Visitors check the Long March 3A rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwestern China's Sichuan province last week. China plans to launch its first lunar orbiter on Wednesday.
Posted on 10/23/2007 6:41:19 AM PDT by Calpernia
Beijing Heats Up Space Race Against Japan This Week;
Communist Party Pride
Excerpt:
Tomorrow evening, the China National Space Administration is scheduled to fire a "Long March" rocket from a launch site in the southwestern province of Sichuan. If all goes well, it will propel a satellite into lunar orbit, an important step toward China's goal of beating Japan to become the first Asian nation to put a man on the moon.
Visitors check the Long March 3A rocket at the Xichang Satellite Launch Centre in southwestern China's Sichuan province last week. China plans to launch its first lunar orbiter on Wednesday.
(Excerpt) Read more at online.wsj.com ...
ping
They had better go easy on the lead paint, or that thing’ll never get off the ground.
The nations first moon orbiter is scheduled to blast offataround 6 pm tomorrow from the Xichang Satellite Launch CenterinSouthwest Chinas Sichuan Province.
It will be launched between October 24 and 26 and ourfirstchoice is around 6 pm on October 24, Li Guoping, spokesmanfor theChina National Space Administration, said yesterday.
The launch window is about 35 minutes; and similar slotsareavailable on Thursday and Friday, he said.
The circumlunar satellite, named Change I after thelegendaryChinese fairy who flew to the moon, and the Long March 3Acarrierrocket have passed all pre-launch tests and have beentransportedto the launch site.
The lunar orbiter is expected to enter the Earth-moontransferorbit on October 31; and the moons orbit, 380,000 km fromEarth,on Novr 5.
The satellite will relay the first pictures of the moon inlateNovr and will continue scientific exploration for a year.
The orbiter will execute a series of projects includingthecapture of 3-D images and analysis of the distribution ofelementson the moons surface, according to the spokesman.
Experts from foreign space agencies have been invited towatchthe launch at the site, he said.
Work will start this morning to inject conventional fuel intothecarrier rocket, which will last about 6 hours, said aseniorengineer surnamed Cheng at the launch center.
Liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen, both non-pollutingandhigh-efficient fuels, will be injected around noon tomorrow,hesaid.
Li, an engineer who has been working at the center for morethantwo decades, sounded confident about the launch. There hasbeen nolaunch failure in Xichang since 1997, and all the past 14launchesof the Long March 3-A were successful.
But he added that weather is a factor that might influencethelaunch.
The sky in Xichang finally turned blue and the sun shonebcenterlyyesterday after more than 10 days of rain. Localmeteorologistsforecast clear or cloudy skies till Saturday.
But if the launch cannot be carried out for any reasonbeforeFriday, the lunar orbiter will have to wait till next Aprilfor asuitable launch window to blast off, according to Cen Zheng,chiefcommander of the carrier-rocket system.
Initiated in January 2004, the moon exploration project hasthreestages - Circling the moon, Landing on the moon and ReturntoEarth.
The latter two involve landing an unmanned rover on themoonaround 2012; and bringing back lunar soil and rock samplesaround2017, according to earlier reports.
As the initial phase of the lunar probe program, theorbitingmission will lay the technical foundation for laterstages ofdevelopment, said Li.
If successful, the mission will become the third milestoneinChinas space achievements after manned flights in 2003and2005.
Source: China Daily
Ping!
I am sure Loral is also happy to see this. Oh, wait, I should include all other U.S. companies happy to help Chinese rocket project. After all, everybody did it, and nobody should be blamed.:-)
I’m totally in support of blaming ALL that were involved. Heck with blame, I want accountability.
WE WERE THERE FIRST!
Oh, blow it all. That is still wrong. He is not an astronaut; he is a cosmonaut. The terms, according to Nasa, mean different things but, according to the Russians (and us), they mean the same thing.
Oh, this is all so confusing. All right, all right, let us start over again.
You might not know this, but there have been a lot of unhappy rumblings in Malaysian society regarding our paying the Russians buckets of money – the amount of which the Malaysian public is not 100% sure about – to train a bloke to be a spaceman (as accurate a definition I can think of, because he is a man and he is in space).
Yes, it is true. This wonderful achievement of the country – to find a handsome, clean-cut, healthy, intelligent fellow and pay someone else to get him into space – is being sneered at in some cynical quarters.
