[FPSPACE] Beating China WAS Griiffin's Giant...Chinese may be first to puttaikonauts on Mo....

[David Anderman]

I believe that creating an industry capable of transporting hundreds 
if not thousands of paying passengers safely to and from orbit would 
make a Chinese return to the Moon irrelevant.

BTW, the short answer on the Chinese is that they admit that they are 
years away from a Proton-class launch vehicle, let alone a Saturn V 
class required for humans to fly to the Moon. The basis of this 
thread is very far detached from reality.

DWA

At 05:24 PM 3/16/2007, DSFPortree at aol.com wrote:
>Tom:
>
>We could easily make China dangerous - it doesn't have to be.
>
>I don't think that not being able to go to the moon - or choosing a different
>path in space, which is my preference - would signal our decline. I think
>that trying to recapture lost glories would.
>
>We should be thinking of something new to do, not repeating what we did 40
>years ago. There are lots of interesting things we could do. For 
>instance, what
>if we declared that we'd be the first nation to send a robot probe to the
>nearest star? A laser-boosted lightsail could get to Alpha Centauri 
>in time for
>the American tricentennial. Closer to home, what if we showed the 
>world that we
>could detect all incoming dangerous asteroids and deflect them?
>
>Incidentally, I hope that you won't notice that both of these options have
>some pretty powerful weapons potential.
>
>David
>
>David S. F. Portree
>author & educator
>dsfportree at aol.com
>(928) 226-1427
>Flagstaff Arizona USA
>
>DSFP homepage
>http://members.aol.com/dsfportree/dsfp.htm
>
>DSFP blog
>http://altairvi.blogspot.com/
>
>"It's like when you're a kid, the first time they tell you that the world's
>turning and you just can't quite believe it because everything looks 
>like it's
>standing still. I can feel it - the turn of the Earth. The ground beneath our
>feet is spinning at a thousand miles an hour, the entire planet is hurtling
>around the Sun at sixty-seven thousand miles an hour, and I can feel 
>it. We're
>falling through space, you and me. Clinging to the skin of this tiny little
>world, and if we let go..." - The Ninth Doctor
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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