China's Space Program, News & Views

Originally Posted by Quickie

Good catch! It's 11.4 years to be exact, a month faster than the U.S.

I've seen this sort of mistake so often, I wonder it's intentional.

With the pioneering work already done by the U.S., China should be a little quicker.

Some characteristics of Feng-Yun-4 (Wind-Cloud), China's second series of GEO meteo sat.

FY-4 plans for 3-axis stabilization, 14 channel imagery with 5-minute scans of China, a FTIR sounder, a lightning mapper, and a solar imager. The imager is called the "Advanced Geosynchronous Radiation Imager" (AGRI), and resembles "Advanced Baseline Imager" (ABI) being constructed for NOAA GOES-R/S. AGRI uses an off-axis telescope, two scan mirrors, 216 detectors in 14 spectral bands, and full-path on-orbit calibration. The sounder is called the "Geosynchronous Interferometric Infrared Sounder" (GIIRS), and resembles the sounder proposed for GOES-R/S. GIIRS uses an optical design similar to AGRI, with 16x16 detectors arrays and active cooling.

China plans to have hyperspectral interferometric sounders on both FY-4s and FY-3s sat by 2015.

Originally Posted by bladerunner

With the pioneering work already done by the U.S., China should be a little quicker.

Right, as if the U.S. would share the experience of the pioneering work with China.

One have also to consider China had no urgency of getting ahead of another country like what happened during the space race between the U.S. and USSR to the point of faking a manned moon landing if necessary.

One thing the article never mentioned, the SZ-8 had the year before performed an automatic docking maneouvre with the TG-1, twice, which means the docking with TG-1 was performed even earlier if this is counted.

Originally Posted by Quickie

Right, as if the U.S. would share the experience of the pioneering work with China.

One have also to consider China had no urgency of getting ahead of another country like what happened during the space race between the U.S. and USSR to the point of faking a manned moon landing if necessary.

One thing the article never mentioned, the SZ-8 had the year before performed an automatic docking maneouvre with the TG-1, twice, which means the docking with TG-1 was performed even earlier if this is counted.

There certainly was'nt the computer crunching power around then and perhaps some knowledge is made available in the public domain. However it is a tremendous accomplishment on China's part to get to the same stage of space travel as the U.S. and the USSR did with fewer launches.

Man you really do have a bee in your bonnet about the possibility of a faked moon landing.. Im afraid I lost the link to the article about the mystery of those black spidery things that have been poping up to the surface on Mars.Have a go at trying to solve that one



found it

http://grantjkidney.com/mysterious-a...found-on-mars/

Wow...interesting. I'll be open minded on this.

Originally Posted by Quickie

to the point of faking a manned moon landing if necessary.

Man, I can't believe you buy into that myth...

This is called a catch-up effect, a very common sense to all of us. China can repeat everything the Americans have done in a very short amount of time, but sooner or later there will be a bottleneck. The catch-up effect will began to fade off and they have to tackle problems head-on like the Americans. Because of this, unless the Chinese really try hard and simultaneously the Americans lag behind, it will be really hard for the Chinese to catch up. It's always easy to catch up to someone, but to come to onpar or even surpassing, will be very hard. There will also be a small gap between the two countries, unless miracles happen.

We can see this throughout the world. South Korea and Japan are both very developed countries and are both very rich. They caught up very quickly and came close to the West, due to the catch-up effect. But because they are coming close to the level of per capita GDP compared to US and UK, the catch-up effect began to fade off, so they never really caught up in the last 15-20 years. The gap always staid there.

Originally Posted by Vini_Vidi_Vici

This is called a catch-up effect, a very common sense to all of us. China can repeat everything the Americans have done in a very short amount of time, but sooner or later there will be a bottleneck. The catch-up effect will began to fade off and they have to tackle problems head-on like the Americans. Because of this, unless the Chinese really try hard and simultaneously the Americans lag behind, it will be really hard for the Chinese to catch up. It's always easy to catch up to someone, but to come to onpar or even surpassing, will be very hard. There will also be a small gap between the two countries, unless miracles happen.

We can see this throughout the world. South Korea and Japan are both very developed countries and are both very rich. They caught up very quickly and came close to the West, due to the catch-up effect. But because they are coming close to the level of per capita GDP compared to US and UK, the catch-up effect began to fade off, so they never really caught up in the last 15-20 years. The gap always staid there.

South Korea and Japan combined don't even have the size like China. The only thing they can catch up on is the export stuff, they just don't have enough of a domestic market in terms of size to really blossom out and diversify their economy when their per capita GDP came into parity with the West. That's why they became stagnant.

Originally Posted by vesicles

Man, I can't believe you buy into that myth...

I too dismissed this conspiracy as something too impossible to happen, until I see the evidences for myself. Let me just say, of all the conspiracy theories I have come across, only this one have the most solid basis. You can see all the argument going back and forth between the opposing parties on youtube and other places. I think you will learn a lot of interesting stuffs no matter which side of the argument you finally end up.

Edit: This is one of the better documentary on the subject. (There are also one or more others which are in my opinion not so properly researched and, incidentally, become a target of attack for some of the hoax debunkers.)

Originally Posted by Quickie

I too dismissed this conspiracy as something too impossible to happen, until I see the evidences for myself.

Mythbusters had proven the popular conspiracy theories were not valid.

I don't really follow Mythbusters. I remember only one or two related episodes, but as usual there're always counter arguments but let's not go there and derail the thread.

Moon landing is not a hoax, they didn't just land on moon once, they went there in many trips, there are multiple footage, and lastly, the newest imagine satellite have actually photographed the lander located on the moon.

New Photos Reveal Apollo 11 at First Moon Landing Site | Space.com

Photos of Apollo Moon Landing Sites From Space!

Originally Posted by jackliu

Moon landing is not a hoax, they didn't just land on moon once, they went there in many trips, there are multiple footage, and lastly, the newest imagine satellite have actually photographed the lander located on the moon.

New Photos Reveal Apollo 11 at First Moon Landing Site | Space.com

Photos of Apollo Moon Landing Sites From Space!

Exactly. I was 15 years old. Watched the event on TV.. Amazing...

My pops was in the garage with his Ham radio going and a portable TV seeing how much of a delay there was between the broadcast on the TV and the Ham radio. The Ham radio broadcast was about 8-10 seconds ahead of the TV.. as I recall.

If the whole event was a hoax it would take a cover up of unbelievable measure. All of NASA and their families.A portion of the US Military. Certain privileged media members. many members of congress, the President and Vice president and much of their staff.

If it was a hoax the Soviets would have exposed because they monitored all NASA space flights as the US did the same with the Soviets. Certainly the Soviets would have spilled the beans.

I've seen some of these pictures previously. To be more encompassing, I prefer images from a neutral party, like those from Jaxa/Selene. I noticed there are quite a few differences between the Jaxa/Selene and Nasa images, especially the one on the Apollo 17 landing sites .

As I've said before there're many sides to the argument. It's quite likely they've landed a number of unmanned lunar machines on the moon instead. There are just too many unanswered questions but let's not go there.

Edit: Okay, I found them, the Apollo 17 landing sites from Jaxa/Selene and Nasa LRO. Why are they so different? Resolution alone can't explain it.

http://wms.selene.darts.isas.jaxa.jp.../tc_011_d.html

http://www.squidoo.com/apollo-moon-l...gn=framebuster
(Scroll down to Apollo 17 landing sites and compare with picture a, b, or c.