China says there’s no space race in Asia

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING – Over a few short months, Japan, China, and India will all have lunar probes orbiting the moon, sparking talk of a new space race in Asia. China, for one, takes exception at that characterization.

On Thursday, a top official in its secretive military-backed lunar explorer program defended the probe launched last week as an innovation that is part of a future wave of cooperation, not competition, in outer space.

“It’s all peaceful,” said Pei Zhaoyu, assistant director of the Lunar Exploration Program Center, when asked whether a space race was on. “The countries involved in lunar exploration are developing an understanding. They’re evolving a mechanism for cooperation.”

China’s launch of the Chang’e 1 satellite put in motion an ambitious space exploration plan, and came just weeks after rival Japan launched its own moon probe. India plans to send its own lunar probe into space in April.

The three missions represent a new wave of lunar exploration following those begun in the Cold War by the United States and former Soviet Union, and another bout in the 1990s that saw Japan and Western Europe joining the club.

James Oberg, a space consultant in Houston, said the current glut of lunar missions is less of a space race and more a matter of those countries developing new technologies at similar rates. All three have lately developed more powerful booster rockets, along with experience with payloads gleaned from launching commercial satellites, said Oberg, a veteran of 22 years at NASA Mission Control.

However, he added that such missions do offer tangible benefits for a country’s business and reputation.

“Doing ‘moon probes’ advertises a country’s technological level and that’s good for high-tech exports, and for validating the threat-level of its high-tech weapons,” Oberg said in recent comments to The Associated Press.

Oberg likened the Chinese probe, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon Similar, to the orbiting U.S. moon explorers “Clementine” and “Prospector” launched in the 1990s.

In Beijing, Pei told reporters all was well with the satellite, which is due to move into lunar capture orbit Monday, when it will allow itself to be caught by the moon’s gravity.

“All the systems on board are currently in excellent condition and the spacecraft is on the expected trajectory,” said Pei, who is also spokesman for the China National Space Administration — China’s version of NASA.

The lunar mission adds depth to a Chinese space program that has sent astronauts orbiting around the Earth twice in the past four years and is a source of great national pride.

Pei dwelt extensively on the technical aspects of the lunar mission at a news conference that illustrated a growing openness within the space program.

Foreign observers were present at the satellite’s Oct. 24 launch from the Xichang site in the southwestern province of Sichuan, Pei said. He said data gathered during the yearlong mission would be shared with scientists from other nations.

China sent its first satellite into Earth orbit in the 1970s, but the space program only seriously took off in the 1980s, growing apace with the country’s booming economy.

In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to put its own astronauts into space.

But China also alarmed the international community in January when it blasted an old satellite into oblivion with a land-based anti-satellite missile.

Pei dodged a question about the anti-satellite weapon, but gave the budget for the engineering stage of the lunar program as $187 million.

“China has always adhered to the principle of peaceful use of outer space,” he said. “All goals, including engineering goals, and scientific goals, are without military purposes.”

Carried into space by a Long March 3A rocket, the Chang’e 1 satellite is expected to transmit its first photo back to China in late November.

It will survey the lunar surface using stereo radar and other tools as a precursor to a planned landing on the moon’s surface in 2012 and a recoverable mission by 2020.

Pei said China was being careful not to travel territory already covered by the space programs of Russia, the U.S., Japan and the European Space Agency.

He said that by launching the probe, China was playing to its science and technology strengths, while laying the groundwork for future innovations and benefiting the country’s economic and social development — a reference to the Communist Party’s use of the space program to drum up patriotism and loyalty.

“China’s lunar program got off to a relatively late start, but we hope to … try to do something that no one has done before,” Pei said.

“We’re fully confident that alongside the progress in our science and technology, our lunar and deep space exploration programs will advance rapidly from strength to strength,” he said.

(Source: http://news.yahoo.com)

China says there’s no space race in Asia

By CHRISTOPHER BODEEN, Associated Press Writer

BEIJING – Over a few short months, Japan, China, and India will all have lunar probes orbiting the moon, sparking talk of a new space race in Asia. China, for one, takes exception at that characterization.

On Thursday, a top official in its secretive military-backed lunar explorer program defended the probe launched last week as an innovation that is part of a future wave of cooperation, not competition, in outer space.

“It’s all peaceful,” said Pei Zhaoyu, assistant director of the Lunar Exploration Program Center, when asked whether a space race was on. “The countries involved in lunar exploration are developing an understanding. They’re evolving a mechanism for cooperation.”