The issue isn’t about who was there first. This is about offensive technology.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1891445/posts
Pentagon: China Gearing Up for High-Tech Warfare
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NEVER FORGET
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HILLARY’s 1st CHINAGATE =
Report: -RIADY- Walks after Day/Night in LA Court
http://www.Freerepublic.com/forum/a3ab7ae794f32.htm
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Signed:..”ALOHA RONNIE” Guyer - An in-court Witness
http://www.lzxray.com/Ronnie3.jpg
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NEVER FORGET
.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1915050/posts
China to test space weapon in launching moon satellite: rights group+
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1915064/posts?page=13#13
Related:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/1814236/posts?page=82#82
More at thread
In October 1990 John McCain said on the floor of the Senate: “Mr. President, I am anxious to construct a new relationship with our old adversary (Vietnam)”. He, who was in a Vietnamese prison camps for five and a half years, was pushing hard for normalized relations with Hanoi long before anyone else was.
Between when Clinton said that he would not normalize relations with Vietnam until there was a full accounting and the time he lifted the Trade Embargo only two Americans had been accounted for in Vietnam.
Lifting the embargo opened the door for the multi-billion dollar corporation, Lippo Group with American business partners, such as Stephens Investment of Little Rock, AR to conduct business in Vietnam. Mr A. Vernon Weaver, at that time the Vice-President for Operations in the Pacific Rim of Stephens Investment and a member of the Board of Visitors at the U.S. Naval Academy was instrumental in arranging an upgrade of the position of Commandant of the U.S. Naval Academy from two stars to four stars.
Former U.S. Navy officers, Senators John Kerry and John McCain supported this reorganization.
http://www.usvetdsp.com/billbell.htm
An indication of just how deep and subtle Red Chinese roots run in U.S. business and government affairs deals with McCain and Kerry. Both McCain and Kerry fought long and hard to provide the political cover Clinton needed when he made the controversial decision to normalize relations with Vietnam. McCain’s wife, Cindy, is the daughter of James Hensley, who is the second largest Anheuser-Busch distributor in the United States. McCain is an officer in Hensley & Co. and Cindy is a vice president. The McCain family owns several million dollars in Anheuser-Busch stock. As a part of an aggressive campaign to enhance its international standing in the beer market, Anheuser-Busch has had signned contracts and invested hundreds of millions building brewery operations in China and Vietnam. I can’t link any of those contracts involve Lippo. Some docs retrieved from the net revealed that Riady’s Lippo is the holder of a license for Sea World in Indonesia and that Anheuser-Busch owns all the Sea World themeparks in the United States as well as some overseas. Is there a connection between Anheuser-Busch and Lippo?
http://www.usvetdsp.com/billbell.htm
SeaWorld/Lippo Connection:
Old URL: http://www.lippo.co.id/Main.htm Internet Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/19980530014836/http://www.lippo.co.id/Main.htm
Net cache shows Lippo holds/held the license on Sea World in Indonesia.
“Today I am lifting the trade embargo against Vietnam because I am absolutely convinced it offers us the best way to resolve the fate of those who remain missing and about whom we are not sure.” Two things happened between November 1992 and February 1994 which bear on this issue. One was that Senators John Kerry and John McCain lobbied the president to drop the embargo. The second thing was that in September 1993 the head of the Lippo Group, Mochtar Riady, led a trade mission of Asian bankers on a trip to Vietnam to (in his words) “size up business opportunities there.” Lippo helps, among other things, to finance trade deals. It therefore stood to benefit enormously from expanded trade between Vietnam and the United States;
Old URL: http://www.empower.org/html/policy/misc/roadmap3.htm See Internet Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/20000816001233/http://www.empower.org/html/policy/misc/roadmap3.htm
Every time I’ve seen McCain’s name in reference to legislation, Kerry’s name pops up as well. It is like they are two peas in a pod. So I checked out Kerry to see what his connections were:
KGB-ASSOCIATED SPY PAID DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Military secrets on infrared detectors, drawings of rotors for Sikorsky attack helicopters and documents on stealth technology. Subrahmanyam M. Kota was a spy that delivered to the KGB. He sold U.S. military secrets to the former Soviet Union. Yet he paid some of the proceeds, $5250, to the Democratic Party and to Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts. When he was finally brought to justice in Massachusetts, he was allowed to plea bargain his charges down to mere tax evasion on his espionage windfall.
