Joseph Riggs wrote: > > In summary, the primary focus of the article is on the effect that a new > spaceport will have on the Chinese space program. In particular, the fact > that it's close enough to a port to allow for shipping rocket parts by sea > from other factories will be useful as it means that the width of the > rockets that China designs and launches won't be restricted by the width of > China's railroad tunnels. >
That's kind of a bit too esoteric for me (and I am pretty surprised MSNBC picked it up). I read about China moving their main space port to Hainan island after the launch of Chang-e 1 8 days ago in a Chinese paper. During the launch, debris from stage 1 and 2 separation touched down on the mainland, a very undesirable situation. Moving to Hainan island will remove the possibility of hitting someone or even farm animals during launches. As for moving large constructions too big for highway or railroad, ehh... that idea is over a thousand years old. It's not that convincing that Chinese pinched the idea off Americans. Something that I haven't seen on the scant English coverage of the Chang-e 1 mission but I read off the Chinese press and Chinese wikipedia page: that China is "scouting out real estate" for a possible space station. China, reportedly, had long been trying to participate in ISS, but (supposedly) roundly rejected. Now it seems the Chang-e 1 trajectory isn't the taking the shortest, fastest or most economic route (e.g. by copying from the Apollo mission). Instead it's taken three "pitstops" at the 16-, 24-, and 48-hours orbits (significantly higher than the 1.5-hour orbit taken by ISS) before entering the Earth-Moon transfer trajectory. Perhaps the cost for taking these pitstops is pretty minimal anyway (perhaps -Z- can answer that). But still the rumor was raised that China may at some point decide to build their own low-cost space station. Of course the bigger story is that Japan's Kaguya (much better name than Selene) had already arrived at the Moon a month ago and India will launch its Moon probe next year. All three Asian missions are searching for He-3 using remote sensing, another Gundam connection. Now we need only a fusion reactor to use all the He-3 bounty on the Moon. -- Dr. Core