China’s launch of the Chang’e 1 satellite put in motion an ambitious space exploration plan, and came just weeks after rival Japan launched its own moon probe. India plans to send its own lunar probe into space in April.

The three missions represent a new wave of lunar exploration following those begun in the Cold War by the United States and former Soviet Union, and another bout in the 1990s that saw Japan and Western Europe joining the club.

James Oberg, a space consultant in Houston, said the current glut of lunar missions is less of a space race and more a matter of those countries developing new technologies at similar rates. All three have lately developed more powerful booster rockets, along with experience with payloads gleaned from launching commercial satellites, said Oberg, a veteran of 22 years at NASA Mission Control.

However, he added that such missions do offer tangible benefits for a country’s business and reputation.

“Doing ‘moon probes’ advertises a country’s technological level and that’s good for high-tech exports, and for validating the threat-level of its high-tech weapons,” Oberg said in recent comments to The Associated Press.

Oberg likened the Chinese probe, named after a mythical Chinese goddess who flew to the moon Similar, to the orbiting U.S. moon explorers “Clementine” and “Prospector” launched in the 1990s.

In Beijing, Pei told reporters all was well with the satellite, which is due to move into lunar capture orbit Monday, when it will allow itself to be caught by the moon’s gravity.

“All the systems on board are currently in excellent condition and the spacecraft is on the expected trajectory,” said Pei, who is also spokesman for the China National Space Administration — China’s version of NASA.

The lunar mission adds depth to a Chinese space program that has sent astronauts orbiting around the Earth twice in the past four years and is a source of great national pride.

Pei dwelt extensively on the technical aspects of the lunar mission at a news conference that illustrated a growing openness within the space program.

Foreign observers were present at the satellite’s Oct. 24 launch from the Xichang site in the southwestern province of Sichuan, Pei said. He said data gathered during the yearlong mission would be shared with scientists from other nations.

China sent its first satellite into Earth orbit in the 1970s, but the space program only seriously took off in the 1980s, growing apace with the country’s booming economy.

In 2003, China became only the third country in the world after the United States and Russia to put its own astronauts into space.

But China also alarmed the international community in January when it blasted an old satellite into oblivion with a land-based anti-satellite missile.

Pei dodged a question about the anti-satellite weapon, but gave the budget for the engineering stage of the lunar program as $187 million.

“China has always adhered to the principle of peaceful use of outer space,” he said. “All goals, including engineering goals, and scientific goals, are without military purposes.”

Carried into space by a Long March 3A rocket, the Chang’e 1 satellite is expected to transmit its first photo back to China in late November.

It will survey the lunar surface using stereo radar and other tools as a precursor to a planned landing on the moon’s surface in 2012 and a recoverable mission by 2020.

Pei said China was being careful not to travel territory already covered by the space programs of Russia, the U.S., Japan and the European Space Agency.

He said that by launching the probe, China was playing to its science and technology strengths, while laying the groundwork for future innovations and benefiting the country’s economic and social development — a reference to the Communist Party’s use of the space program to drum up patriotism and loyalty.

“China’s lunar program got off to a relatively late start, but we hope to … try to do something that no one has done before,” Pei said.

“We’re fully confident that alongside the progress in our science and technology, our lunar and deep space exploration programs will advance rapidly from strength to strength,” he said.

(Source: http://news.yahoo.com)

Enterprise Mission Press Conference

PRG
Paradigm Research Group

Forwarded Press Release – 10/26/07

Re: Enterprise Mission Press Conference
National Press Club, Zenger Room
Tuesday, October 30, 9 am

Are Classified NASA Lunar Findings Secretly Pressuring the Aging Shuttle Program to Completion by 2010, to Make Way for “Constellation” — and the New “Space Race” to the Moon?

Washington, DC – Japan is currently in lunar orbit with the most sophisticated lunar mission since Apollo. China is about to launch a major unmanned lunar mission, on October 24th. In April, 2008 India will launch its first comprehensive unmanned lunar mission. And, Russia recently announced its own ambitious lunar plans — for not only sending cosmonauts to the Moon by 2025, but establishment of a permanent moon base soon after.

All this on the heels of President George W. Bush’s own “Vision for Space Exploration” (VSE) – his sudden decision to “return Americans to manned lunar exploration” … made inexplicably, in the middle of his war.

Why this abrupt international focus on a 21st Century Moon Program — after over 30 years of the Moon being totally ignored? Did Apollo find “something” of major importance on the Moon, which NASA just forgot to tell the rest of us?

