China plans to bring back the first Moon rocks for 40 years:
Chang'e 5, scheduled for launch around November 24th, is intended to drill two metres down into the Moon's surface, retrieve about 2kg of rock, and then return this to Earth. If successful, it will be the first lunar sample-return mission since 1976, when a Soviet probe called Luna 24 sent back a mere 170g of the stuff. And it will be another step forward in China's space programme.
The Chang'e missions, named after a Chinese Moon goddess, have had their ups and downs. Chang'e 5 was originally scheduled for blast off in 2017, but the failure in July of that year of an otherwise-unrelated project that was, like Chang'e 5, using a Long March 5 as its launch vehicle, caused a delay. (Chang'e 4 used a different sort of launcher, a Long March 3B.) The "go" does, however, now seem to have been given. State media reported on November 17th that the rocket with Chang'e 5 on board has been moved to its launch pad at Wenchang space centre, on Hainan island.
Assuming the launch goes to plan, success will then depend on a complex ballet involving the craft's four components. These are a service module, a return-to-Earth module, a lunar lander and an ascender—a configuration originally used by America's Apollo project. Once the mission is in lunar orbit, the lander and the ascender will separate from the orbiting mother ship of service and return modules as a single unit and go down to the surface. The landing site is in the northern part of a vast expanse of basalt called Oceanus Procellarum, a previously unvisited area. Researchers hope rocks collected here will confirm that volcanic activity on the Moon continued until far more recently than the 3.5bn years ago that is the estimate derived from studies of currently available samples.
Once the new material has been gathered, which will take several days, the ascender will lift off, dock with the mother ship and transfer its haul to the return module. The service module will then carry the return module back to Earth, releasing it just before arrival to make a landing at a recovery site in Inner Mongolia, also used for China's crewed missions, in December.
I wonder if this will this put another nail in the coffin of the exorbitantly-expensive SLS (Space Launch System) or be leveraged to increase its funding?
(Score: 0, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @03:50PM (1 child)
Does China have a pyramid occult group(s) too? or do they push everyone down under the banner of non approved state religion?
See, I think the occult "brands" and "organizations" exist there just as they do everywhere. I'm just not a resident of china.
the more you know (rainbow ascii art goes here)
(Score: 2, Offtopic) by VLM on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:51PM
Its hard to get a straight fair answer if they're butthurt about Falun Gong from first principles or because the Falun Gong declared war on them first.
I suppose "ancient" history doesn't matter and
Kinda? They're like Tai Chi exercise crossed with meditation crossed with buddhism crossed with taoism, all kinda watered down and mixed together. The commies absolutely hate them. Generally all the wrong people hate Falun Gong, so you know they're highly likely to be the good guys in any given situation LOL.
However, I don't think they're involved in any moon landings.
(Score: 1, Troll) by VLM on Saturday November 21 2020, @04:54PM (14 children)
Given how well they did keeping bat viruses contained in their bioweapon labs, we can safely assume the same morons will re-implement the activities in the book "The Andromeda Strain". Great. Just Great.
Would not advise shopping at "wet markets" in Inner Mongolia that month.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:14PM
I don't think anyone is betting that life will be found on the moon. Yeah, maybe, possibly, but the smart money is elsewhere.
https://medium.com/predict/the-top-10-places-life-may-be-hiding-in-the-solar-system-4e17508713eb [medium.com]
(Score: 2) by unauthorized on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:21PM (3 children)
A bioweapon that's ineffective at harming healthy adults... yeah right, you keep telling yourself that. If someone was to develop a bioweapon, they'd base it on Measles or Smallpox or any other actually dangerous bug instead of the relatively harmless SARS.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:23AM
Modern bio-weapons require three elements:
1) At least some physical consequence
2) A clickbait MSM with a vendetta to prosecute
3) A political party seeking relevance
You put those three things together, and America folds in itself and commits suicide.
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2020, @05:52AM (1 child)
I do not buy into the conspiracies at all (beyond believe that China was researching COVID and may have inadvertently released it), but I think you may not have considered what would constitute an "effective" bioweapon.
