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from the escape-from-the-return-to-the-moon dept.
The Washington Post reports that NASA "has canceled its only lunar rover currently in development," Resource Prospector. From Wikipedia:
Resource Prospector is a cancelled mission concept by NASA of a rover that would have performed a survey expedition on a polar region of the Moon. The rover was to attempt to detect and map the location of volatiles such as hydrogen, oxygen and lunar water which could foster more affordable and sustainable human exploration to the Moon, Mars, and other Solar System bodies.
The mission concept was still in its pre-formulation stage, when it was scrapped in April 2018. The Resource Prospector mission was proposed to be launched in 2022.
takyon: Meanwhile, NASA is "pushing hard on deep space exploration" with the Moon as its goal.
Also at Space.com, The Verge, and Fortune.
(Score: 4, Insightful) by c0lo on Monday April 30 2018, @06:01AM
So were the Japanese back in the '70-ies. As a single example: they still manufacture better cars than Americans and their auto industry isn't quite in the collapse.
Neither US is a fresh chicken. If you look on the number of sciency stories on SN, you'll see that, more often than not, new discoveries are authored by European and Chinese authors (and increasingly less US). My point: in regards with scientific and technology progress, the "superpower" status doesn't seem to do shit for nowadays USA.
The explanation may be quite simple: while the Europeans and Chinese have state sponsored science, the Sillicon Valey tends to hunt unicorns (and, lately, crypto-currency), while the US national debt has doubled in about 10 years to over 100% of GDP [usgovernmentdebt.us]. Those Trump tax-cuts? They are going to add to this debt.
I'll be dead when China's political system will give way to "internal pressure from citizens".
Deng Xiaoping was quite a reformist (and it is him that China can thank for the economic reforms [wikipedia.org] and implicitly the status of "raising power" that China now has). Even him could not stop the Tiananmen Square [wikipedia.org] and even a public massacre could not change the China's political system.
I reckon that China is going to remain like it is for a long time: a country that doesn't quite react as the mind of a Westerner may think it should.
https://www.youtube.com/@ProfSteveKeen https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford