese. I wonder how that will turn out?
Good thing we got Republicans in charge.
— Donald
Sure, rub my nose in it. Grrr.
If the Wingo Hypothesis is correct and intact platinum bearing nickel-iron asteroid fragments are lying on the lunar surface, China has much to gain by harvesting that resource.
China has no native sources for PGMs and in 2004 imported $3 billion in platinum despite a significant slump in demand for platinum jewelry due to high prices. China’s demand for platinum will only increase with time (new cars need PGM for catalytic converters even if we ignore fuel cells) and given that the Chinese people already hold platinum jewelry in high esteem, a space program that began returning lunar PGM to the Earth (10 or 20 years from now) should prove wildly popular with the Chinese people.
These Chinese platinum panda coins already sell at 150% of bullion prices and they are almost certainly fashioned from South African platinum.
What might a Chinese panda lunar platinum coin sell for?
> The way we overcame the Soviet Union was by demonstrating the power of
> capitalism over socialism. Funny how we seem to be doing the exact opposite
> with the Chinese. I wonder how that will turn out?
The same way it did with the Soviet Union. During the Cold War, the CIA constantly overestimated the growth rate of the Soviet economy and warned that the Soviet economy would quickly overtake the West. Those predictions have now been transferred to China.
So you think China is demonstrating the superiority of socialism over capitalism — where’s the evidence? US citizens can vote with their feet. For all the griping you and Donald do about American free enterprise, you both choose to live under it. So, we must be doing something right, even in your eyes. As Ken Hamblin says, if you don’t like America, just pick a better country.
> If the Wingo Hypothesis is correct and intact platinum bearing nickel-iron
> asteroid fragments are lying on the lunar surface, China has much to\
> gain by harvesting that resource.
The mere existance of a resource means very little if you don’t have the means to economically extract it. How many expendable launch vehicles and capsules would China have to build to mine those fragments, if they exist? How many hundreds of billions of dollars would that cost? How much platinum could they buy on the world market for the same price?
The lunar surface could be covered with diamonds, but they wouldn’t do any you good as long as the cost of retrieving them is greater than what diamonds will bring on the market.
> the Chinese people already hold platinum jewelry in high esteem, a
> space program that began returning lunar PGM to the Earth (10 or 20 years
> from now) should prove wildly popular with the Chinese people.
Bill, are you under the impression that China is a democracy? The Chinese government doesn’t have to buy votes by bribing people with jewelry. They maintain power with steel armor, not platinum jewlery. Remember Tiananmen Square?
The mere existance of a resource means very little if you don’t have the means to economically extract it.
If platinum cannot be economically extracted, what can be economically extracted? Is there a better choice for making “intermediate term” money in space than PGM?
Of course, PGM mining and tourism are very far from being mutually exclusive. Visiting the Mond process plants could be part of a lunar tourism Grand Tour.
The lunar surface could be covered with diamonds, but they wouldn’t do any you good as long as the cost of retrieving them is greater than what diamonds will bring on the market.
If this proves to be true, then Greg may be making a valid point in these forums. If nothing can be extracted at a profit, why waste our tax dollars on human space exploration?
Can PGM be mined at a profit? I don’t know. I also don’t know if the Wingo Hypothesis will be proven true. But if China can ship $1 billion worth of PGM to Earth that is $1 billion less their economy needs to spend supporting a lunar presence. Even if PGM mining fails to break even =ANY= revenue that is generated can supplement governmental budgets.
Bill, are you under the impression that China is a democracy? The Chinese government doesn’t have to buy votes by bribing people with jewelry. They maintain power with steel armor, not platinum jewlery. Remember Tiananmen Square?
I don’t think I have any illusions about China. Ancient Rome wasn’t a democracy either but “bread and circuses” were a necessary expenditure to keep the populace at least somewhat content.
Chinese astronauts mining PGM would be a global PR coup for the PRC whether they made a profit or not. And, if 100 million Chinese voluntarily purchase a 1/20th ounce panda lunar platinum coin at $200 per coin for reasons of civilizational pride, that raises $20 billion dollars and avoids some of the discontents associated with forced taxation.
Using Hubble’s Advanced Camera for Surveys [of the moon in UV light], preliminary assessments suggest a newly discovered abundance of titanium and iron oxides. They may be sources of oxygen and a potential resource for human exploration.
From space.ref.
Edward. I have never “griped” about capitalism. I love it and I love most elements of my country, though I remain deeply worried about its current direction. I _have_ argued that there is more to the American success story than capitalism, and that those who ignore the other elements are at risk of destroying that success story. I stand by that arguement.
