Love the name
You can have the International Space Station, or you can have the Heavenly Palace. The latter sounds a lot more fun!
The three Chinese astronauts currently residing in the Heavenly Palace have managed to successfully dock their ship with the Tiangong-1 manually, the first time China has tried such a thing. Liu Wang, Jing Haipeng and Liu Yang got back into the Shenzhou-9 over the weekend, which had already berthed automatically with …
Sure, if you want a double plate of #3 with extra meat and some fried donuts on the side. Me, I'll stick with the stodgy old kind of name that just goes and tells you what the thing is that has it.
(Why not make jokes? -- what, they aren't hanging arses and middle digits out the windows at us as they rudely swerve into the passing lane on Imperial Motorway and prepare to make us eat their dust? OK, granted, that's more the Russian style, but still.)
The Amis wouldn't let the Chinese play with the toys in what they regard as their sandbox (despite a lot of other countries and institutions who contributed to building it wanting the Chinese in), so the Chinese decided to build their own. They have even invited others to join with them and last year German scientists participated in 17 biological experiments in connexion with the launching of Shenzhou-8. Nice civilised behaviour ; hope those chaps on the other side of the Pond will learn from the example. But then again, they have to contend with a Frank Rudolph Wolf, which could lead to lapses in civility on anybody's part....
Henri
I appreciate how bloody difficult it is to dock in space, and getting a decent intercept orbit can't be easy, but quite frankly it's not like the closure velocity is 7.7 km/s (circular orbit at 400km), It akin to me saying how bloody dangerous it is for me to park my car seeing as I'm travelling Mach 0.84 (at 52 degrees North)
But to catch up with something ahead of you in orbit you have to slow down (and go into a lower faster orbit).
To slow down you have to speed up backwards, to stop slowing down you need to drive forwards, every manouver you make uses fuel which changes the CofG of the vehicle, before you can start a burn you need another burn to slosh all the fuel to the bottom of the tank...and so on.....
So worse than parking a transit van with a broken wing mirror.
You think we're going to get cut in on whatever they find out, except at cost-plus? Fair enough, I say; we're mercantile enough ourselves, but let's not pretend that "exploring space for the betterment of mankind" is anything other than now rather outdated NASA PR, shall we?
'We' already are - we helped them develop their first telecoms sat because export restrictions wouldn't let us launch a Eu built sat on a Chinese rocket because it contained US components.
A bit like how we were banned from using Sharp/Toshiba LCDs in our computers in the 80s to protect our domestic LCD technology - good job the Japanese could never work out how to make laptops wasn't it ?
Yeah, but they're doing it, which is a lot more than can be said for the US's spavined excuse for a space program -- and the less said about the British Lunar Expedition of the '70s, the better.
(* What lunar expedition?)
(** Exactly.)
PS: I would note the word is 'perspective'.
It's not that easy - the technical challenges of making a decent cup of tea in free fall are considerable, but as soon as they are solved the UK's space program is back on track.
IIRC one of their earlier craft used a wooden heatsheild which suggests they have stolen plans of the Morris Traveller
First they ignore you.
Then they laugh at you.
And then you win.
Quite a lot of El Reg readers seem to be at No. 2 but you can bet the Chinese have their eyes fixed on No. 3.
ISS is slated to decommision around 2020. There is no, and likely there will be no, political will to set up a replacement. People talk about Bigelow and his inflatable modules but I haven't seen or heard of any announcements from Bigelow or anyone else saying that, "Construction will begin in..." or, "The first launch will be on..."
So, barring changes and developments, the only space station in orbit in 2021 will be a Chinese one. I'd call that success.
to gently meet at thousands of miles an hour, ...» Brid-Aine, I know you mean well, but isn't about time that all Reg bloggers who feel called upon to comment upon space endeavours first learn the concept of Gallilean invariance (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galilean_invariance) ? How fast the two objects in question were moving relative to our frame of reference here on the planet's surface is irrelevant ; what is at issue is how fast they were moving relative to each other. As Galileo pointed out 380 years ago in his Dialogo sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo, that's the reason we are not blown off the Earth as it spins. After all, Galileo's work was removed from Index Librorum Prohibitorum as early as 1835, so presumably it's safe for Reg bloggers to read it now....
Henri