War is no longer about people - really, it never was. It's always been about economies for which people have often been a proxy. In 'ye olde times' the king who could hire more mercenary troops could destroy any army incapable of meeting such. And in modern times economies are what keep us moving through the tech tree, the factories producing weapons of war, and the propaganda/funding to keep a steady stream of doe eyed patriotic youth manning their stations and losing their limbs. It's even how we won WW2. The economy went into overdrive and we pumped out enough weapons and technologies to turn the tide.
So an effective weapon attacks the economy. Of course something like a smallpox derivative would achieve this, but it would have many downsides compared to something like COVID:
1) Such a bioweapon will also inevitably come back home. COVID primarily targets the unhealthy and obese. China has a much healthier, obedient, and (on average) intelligent population. This means they would be able to deal with its effects much more effectively than most western nations which have increasingly become unhealthy, divided, grossly obese, and are seeing reduced intelligence.
2) Such a bioweapon would *look* like a bioweapon. COVID does not. When a weapon looks like a bioweapon, it opens you up to immediate forceful retaliation. When something looks like COVID that easily could have developed naturally and believably jumped from animal to human, there's much less clear argument for retaliation.
And then there is the question of effectiveness. What we can say without any doubt is that COVID has destroyed the US economy. Earlier this year the US economy contracted even more [npr.org] than it did during the Great Depression. And it's not like it's just going to bounce back. Far from it, the only way we're even treading water right now is printing money like it's going out of fashion. Check out this [stlouisfed.org] graph of our monetary supply from the Fed. We're "printing" money like there's no tomorrow and that's still not preventing businesses from collapsing all around us. So after this is all over we're going to be left with not only a destroyed economy but also the consequences of printing trillions of dollars of currency.
COVID driven economic deterioration will likely be remembered in history as the inflection point where the US in specific, and the west in general, lost its role as world leader. This virus has pretty much destroyed us. And on a political level it also helped to damage Trump who enacted a number of measures that were helping to grow the US economy and to slow China's economic acceleration. He has also been alluding to a greater conflict with China. Now not only has this virus helped to get rid of Trump but in his place will be not only a corporatist who will rapidly return to globalist policies accelerating the growth of China and decline of the US/west, but one who seems to have already have been directly and personally compromised by China.
Would a smallpox style virus have done better? Of course it's possible, but I think the argument there is a far more difficult one to make than it seems at first.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Thursday November 26 2020, @04:21PM
Sorry for the late response but don't forget the average military soldier is very young and healthy compared to general public.
So a crate of "the stuff" falls off a truck and cracks open... Sure 1/3 odds of death to folks over 80, but lightning strikes are a bigger threat to the 19 yr old military truck driver and guard.
Logistics is a big thing for military and something the average private is immune to is very convenient.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @08:29PM
Don't know if you're trolling or really that ignorant, but the Apollo missions already brought back kilograms of moon rocks fifthy freaking years ago, and all life on Earth hasn't been eradicated by some space plague.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:04PM (7 children)
Yes, funny how those videos of people collapsing on the street in China from covid got out. Yet there were no videos of people elsewhere in the world collapsing, even the few that didn't do any lockdown.
I don't think China would emit a virus like that, then stage videos like that to "leak", in order to make it look worse, to force the US into lockdowns to make stealing the US elections easier. I mean, it's probably a coincidence that the presumed winner at this point has lots of ties to China.
No, no, I'm sure that a society that thinks in terms of hundreds of years, and proven to have riddled the US with their spies, couldn't think up a year-long plot to help undermine their US enemy. Didn't happen. Of course not.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:34AM (6 children)
Trump also has a lot of ties to China. Voters would need to elect a third party candidate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:24AM (1 child)
Hi Fusty, er, uh, khallow? Oh well, Hi khallow.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Sunday November 22 2020, @05:37AM
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2020, @07:45AM (3 children)
He may have ties to them, but he's the first president in decades to have rolled back the globalist system which has been effectively accelerating their growth at the literal and figurative cost of most developed nations, most of all - the US. Biden will get back to globalism immediately which, given our crippled already deeply economy, is going to send China into a position of clear geopolitical dominance. And I'd add that he'd do this even if he wasn't compromised by China - it's just the current ideology held by establishment politicians. He just happens to be an establishment politician and one who has also been compromised by China which is going to further cement China's global dominance.
