China's Tianwen 2 spacecraft sends home 1st photo as it heads for mysterious 'quasi-moon' asteroid

[Admin]

China has revealed the first image from its Tianwen 2 asteroid sample return mission, which is now more than 3 million kilometers (1.9 million miles) from Earth.

China's Tianwen 2 spacecraft sends home 1st photo as it heads for mysterious 'quasi-moon' asteroid : Read more

 

[Unclear Engineer]

China is definitely demonstrating rapid progress in advancing its technological capabilities in space.

It provides a good benchmark for what a strong technological society can do with consistent planning and adequate funding.

The United States has been lacking in both for the last couple of decades, and our space programs are showing the negative effects. If it had not been for SpaceX continuing work on some of its government projects while government funding was held up, we might not even be as far along as we are today.

SpaceX and maybe Blue Origin at least have the private funding to do a lot without the government supplying the money every step of the way, and they seem to have a vision for their goals that keeps them on-track with specific programs, even if they don't really have the ability to predict their progress rates.

So, it is basically our "multi-billionaires" who are holding the U.S. space program together at all, with the government-dependent legacy corporations not even close to catching up.

For a while now, NASA sees to have understood (maybe reluctantly) that we need to transition to private R&D and has done a lot in that direction, but it is now rapidly losing control of the "big picture" for how to get things done.

Trump wants (among many other priorities) to beat China back to the Moon, but that might well not last for more than the next few years. Musk wants to disregard the Moon and get humans on Mars, but that might turn out to be much too ambitious in its scheduling. Not clear to me what Bezos wants, except maybe to compete with Musk. Others with less money are also players in new space stations, smaller launch capabilities, radical new rocket (and jet) motor development, and even scientific space exploration, but they mostly depend on U.S. heavy launch capabilities existing and being cheaper than ULA can provide.

So, I am seeing our private enterprises picking up the ball that our government has dropped, and am hoping they can get it over our goal line. But, it really isn't clear what those goals are, anymore.