— Donald
> If platinum cannot be economically extracted, what can be economically
> extracted? Is there a better choice for making “intermediate term”
> money in space than PGM?
Nothing can be extracted economically, unless the costs of extracting it are low enough. Transportation costs do matter, no matter what Dennis Wingo says — and even Dennis now admits that mining won’t be economically feasible as long as EELVs and Constellation capsules are the only form of transportation. He’s counting on some magic technology like scramjets or laser launchers to reduce costs.
> Of course, PGM mining and tourism are very far from being mutually exclusive.
> Visiting the Mond process plants could be part of a lunar tourism Grand Tour.
Tourism depends on transportation costs, too. How many people do you think you can find to tour your processing plant if it costs hundreds of millions of dollars for one ticket?
> If this proves to be true, then Greg may be making a valid point in
> these forums. If nothing can be extracted at a profit, why waste our tax
> dollars on human space exploration?
Is that a trick question? I haven’t advocated “wasting tax dollars” on space exploration or anything else. I’ve advocating reducing the cost of space transportation so we can do things at a profit. Which will save the taxpayers money. For some unknown reason, you’re opposed to that and want to continue building ELVs regardless of economics.
> if 100 million Chinese voluntarily purchase a 1/20th ounce panda lunar
> platinum coin at $200 per coin for reasons of civilizational pride, that
> raises $20 billion dollars
No, it raises $20 billion *minus* whatever it costs to mine 5,000,000 ounces (416,000 pounds) of platinum and ship it back to Earth. Mike Griffin’s talking about $104 billion just to land four guys for a one-week stay. Then a billion dollars or more for each additional mission. Even if you assume the hyper-efficient Chinese Communists can do it for half that price, how many man-years do you think it will it take to mine 208 tons of platinum and return it to Earth?
The Chinese can’t mine the Moon with Shenzhou capsules anymore than they can mine another continent by building a jumbo jet to carry a few miners, burning the jet after one round trip, then building a new jet to replace it.
If they Chinese are foolish enough to try that, they won’t gain prestige but ridicule. The fact that the Chinese might try something foolish is no reason for us to be equally foolish.
> Edward. I have never “griped” about capitalism. I love it and
> I love most elements of my country,
I’d never guess that from all the posts about how crappy America has become compared to China.
> I remain deeply worried about its current direction.
Yeah, I got that. How did Merle Haggard put it? “Harping on the wars we fight and griping bout the way things oughta be”? If you and Dfens really think the United States ought to be more like China, you have the right to that opinion, because this isn’t China. By the same token, the rest of us are not obligated to change to please you. I like the direction we’re heading. I enjoy living in a nation that can do things like SpaceShip One. If you guys would rather live in a nation that’s stuck copying 20-year-old Soyuzes and only the government can go into space, there’s one over yonder.
The Chinese can’t mine the Moon with Shenzhou capsules anymore than they can mine another continent by building a jumbo jet to carry a few miners, burning the jet after one round trip, then building a new jet to replace it.
Couple thousand years ago, it used to be a standard practice of building rafts upstream at the river, and shipping materials from there to river deltas where bigger cities were. Rafts were dismantled at the destination. In that sense, those were expendable river vehicles and very economical for their purpose. Of course, people still needed canoes and boats to travel on the river, but that doesnt mean that rafts were somehow wrong or evil.
Obviously, rafts were not jumbo-jets. Jumbo-jet is highly complicated piece of machinery built with relatively high-cost materials and skilled labor, while rafts, although big, were wery “low-tech” even for the time ( as compared to construction of boats or ships for instance ).
What im getting at, is that ELVs are not stupid or bad per se, if you build them cheap enough with cheap construction methods they have their uses ( especially for bulk material launches for example, that do not require 100% reliability )
Chinese are actually best positioned to actually get to the point of mass-producing ELVs with cheap methods, they are the current masters of the art [of cheap mass production] after all. So it might very well turn out that they CAN mine the moon with ELVs. This still means that they have to have some methods of transporting more valuable cargo, like humans, on more reliable methods. Although with chinese population, im not sure that they consider humans much more valuable than lunar mining machinery for example …
How the former differs from the B-2, or the latter from Operationally Responsive Space, isn’t specified.