The press conference will be lead be Richard C. Hoagland: former NASA consultant; CBS News Science Advisor during the Apollo lunar missions; co-author of “Dark Mission: The Secret History of NASA” (currently #1 on Amazon’s list for “Astronomy,” and “Space Science”); and head of The Enterprise Mission. Ken Johnston, former NASA Manager of the Data and Photo Control Department of NASA’s Lunar Receiving Laboratory at MSC during the Apollo Program, will present supporting NASA documentation.

According to the Enterprise Mission:

This is an era of increasing concern for ever more government secrecy and expanding classification. Hoagland and Johnston will demonstrate that this “less than forthright NASA decision-making” actually began a long time ago.

Citing specifics from the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958, Hoagland will present startling evidence that, contrary to assumptions made by politicians, members of the press and public for almost half a century, NASA is NOT a “civilian” space agency, but is in fact “a defense agency of the United States”.

As a tax-supported federal institution, NASA’s 1958 Congressional charter specifically instructs “Sec. 205 … (d) no [NASA] information which has been classified for reasons of national security shall be included in any [NASA] report made under this section [of the Act] …” [Emphasis added].

So, what criteria does NASA apply to classifying its scientific or engineering information? And, what major NASA discoveries have never been reported – either to the Congress, the American people or the press — because of NASA’s legal ability to lie? And why could these now be politically significant …?

Says Hoagland “the evidence that NASA is something other than the ‘benevolent civilian science institution’ it has pretended to be for 50 years, is as overwhelming now as it is disturbing.

It is this ‘dark mission,’ allowing the president to legally classify NASA’s most important scientific and technological findings without even other NASA scientists or engineers, or Congress, the press or the American people becoming aware, which we contend is now impelling this new 21st Century Space Race.

A Race whose outcome – unlike the first US/USSR race for ‘mere’ political prestige 50 years ago — will literally shape the life of every human being now alive on Earth, through the startling technological discoveries we have evidence that NASA made on the Moon during Apollo … brought back to Earth … and then successfully kept secret for more than a generation.”

Supporting Hoagland’s highly controversial data and analysis, Ken Johnston, former LRL manager of NASA’s photographic lunar archive in the early 1970′s, will give a first-hand account of how he was specifically instructed by his NASA managers toward the end of the Apollo Program to destroy unique Apollo records of what the astronauts actually recorded on the Moon, rather than donate them to a university, high school or other public archive.

Hoagland and Johnston – using these 30-year-old original Apollo images that Johnston, in disobeying that direct order, personally preserved – will illustrate exactly what NASA hoped would never become known: the apparent remains of extensive lunar ruins on the Moon, one of the key projected discoveries cited by a pre-Apollo NASA/Brookings study as “capable of destroying civilization.”

Hoagland and Johnston will then compare this 30-year-old data with current Apollo images being posted on official NASA websites around the world – revealing total confirmation of Johnston’s 30-year-old claims – including, an actual astonishing example of the extraordinarily advanced technology the Apollo astronauts may have returned to Earth in the last Mission of Apollo….

Richard C. Hoagland and Ken Johnston will be available for interviews immediately following the briefing which will last from 9:00 to 9:45 AM with a question and answer period following until 11:00 AM.

3 Titans of Asia Face Off: Who Gets the Biggest Chunk of Moon?

Amid a renewed burst of global space agendas, Asian spacefarers are racing to the moon. It seems everyone wants to ensure their piece of the lunar pie. Asian giants Japan, China and India are engaging in a race to map lunar resources and put dibs on the moon as a platform to eventually explore the planets beyond.

Japan may have sparked the Asian lunar race on September 14 when it successfully launched its first lunar orbiter. China will now launch its own moon probe before the end of the year, followed by India in the first half of 2008.

JAXA, as the Japanese space agency is known, will carry out more robotic missions before sending their own astronauts to the moon, said agency president, Keiji Tachikawa, in a brief interview Monday.

Missions to the moon and to Mars and international cooperation topped the agenda of a five-day global conference held recently in Hyderabad, India that brought together 2,000 space professionals, including scientists, astronomers and astronauts.

“There is a great revival of interest in exploring various planets,” said Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration.

China’s Chang’e 1 lunar probe is being transported to the launch site and “if everything goes fine, will be launched by the end of the year,” said Sun, adding that China will be considering their own manned moon mission if all goes well.

India’s Chandrayaan 1 lunar probe will be launched in March or April 2008, said B.N. Suresh, director of the Vikram Sarabhai Space Centre in Kerala’s capital Thiruvananthapuram. Preparatory work is in “full swing” at the Sriharikota space station in southern India, where the craft is being assembled, the launch vehicle readied and antennae installed to receive data from the moon, Suresh revealed.