More than anything, I think we're essentially learning that open democracy simply does not work in the longrun. The masses are misinformed, politicians are corrupt, the media is literally for sale to the highest bidder, and the main people to lobby for their own benefit in democracy tend to be tiny self interested groups - be that transsexuals, the film industry, or even the military industrial complex. The general improvement of society gets placed on the backburner in lieu of the interests for this relatively tiny groups, alongside the enrichment and various forms of indulgence and self gratification of politicians. It's a system that inevitably works spectacularly, catches cancer, and dies.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 23 2020, @12:01PM (2 children)
I grant that there's more theater than normal, but what really was done? The US and a bunch of people in other countries was harmed collectively by those tariffs, and China still is on track to replace the US as the dominant superpower in a few decades. It's the thrashing of a drowning man and worse than if we had done nothing.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2020, @05:30AM (1 child)
The interesting thing about globalization is that it only lived up to half the promise. The whole idea was that by effectively sourcing our products to the place most capable of efficiently and cheaply producing them we could elevate those economies and, in turn, provide more plentiful and cheaper products to all consumers. Companies can now indeed produce products far cheaper than ever and the labor/production countries such as China have undoubtedly been elevated extremely rapidly. But, the prices never came down. As some contrived example, Nike may have used to have spent about $30 making a shoe stateside before selling it for $100. Now they make those shoes for $5 and sell them for $250, because they can.
The point of this is not a rant against Nike getting rich off globalism, or even consumers being fucking idiots - but to emphasize that even if you put a 500% tariff on all products effectively forcing national production of every single product - very little would change. Companies have become so aggressive with pricing, and consumers so stupid, that most things are already set at prices such that people can barely afford them. As a consequence, most companies profit margins are already so high that production stateside would entail little more than a moderate hit to their profit margin.
---
I do, however, ultimately agree with you that all of this would just be the "thrashing of a drowning man." As technology gradually plateaus and as developing nations become to reach comparable technological levels, all economies becomes a function solely of productive citizens. And a country of 340 million, many of whom just want to mooch for life, is not going to compete against an industrious nation of 1.4 billion - period. Within a decade even India is expected to overcome our economy. However, in some ways I would argue that this is why it's even *more* important to start bringing stuff home. China, and the East in general, have long memories. And as they become the defacto rulers of the world, being dependent upon these nations is a *very* bad idea. Globalization has become a crutch that the US needs to get rid of ASAP.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Tuesday November 24 2020, @04:25PM
I disagree. I think both sides have been satisfied. There's a lot more products out there than high priced Nike shoes. For a counterexample, cars are vastly better and cheaper today due to global competition from Japan. In the US in the 1960s, cars were dangerous junk, no matter if they were built in the US or Europe. Japan introduced much higher engineering standards to auto manufacture, creating cars that were more reliable, lower maintenance, and better fuel efficiency.
Except of course, for suddenly losing access to all those efficient and cheap products that the rest of the world would continue to enjoy - leaving the US in its wake. It would just hammer the nails into the coffin faster.
(Score: 2) by NateMich on Saturday November 21 2020, @05:33PM (3 children)
I kind of assumed with a new president, it would just get canceled again. Maybe followed by a new program using all the same parts, but with a different name and slightly different purpose.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:29AM
Biden will replace all science with "lived experience" anecdotes as demanded by the CRT crowd, and the next time we go the moon, it'll be on someone else's rocket ship -- someone who put utility and results ahead of ideology.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 23 2020, @12:04PM
Would be nice, right? In practice, these things go on and on. It's worth noting here that key parts of the program, such as the solid rocket motors and the engines, have been around since the 1970s. The programs rise and fall, but the key players keep paid to make the crap they've always been making.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday November 23 2020, @04:32PM
Whatever you get, it won't be the truth. Otherwise, they would rename it the PBR - Pork Barrel Rocket.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:24PM (8 children)
well here's a typical case of getting your priorities wrong.
unless there's a magical ingredient in lunar rock that makes one-way throw-away rockets vastly more cheap then the goal should really first and foremost be to get a reusable lift-like device working that can be used over and over and over to at least get into low earth orbit ...
but i guess if you aren't answerable to your tax-payers (as a governmental organization) you can just buy the biggest shovel and start shoveling those 'em yuan-renminbi out the window with the strongest china-man you can find...
btw: this seems to BE a indicator that all non reusable rockets and the agencies that build 'em are actually camouflaged intercontinental rocket and factories to build 'em with the main goal of delivering devices to annihilate the planet ... who cares if the rocket is one-way and throw-away if there's nothing to come back to, eh?