Referring back to Jeff’s original post regarding Melana Zyla Vickers’ article, I think what she was referring to was a stealth bomber capable of quickly striking into China. This would be a Mach 2 or 3 capable vehicle, like the XB-70 but stealthy. This is rumored to be on the USAF wish list, but is in competition with the fighter derived stealth bomber. The FB-22 is one of the latter candidates, and NG is rumored to be hammering the old YF-23 into a candidate. It’s not much of a contest between the two, but the USAF has screwed up on that account before.
I’m not really up on this Operationally Responsive Space thing, but I know right now it takes forever to get a satellite launched. It’s too bad we don’t have an MX missile equivalent of a Titan. NASA could possibly help that situation by making some better choices with their crew launch vehicle, but they won’t, of course. That would make it way too relevant.
Whether China wants to go to the moon (as Brownback has said) or build a space station (as Dwayne Day argues), all we have to do is to cheer them on in their silly wild goose chases. The sad thing is that China is still a poor country and it shouldn’t be tossing money into space.
Just maybe, Greg, China has learned from their mistakes and they don’t plan on missing the boat like they did during the last great exploratory period.
Per Dwayne Day’s observation of the slow rate of progress, maybe they are doing what they feel they can afford while not falling too far behind. That said, they may not need the kind of flight rate that we and the Russian’s did in the 1960s. They’re at the level of early Geminii felights after only two missions. Technology has advanced and they can learn from what others have done.
— Donald
If nothing can be extracted at a profit, why waste our tax dollars on human space exploration?
That is a strong argument against human space exploration, if it has to be profitable in the near term.
But if China can ship $1 billion worth of PGM to Earth that is $1 billion less their economy needs to spend supporting a lunar presence.
In other words, cutting their losses.
Even if PGM mining fails to break even =ANY= revenue that is generated can supplement governmental budgets.
That is illogical, since the alternative is saving more budget money by avoiding a PGM mining boondoggle.
There’s also the Econ. 101 thought that a big increase in the supply of a precious metal would tend to makes its price cheaper.
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This would be a Mach 2 or 3 capable vehicle, like the XB-70 but stealthy.
That is in the area of my professional experience. It’s hard to make an aircraft like the XB-70 stealthy.
Why? Here’s a couple of reasons. First, flying faster makes targets more easily recognizable, because faster targets produce larger, more distinctive Doppler shifts. Sorry, but Mach 2 or 3 or faster doesn’t outrun 3×10^8 m/s. If you go hypersonic, you create an ionized wake that shows up big on radar …. although there are arguments for a platform that could fly hypersonic, edge-of space, “skipping” routes. That kind of vehicle would be easy to see but hard for contemporary non-USA technology to shoot down.
Second, aircraft such as the XB-70 fly fast at an altitude of 60,000 to 75,000 feet. That means that
a ground based radar has a clear, long distance line of sight to an approaching XB-70 type of air vehicle, with the uncluttered background of space behind the airborne target.
Better to emulate the B-2, and fly subsonic terrain-following ingress courses.
A faster, larger B-70 might be an excellent first stage for a horizontal take off two stage to orbit
system.
Putting aside the ride of the Valkyrie for a moment, does anyone know how compatible the docking, communications, and atmosphere of Shenzhou is vis a vis Soyuz, the ISS, and the shuttle?
Thanks in advance.
Sam, I don’t know the answer to that myself, but the British Interplanetary Society has been publishing very detailed technical descriptions of henzhou in JBIS with popular summaries in Spaceflight. I’d start there.
— Donald
David, what you say is true, however, I have long advocated a large, Mach 3 bomber as part of the US fleet. “Speed is life” still works, and works very well. The SR-71 showed this throughout its service life, and it had relatively little stealth compared to something like the B-2. The point to such a vehicle would be, if say the Chinese started picking off our satellites, an M3 bomber could bring ordinance on target quickly enough to stop the process while we still had assets on-orbit to protect. The B-2 can’t do that. Also, the B-2 can be detected and defeated by the same methods the Chinese used against the Japanese in WW2, which was their network of observers.
The M3 bomber is less stealthy to radar, but is much more stealthy to observers, and typically once the radar detects the M3 aircraft, it’s already too late to deploy defenses. Also, when traveling at M3, the bomber can launch relatively cheap, stealthy, and long range ramjet powered cruise missiles, expanding its swath of destruction.
> There’s also the Econ. 101 thought that a big increase in the supply of a precious metal would tend to makes its price cheaper.
This was discussed on sci.space.something some years ago (what hasn’t been discussed there?). Someone brought up the point that driving down the price of gold, platinum, whatever would saturate current markets, but perhaps open up much larger new ones. E.g., gold might take the place of copper in wiring and be used for cookware.