Also in 2008, India will likely choose the target year for a human spaceflight to the moon, confirmed G. Madhavan Nair, head of the Indian Space Research Organisation.

Although mankind has had more than four decades of lunar missions, space scientists are still lacking basic knowledge about the moon’s origin, the minerals it contains and even whether or not it holds water that could support human life.

“There is a lot more known about the moon, but even after the current round of lunar missions, you will still have more questions,” said Indian scientist U.R. Rao, who did pioneering work on space launch vehicles.

Mineral samples from the moon contained abundant quantities of helium 3, a variant of the gas used in lasers and refrigerators as well as to blow up balloons. Space experts believe it could offer a solution to the earth’s energy shortages.

Technology for converting helium 3 to energy is still largely unexplored, but spacefaring nations are already talking about a permanent human presence on the moon where resources can be identified and studied. Nations are also increasingly looking beyond lunar missions to Mars and other distant worlds.

NASA aims to put a man on Mars by 2037, Michael Griffin, the administrator of the US space agency, indicated earlier this week, saying the orbital international space station targeted for completion by 2010 would provide a “toehold in space” for travel first to the moon and then Mars.

Japan’s 55-billion-yen (478 million-dollar) Kaguya is the largest moon explorer since the US Apollo missions back in the 1970s after six human landings—the only time mankind visited another world. But the vision and purpose of space explorations has changed dramatically since then. Several renowned astrophycists have called on mankind to seriously consider colonizing space as a means of preventing extinction.

“The moon is no longer a place for us to visit,” said JAXA’s Tachikawa. “We should consider inhabiting and exploiting it.”

While many agree with Tachikawa, humanity is still a “couple of generations away” from tapping viable commercial opportunities in outer space, including the moon, believes Franco Bonacina, spokesman for the European Space Agency.

“But we need to go back to the moon to go even farther,” he said. “The moon is a harbor — a kind of spare wheel — from where we can push to Mars.”

In the scramble to reach the moon, spacefarers risk duplication of effort, pointed out Indian scientist Rao, who called for cooperation between the world’s space agencies to avoid that.

“Everyone doing the same work would be a waste of resources.”

Rao is right, but as recently highlighted by the Russian underwater Arctic flag-planting debacle, humans tend to want to get there first to stake things off and make a claim to the coveted land in question—be it on Earth or beyond.

Posted by Rebecca Sato

(Source: http://www.dailygalaxy.com/my_weblog/2007/09/titans-of-asia-.html)

BUSH RISKS INTERGALACTIC WAR

LET’S PLAY HARDBALL SENATOR!

This man is Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL). I’ve known him for a long time. We coached our sons baseball team together back in the early 1990′s in Orlando. I got hit in a car crash once and he was my lawyer. He went on to become Orange County Commissioner and then George W. Bush appointed him to his cabinet. From there Martinez went on to win the U.S. Senate seat in 2004. Many experts have reported that the Republicans did much electoral manipulations to win that year in Florida. Today Mel is the chair of the Republican National Committee. His main job is to recruit Hispanics for the Republican Party.

Martinez has just announced that he will be taking the lead to ensure that NASA’s Moon base missions will stay a top priority in Congress.

That means that Martinez and I will get to play hardball once again as the Global Network has long been working to bring the light of truth to NASA’s Moon program.

The Moon base the U.S. wants to establish is really about two basic things. One is the establishment of mining colonies on the Moon to extract helium-3, a precious resource that could be used for fusion power here on Earth. Scientists have long been saying that the profits from helium-3 extraction will make the money made from oil exploration on Earth look like nothing in comparison. But in order to make the Moon mining program possible, new launch capabilities must be developed to lift the heavy payloads necessary to build the Moon bases and return the mined resources back to Earth. This is where the nuclear rocket comes in. Nuclear reactors for rocket engines, NASA says, would give rockets greater lift capability and speed up transit time to the Moon and Mars. (NASA is working to create mining colonies on Mars as well. The Halliburton Corporation is today building a drilling mechanism for Mars.)

Nuclear powered mining colonies are also on the drawing board. So a host of nuclear launches would take place from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is important to remember that space technology can, and does, fail on occasion. We should also remember that the Department of Energy (DoE) nuclear production cycle has a long and dirty track record at the labs across the U.S. When the nuclear powered generators were fabricated at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, from 1994-1996 for the Cassini mission, over 244 cases of worker contamination were reported to the DoE.