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:10PM
Usually if you think someone else is acting against their priorities, it means you don't understand what their priorities actually are.
If the rulers of China think that increasing the people's belief in the glory of China via relatively quick moon missions, then faster is better regardless of reusability.
That's why the Apollo and Soyuz missions did not wait to engineer reusable spacecraft. The goal was not just to get to the moon and back, but get to the moon and back before the other guy could.
(Score: 2) by Immerman on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:57AM
Why are you acting surprised that national rocket programs are built around developing and maintaining ICBM technology? The agencies don't usually go out of their way to advertise the fact, but it's a pretty open "secret".
More important to space enthusiasts, why should notoriously inefficient national space programs waste they're very limited budgets trying to compete with an enormously successful private enterprise? SpaceX owes no great allegiance to the US, and will be happy to launch Chinese payloads to orbit. Far more efficient to let them master the technology and then just copy it once it's mature. There's no need for a space race when the guy with a commanding lead keeps pouring on the steam for his own reasons.
National programs are much better suited to foundation-laying endeavors where there's no short-term profit to attract commercial investors. And Chang'e missions are actually part of a non-binding collaborative road map established by the ISECG, a partnership with NASA and 20 other national space agencies to establish a lunar outpost with proof-of-concept industrial capacity by 2035, supplying 1% of their environmental and propellant oxygen needs from lunar regolith before scaling up to something more useful. A decent video overview: https://youtu.be/Ap5sDeItDTM [youtu.be]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:49PM
The space industry has always been about the ICBMs. That's why the Soviets were ahead at the start; their nuclear tech wasn't as advanced as the US, so they needed bigger warheads to get the same effect, thus needed bigger ICBMs to work. Which meant that they had heavier lift capability than the US when they launched Sputnik and Gagarin, so the US had to scramble to catch up for PR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2020, @06:09AM (3 children)
The big picture is easy to miss.
There was a reason that European countries were so reluctant to fund journeys to the west. It was generally felt such a voyage was doomed to failure, and they had so many issues at home to deal with. And the perceived best case outcome of the journey westward? You find a chunk of land with yet more 'wild' natives. And then what? These countries could never have imagined that within a matter of decades that chunk of land would become the center of the world's economy and transatlantic voyages would become the norm for the growth of economies and nations. Let alone that the colonizers of that isolated and mostly inhospitable 'chunk of land' would soon come to rule the entire world.
Today we know that in those rocks just floating about in space, there are resources worth more than the sum total of all resources on Earth. And we also know of course that if we can somehow manage to 'tame' the lands, there is also effectively infinite land available for development and exploitation. And this is also ignoring the inevitable unknowns. We only very recently learned that the moon has water which is such a superficial bit of a knowledge. We know *extremely* little about any place other than our little rock. And we will make discoveries that can be utilized.
And "we" here is going to be whoever happens to get there first. Treaties, singing kumbaya, and the international world all working together as one will work phenomenally. Until there's a single conflict over a limited resource. And that point we're going right back to 'us vs them' and the winner there is likely to be whoever gets their first and is able to start developing and preparing for the inevitable conflict.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 23 2020, @12:39PM (2 children)
Because they didn't have the technology to do that. Deep sea ships of the sort that Columbus used (carrack [wikipedia.org] and caravel [wikipedia.org]) didn't start to be developed until the 1300s and later. When they did, those voyages happened despite that alleged reluctance. And once those European countries knew there was a New World out there, they massively and aggressively colonized it (for example, going from starting to colonize what became the US in 1610 leading to a global superpower by 350 years later).
It's a cool story, bro, but it didn't happen that way.