Old URL: http://www.federal.com/jun16-97/Cash See Internet Cache: http://web.archive.org/web/19990209005109/http://www.federal.com/jun16-97/Cash
Frances Zwenig, John Kerry’s (D-MA) chief of Staff for the now defunct Senate Select Committee on POW/MIAs, was given a position at Commerce in the Vietnam Interests Section until some genius decided it may be a conflict of interest. Ms. Zwenig coached the Vietnamese on how to testify before the SSC in order to show that Hanoi was cooperating; an obstacle in the way of lifting the embargo or normalizing. . . Zwenig had headed a US based organization that lobbied American business to invest on Vietnam.
In order to follow the money trail, involves the various business and 527s of Senators:
John Forbes Kerry (D-MA)
John Sydney McCain III (R-AZ)
Jesse Helms (R-NC)
Frank Murkowski (R-AK)
This involves the political contributions and the relationships connected to the companies that made the contributions. This involves searching the 527s relationships that these guys are into. Then the links to Riady/Lippo. It gets messy on a home computer. But the involvements show in Google searches.
http://www.ojc.org/powforum/editor/lippo.htm
Kerry’s cousin, C. Stewart Forbes, is CEO of Colliers International, real estate.
In Dec. 1992, Vietnam granted Colliers a contract designating Colliers the “exclusive real estate agent representing Vietnam.” Colliers has since written contracts in Vietnam worth billions, upgrading Vietnam’s ports, railroads, highways and government buildings.
Colliers is involved with Lippo in multimillion contracts in Indonesia. Kerry, who has a blind trust run by members of his family, claims he knows nothing about his cousin’s business deals or affiliations.
http://www.ojc.org/powforum/editor/lippo2.htm
That's like the difference between building your first aircraft carrier and actually running 24 hour all-weather flight ops off of one.
It's so mundane we're ready to trash it because we haven't upgraded to warp drive yet.
Meanwhile, China has to buy commercial aircraft off-the-shelf from Boeing because why? Because their aerospace industry can't compete yet.
In time, maybe they will, like the South Koreans and cars....but I don't see the Trabant or North Korean wood-gas cars beating GM right now, do you?
I think it's true, to some extent, that a side benefit of a space program is an increased nationalistic-oriented interest in science and math for kids.
That happened in the USA, too....but only because OUTSIDE forces pushed it (Sputnik.)
Indeed, if Vanguard had been first and highschoolers in 57 thought that the USA remained comfortably in the lead (turned out we were) then there wouldn't have been as many kids signing up for aero-engineering and electronics.
I fear we have not lost the technical edge...but have lost the NATIONALISTIC edge. It's not that kids don't want to win, it's that they're being taught that America should not win.
bump dat
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1891445/posts
Air Power. China has more than 700 combat aircraft based within an un-refueled operational range of Taiwan and the airfi eld capacity to expand that number signifi cantly. Many aircraft in the PLA force structure are upgrades of older models (e.g., re-engined B-6 bombers for extended ranges); however, newer aircraft make up a growing percentage of the inventory.
- The PLA Air Force (PLAAF) is deploying the F-10 multi-role fi ghter to operational units. The F-10, a fourth generation aircraft, will be China’s premier fi ghter in the coming decades.
- China is now producing the multi-role Su- 27SMK/FLANKER (F-11A) fi ghter under a licensed co-production agreement with Russia following an initial production run of Su-27SKs (F-11). China is employing increasing numbers of the multi-role Su-30MKK/FLANKER fi ghterbomber and its naval variant, the Su-30MK2.
- Chinese aircraft are armed with an increasingly sophisticated array of air-to-air and air-to-surface weapons, satellite and laser-guided precision munitions, and cruise missiles.
- China’s first indigenously produced attack helicopter, the Z-10, is undergoing fl ight testing. The Z-10 will fi re the Red Arrow 8E anti-tank guided missile, offering combat performance equal to the Eurocopter Tiger, but below that of the AH-64 Apache.
- Improvements to the FB-7 fighter program will enable this older aircraft to perform nighttime maritime strike operations and use improved weapons such as the Kh-31P (AS-17) antiradiation missile and KAB-500 laser-guided munitions.
Air Defense. In the next few years, China will receive its fi rst battalion of Russian-made S- 300PMU-2 surface-to-air missile systems. With an advertised intercept range of 200 km, the S- 300PMU-2 provides increased lethality against tactical ballistic missiles and more effective electronic countermeasures. China also is developing the indigenous HQ-9 air defense missile system, a phased array radar-based SAM with a 150 km range. As noted above, a naval variant (HHQ-9) will deploy on the LUYANG II DDG and a vertical launch naval SAM (HHQ-16) will deploy on the JIANGKAI II FFG.
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