China is very much Russia v2, space-wise. The cross-pollination of Soyuz-like and Mir-like inspiration in its current crop of manned projects is clear, even if you didn't know that they were nudged in that direction at times of closer technical union. Though updated, and without the zee-rust, somewhat.
Yes, China is doing a lot. Has done since
the seventies (I remember hearing a recording of that satellite's broadcast[1], basic synthesised tune very much like a stylophone, but the context of the source made it somewhat haunting, as I recall). I think they're both ambitious and capable enough to progress, and (separate from the necessary military refocus of Russia) seem destined to be the "second place space power" quite soon. If they aren't already, in an insular way. But the US (with SpaceX to take up the man-rated slack it had to surrender to on retiring the remaining Shuttle fleet, at least until the Boeing capsule gets used for real) is probably going to keep its edge for at least the time that Artemis takes to deliver its major milestone (severe and unavoidable upcoming problems with that excepted).
In two decades, though, who knows? And the current footing of quite recent manned missions and space-station building could well be judged (in hindsight) by far the most successful technical development of this time. But that's a long time, with more than one down-to-Earth issue that could interrupt any (or all) country's(/ies') space ambitions. Or favouring them (you shouldn't ignore the likes of India, for example). And with around half a dozen or more prominant private launchers out there that might join SpaceX in getting from mere hardware delivery to manned missions in their own dight.
I really think that the various races on the ground (technological, political, social, arms-, etc) are the first worry. They'll dictate how long the current space trends continue, before some game-changer makes for something I wouldn't know how to predict. Imagine something like the Cuban Missile Crisis could have made the original race a moot thing. Or what happened as the collapse of the Soviet Union basically froze the Russian space effort[2a]. Basic failings/bad luck/bad management (to not predict and mitigigate the specific instances of bad luck!) with Colombia and Challenger vastly changed the US plans[2b] for its manned space-program. There are all kinds of other inflection points I might mention that did or didn't happen that might have turned out otherwise[3], most of which don't initially rely upon either the sharp
or blunt end of an actual rocket and yet have logical ramifications in how these things go.
(And space-treaty stuff. For starters, US, Ru and Ch, if not also others, could deliberately Kesslerise ourselves, in response to surface politics. Heck, Musk could be (inadvertently?) setting up the feedstock for what is (initially) something like a Starlink constellation catastrophy. If things tip the wrong way at some point. But active militarisation of space and/or blanket space-denial could be further out there. Lets see who lands at Shackleton Crater first and (de facto) claims the Lunar ice, for example. Or who gets to nudge a handy asteroid much more into Earth's orbit (or a handier and more artifical NEO) for Fun And/Or Profit?)
((Delphonso, I get the feeling that your adopted nation will probably ramp up the coverage when it's into less of a "catch up" mode. Getting a possible "space first" under the belt. But possibly also they have so much other need to keep the wide and diverse nation happy that while more Earthly matters are needing addressing/repressing to support the Party it is still a side-note to the rest of the news. It's not as ground-breaking as the Two Nukes One Satellite, even. Compare and contrast with NK currently internally shouting about its (military) missiles?))
[1] I also remember being told it was the first music in space... But maybe I was told it was the first "broadcast only" music, as I no know that NASA had played music in space, and on the Moon, in various manned missions in the '60s.
[2a+b] As both of these prevented Buran from taking an operational place in space history...
[3] And ones that did? What if CERN did
not support Tim Berners-Lee, and we had no Web, would that then not create the rise of Paypal and Amazon so we never got super-rich Musk and Bezos doing their various things as they have done. Where are we then? All else being equal, Russia is the only place the US can go to for man-launching, for so long, China (as with us) not yet at a stage to be that option, political ramifications reverberate well beyond merely space. Or, through a different quirk of fate, music and airline magnate Branson doesn't get into Scaled Composites and LauncherOne, but somehow revives the Hotol spaceplane for the UK and perhaps (still, because social media didn't create the conditions for Brexit) EU dominance? What situation
would I be discussing on Bay12's Gopher pages (or BBS, or rec.games.dwarffortress, or whatever was
the near-universal Internet front-end/backbone/whatevertheanalogy)?
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Topic: Space Thread (Read 366467 times)