The Army has had plans since the early 1950′s to set up military bases on the Moon. Scientists have long known that there exists an Earth-Moon gravity well. Whoever sits at the top of the well, with bases on the moon, will be able to literally control who can get on and off the planet Earth. So military bases on the Moon play a key role in the space “control and domination” program outlined in the U.S. Space Command’s 1997 document called Vision for 2020. It’s hardly a coincidence that the NASA goal for establishing manned bases on the Moon is set for 2020.

The aerospace industry is an expensive game. Virtually every space technology project underway today is overwhelmingly over budget. The International Space Station, originally set to cost $10 billion, now costs out at over $100 billion. The aerospace industry publication, Space News, years ago editorialized that they know they must come up with a funding source for their expensive space programs. They have they reported. They said they are sending their lobbyists to Washington to defund the “entitlement programs.” Officially the entitlement programs are Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and what is left of the welfare program after Bill Clinton got through with it.

The space industry has declared war on the poor and the working class. Which will it be folks? Social progress or bases on the Moon?

Let’s play ball Mel!

(Source: http://space4peace.blogspot.com/)

Is it only me, or there is a serious lost of priorities in the US and Canada? This is getting totally out of hand. We have some critical situation on the planet, and they want more cash to put more junk in space? For what? To ensure supreme power in space as well?

LET’S PLAY HARDBALL SENATOR!

This man is Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL). I’ve known him for a long time. We coached our sons baseball team together back in the early 1990′s in Orlando. I got hit in a car crash once and he was my lawyer. He went on to become Orange County Commissioner and then George W. Bush appointed him to his cabinet. From there Martinez went on to win the U.S. Senate seat in 2004. Many experts have reported that the Republicans did much electoral manipulations to win that year in Florida. Today Mel is the chair of the Republican National Committee. His main job is to recruit Hispanics for the Republican Party.

Martinez has just announced that he will be taking the lead to ensure that NASA’s Moon base missions will stay a top priority in Congress.

That means that Martinez and I will get to play hardball once again as the Global Network has long been working to bring the light of truth to NASA’s Moon program.

The Moon base the U.S. wants to establish is really about two basic things. One is the establishment of mining colonies on the Moon to extract helium-3, a precious resource that could be used for fusion power here on Earth. Scientists have long been saying that the profits from helium-3 extraction will make the money made from oil exploration on Earth look like nothing in comparison. But in order to make the Moon mining program possible, new launch capabilities must be developed to lift the heavy payloads necessary to build the Moon bases and return the mined resources back to Earth. This is where the nuclear rocket comes in. Nuclear reactors for rocket engines, NASA says, would give rockets greater lift capability and speed up transit time to the Moon and Mars. (NASA is working to create mining colonies on Mars as well. The Halliburton Corporation is today building a drilling mechanism for Mars.)

Nuclear powered mining colonies are also on the drawing board. So a host of nuclear launches would take place from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. It is important to remember that space technology can, and does, fail on occasion. We should also remember that the Department of Energy (DoE) nuclear production cycle has a long and dirty track record at the labs across the U.S. When the nuclear powered generators were fabricated at Los Alamos Labs in New Mexico, from 1994-1996 for the Cassini mission, over 244 cases of worker contamination were reported to the DoE.

The Army has had plans since the early 1950′s to set up military bases on the Moon. Scientists have long known that there exists an Earth-Moon gravity well. Whoever sits at the top of the well, with bases on the moon, will be able to literally control who can get on and off the planet Earth. So military bases on the Moon play a key role in the space “control and domination” program outlined in the U.S. Space Command’s 1997 document called Vision for 2020. It’s hardly a coincidence that the NASA goal for establishing manned bases on the Moon is set for 2020.

The aerospace industry is an expensive game. Virtually every space technology project underway today is overwhelmingly over budget. The International Space Station, originally set to cost $10 billion, now costs out at over $100 billion. The aerospace industry publication, Space News, years ago editorialized that they know they must come up with a funding source for their expensive space programs. They have they reported. They said they are sending their lobbyists to Washington to defund the “entitlement programs.” Officially the entitlement programs are Social Security, Medicaid, Medicare, and what is left of the welfare program after Bill Clinton got through with it.

The space industry has declared war on the poor and the working class. Which will it be folks? Social progress or bases on the Moon?

Let’s play ball Mel!

(Source: http://space4peace.blogspot.com/)

Is it only me, or there is a serious lost of priorities in the US and Canada? This is getting totally out of hand. We have some critical situation on the planet, and they want more cash to put more junk in space? For what? To ensure supreme power in space as well?