Photos of Chinese Moon Rover

Hello,
never before I have been watching 5 hours of Chinese TV
within two days. This weekend I did, because of the
Chinese moon landing.

I took some screen shots. Click
here.

Ingo.

I wish this had received more attention in US media than it seemed to. Likewise, I wish I had watched it. I'd love for this to spark a new drive for lunar exploration.

I'm loving those pictures.

Very cool!

Didn't we take our own close-ups 44 years ago?
After a few trips, didn't find much worth going back for.

Total pink bubble gum. Oh, its so out of fashion!

The moon explorers where largely career air force jockeys. It was not much use getting them to do much science.

Some US stealth bombers cost over 2 billion dollars each, more than the entire Space budget for a year.
2 billion spent on nameless fears. What kind of patriotism is it that allows the rest of the world to catch up on a forty year start. Oh, anyone can do it now. So it was not worth doing. Forty years of funding a room that goes round and round the earth in space, and that is about it. Very very sad.

To be honest, I still think that the single greatest positive achievement the human race has done is to put men on the moon and get them all back alive. Some other country repeating it half a century later would probably excite me, as I didn't really get to experience the first handful.

But on the flipside it would probably depress me as it would indicate how useless the human race has been at solving problems and rising to challenges for the last 40 years. While we're fracking rather than building clean modern nuclear plants, we're just going backwards as a species. But being stuck in the technology of the industrial revolution isn't our worst flaw whilst we're letting iron-age cults use bronze-age fairy-stories to justify the distribution of lies and forbid the distribution of condoms.

Brilliant! I cannot agree more on the "iron-age cults use bronze-age fairy-stories" subject.

Anyway it may look disappointing that some technology is essentially the same has half a century ago, but that is because the basic science around it has been solved for a long time. There are not many candidate molecules to make rocket fuel and all of them where known 50 years ago. So rockets based on burning something and use reaction force cannot be much better that they are, not in a million years. We need other approaches like space elevators (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_elevator) and even that will only get mankind around the solar system.

Let's face it. Interstellar travel will be: slow (thousands to millions of earth-years), 100% robotic (not many humans can powered down for a million years), small (all you need to reproduce mankind somewhere else is less that a nanogram of matter that can be frozen a million years and mass is the key ingredient of cost. Also, when you reach a place you may need to engineer a cyanobacteria to transform the atmosphere, wait another million years before you can produce "cool life") and a swarm (the cost of engineering one capsule or a million capsules is not so different and you have to spread the universe with very small individual probabilities of success.)

Bad news for trekkies! Star Trek is yet another religion. That's not how it can happen. In a few centuries the intelligence of a human will be closer to that of a pig than to that of a smart machine.

I like Star Trek but alas, it can probably never happen. Therefore, I tend to gravitate to more realistic programming such as "I Dream of Jeannie!"

The U.S. went to the moon to win a race. Once it was won, we lost interest. I'm not happy about how the Chinese government tramples on human rights, but they do understand the concept of long term planning. For example, I read a remark from Chinese scientists that they were pleased the lunar dust seems able to support heavy loads without leaving large tread marks. So they have an eye towards larger vehicles in the future. It's the first step in establishing infrastructure and eventual human settlements. This in turn will help immeasurably for establishing human outposts on Mars and elsewhere. There are many lessons to learn and mistakes will be made. Such mistakes and lessons should occur on the Moon, days if not hours from help, not Mars, months if not years from help.

Maybe private businesses will find a way to profit from the Moon. Would you pay to sit in a booth on Earth and "control" a lunar rover? Be the first to find a transient magnetic anomaly!

Profit from the moon? Dream on. Maybe in a thousand years, but not anything any of us will ever see. Mining on the moon? Maybe there are minerals on the moon but the cost of transportation is, well, on the moon.

There is no place in the universe with as many useful-to-humans resources as planet earth. The only thing that looking elsewhere tells me is that we fucked up bigtime with the resources we already had.

I just hope the cockroaches evolve into something with more smarts than what the monkeys evolved into millions of years back.

Resources are ours to use. If you want to live in a cave and shiver, be my guest. I prefer heat in the winter and A/C in the summer and driving rather than riding a horse. I also like electric light more than a burning torch and I like Twixt over the internet rather than reading a book by candlelight.

Some one said "transport costs". This is an example where one can think for oneself. Not everything has to be calculated from an accountant's spread sheet. "Oh, and because that is too hard for me, I can not think about the matter at all :-( "

The original television pictures show a huge three stage rocket, with a" little toy" on the top. That tiny "little toy" was the moon module which include the return moon rocket. The moon module landed the astronauts on the moon, got them back off the moon and then then returned them to the Earth.

"Oh, why such a huge rocket to get from the Earth, and such a small outfit to get from the moon back to the Earth. The Earth has six times the gravity of the moon, and it tails of much more slowly than the gravity for the moon. You do not have to "have the smarts" to calculate this. You do not have to be locked out of having a valid opinion. You just have to use a little common sense. The huge three stage rocket to get off the Earth, and the "little pimple on top" that not only descends to the moons surface, but takes the astronauts back off the moon and returns them to Earth.

The cost of transport for resources in outer space? Not much. It is a little one way "downhill" trip to the Earth. Think "the little pimple on top" versus the "giant three stage rocket"

True, the cost of transport from the moon to the earth it lower than the cost of earth to the moon, but it is still prohibitively expensive. And since the moon is not much more than a chuck knocked off the earth many years ago, there ain't much up there that we don't have down here.

Also, since many of the resources we are running out of down here are bio-related, there is none up there.