Whether this has any hope of being economically true (aside from the question of whether the gold etc. is actually available in exploitable forms and quantites Out There), I have no clue. But it’s another aspect of the problem to think about.
David – A faster, larger B-70 might be an excellent first stage for a horizontal take off two stage to orbit system.
This is what Langley should have done with some of that HSCT money. Instead they screwed it away with nothing to show for it. Now they’re paying the price with all the cuts due to the repioritization toward space exploration.
As for price suppression, that is a problem every wannabe “sky miner” will face.
In China’s case, they have NO native sources of platinum and their platinum imports will very likely move from $3 billion to $4 billion in the next few years. Therefore, a major decrease in price of platinum flows directly to their balance of trade figures. For China, driving down the price of platinum is almost as good as selling it.
Spend X billion on a lunar platinum mine and cutting the price of platinum in half will save $2 billion per year in expense in addition to whatever they might sell.
Not to mention how dirt cheap platinum might permit all sorts of novel new technologies.
= = =
If the Chinese were evil, a lunar platinum mine would be a terrific mechanism for causing havoc with the global futures market. Leak info (maintaining “plausible deniability” is crucial) about your lunar platinum discoveries after buying or sell commodities futures accordingly.
Buy a fistful of put options (i.e. sell short) and THEN announce finding a million ounce nuggest of Ni-Fe easily mined for PGM & make money before mining a single ounce.
Put options defined.
Chinese lunar prospectors discover platinum bearing asteroid fragments and radio Beijing with an encrypted message. Hong Kong traders purchase as many platinum put options as they possibly can.
Announce the discovery.
Collect profit.
Look at history. How did man get started using metals like platinum, gold, copper, and silver? Did we first theorize their existance and properties because something had to occupy that space on the periodic table? It seems much more likely we found it laying around on the surface of this planet, which lead to our understanding of their properties and value. The Moon, at 1/5 the size of the Earth, has substantial size and much more exposed surface area for its size. I mean seriously, the odds of there being no resources of significant value on its surface has to be in the 1,000,000/1 range. And yet, the only thing NASA can possibly imagine might be there of value is He3! I’ve got their He3, right here!
I’m not worried, though. We’re a service economy now. We can go on servicing each other while China goes and finds new resources to fuel their icky old industries. This way they will have more trinkets and beads to sell us, so we can owe them an ever growing portion of our nation. Aren’t we just so damn enlightened?
> Couple thousand years ago, it used to be a standard practice of building rafts upstream at the river,
> and shipping materials from there to river deltas where bigger cities were. Rafts were dismantled at
> the destination. In that sense, those
> were expendable river vehicles and very economical for their purpose.
Because rafts didn’t cost a billion dollars.
The failure of VSE supporters to do even the simplest finanical calculations is quite telling.
Building a billion-dollar moonrockets to get a few million dollars worth of platinum doesn’t make sense — no matter how many historical anecdotes you tell.
> What im getting at, is that ELVs are not stupid or bad per se, if you build them cheap enough
We can’t build them cheap enough. Handwaving and historical analogies notwithstanding. The Saturn V “raft” cost $2 billion in 2005 dollars — as much as a B-2 bomber or ten 747s.
> Chinese are actually best positioned to actually get to the point of mass-producing ELVs with cheap
> methods, they are the current masters of the art [of cheap mass production] after all. So it might very
> well turn out that they CAN mine the moon with ELVs.
Only if you ignore the math. You can call a Saturn V or the Hope diamond “cheap,” but calling something cheap doesn’t make it cheap.
And as Rand said, we don’t see any cheap Chinese airliners darkening the skies. I think you greatly overestimate power of Communism to overcome the laws of economics.
> This still means that they have to have some methods of transporting more valuable cargo, like
> humans, on more reliable methods. Although with chinese population, im not sure that they consider
> humans much more valuable than lunar mining machinery for example …
Most people do. Ask any insurance company. Saying it’s okay to blow up a $2 billion ELV because no lives are lost is fallacious. $2 billion invested in medical research could save thousands of lives.
The SR-71 showed this throughout its service life, and it had relatively little stealth
:>
China has already gone beyond “platinum” by establishing a human spaceflight program that is not hindered by a lemon shuttle and ball-and-chain albatross.
The Chinese remote orbiting platform and launch escape system both incorporate the Apollo 13 unlearned redundancy lesson NASA left out of the shuttle and station designs assuming failure no longer to be an option.
Thus the Chinese are already comfortably ahead.