I see this a lot with armchair arguments about what to put resources in. Here, it's like landscaping. With the right plants, you don't need to mother your landscaping. With the wrong ones, you'll never lack for work, and they'll probably die anyway. Here, with the right level of technological and economic development, you'll just need to get out of the way. With the wrong approach, you'll be doing token efforts in space until the Earth gets cooked by the Sun.
For what? It's been a remarkably poor showing so far. Treaties range from just barely stable (the Outer Space Treaty [wikipedia.org]) to laughable (the Moon Treaty [wikipedia.org] which hasn't been signed by any country that actually launches stuff to space). And the international world working together has resulted in the International Space Station which is several times more costly than it should be, and took a decade or two longer to put together than it should have.
In contrast, SpaceX presently has around 8,000 employees who among other things, manage most of the work of constructing the cheapest rockets per payload pound on the planet. International anything wasn't required, just a relatively small group committed to sensible rocketry development. My take is that we're pretty close to getting a serious colonization effort in space. It won't take a bunch of European countries changing their attitudes, but technology and infrastructure development by a small but committed sector.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 24 2020, @05:55PM (1 child)
Your post is ironic. You are not only acting like hundreds of years between events is nothing, but your timeline and premise is also completely wrong. The first transatlantic voyage was made around 1000AD - no magical technology required.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Wednesday November 25 2020, @02:52PM
To the first, well, why is that supposed to matter? We're not talking about a simple task like getting out of bed. How long is it supposed to take to build a superpower on a completely different continent, for example?
To the second, Viking longships were technologically advanced with thinner hulls, advanced construction techniques, and the best sailor skills on the continent.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 23 2020, @12:06PM
Like a reusable rocket, amirite? A one-way, throw-away rocket is a huge stepping stone to that.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @06:45PM (3 children)
Get back to me when they do something impressive. I've been doing sample return missions in KSP for years!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday November 22 2020, @02:52PM (2 children)
I'm more curious about their selection criteria on the rocks. The story doesn't mention if this is just automatically going to drill in a couple areas for samples, or if remote operators will be looking for the actually interesting places to sample. Just grabbing random rocks and cores isn't really useful geology, so I'd love to know if this is just a PR stunt or actually has useful scientific intent behind it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday November 23 2020, @06:29AM
You overestimate our knowledge. Nobody really knows much beyond surface level knowledge of the moon, pun intended. Even see this [nytimes.com] little article on how ground penetrating radar ended up providing *less* information than more in another Chinese mission to the moon. Ultimately what you can learn from instrumentation is deeply limited, and not necessarily even reliable. See what a major issue the apparent detection of briny water on the surface of Mars caused and continues to cause.
Beyond this there's something far bigger in play. If this is successful, it's effectively a proof of concept for automated asteroid mining. Set up a processing/launch/landing facility on the moon, automatically send off collection missions at greatly reduced cost. Do the processing on the moon, use the raw resources as necessary in the manufacturing of new mission components, send the remaining ultra pure refined ingots back to Earth for domestic use and commercial exploitation. This route would remove the vast majority of cost, which is getting off of Earth's surface, and likely show room for profit like nothing we can imagine today. It'd require a tremendous amount of industrial development, but China is now the place doing crazy shit like building 'horizontal skyscrapers' [businessinsider.com.au] while the west descends into slogan driven internal conflict and deterioration. So if there was anywhere that could pull something off like this, it'd be China.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Monday November 23 2020, @12:41PM
Turns out it is useful geology. As the other replier noted, at this level of ignorance even the dart board approach will work. While I can't foretell what's going to happen to China's program, it remains that if you can return random samples from the Moon, then you can construct later missions to do smarter sampling and return.
(Score: 2) by EJ on Saturday November 21 2020, @08:22PM (1 child)
If they're bringing them back in 40 years, then why is this news NOW?
Also, it won't be the FIRST moon rocks, because those are already here.
(Score: 1, Redundant) by Immerman on Sunday November 22 2020, @12:59AM
Way to advertise your total lack or reading comprehension - or were you trying to be funny?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @10:59PM (1 child)
Are they faking their moon landing?
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday November 21 2020, @11:14PM
Doesn't everyone?