Japans Moon Ambitions - They're KIDDING, Right ?

BlackWater wrote:

(cnn.com)
TOKYO, Japan (Reuters) -- Japan's space agency is drawing up plans
that could include manned space flights and a manned research base on
the moon, a newspaper said on Monday.


"However, I believe there is no change in our stance on manned space
flight," he added.

. . . . .

What, are they KIDDING ???

Despite the spacefaring success in their cartoons and
their overall mechotechnological prowness , Japan has
hardly been able to get a rocket off the ground without
the thing exploding. It's downright embarassing to watch.

I seem to recall something similar with American space launchers and
Euro ones too, their newest heavy lifters. Learning how to build and fly
rockets includes explosions. It's part of the game.



I dunno WHAT their problem is, but frankly I'd be more
inclined to ride on a ricketty old NASA shuttle or even
a Chinese missile than anything Japan is likely to build
in the near future.

Japan could decide to buy or borrow technology from the Russian Soyuz.
This could get them seriously into manned LEO in less than a decade for
not that much money. What does a Soyuz cost now, about six euros or
something?



Face it, the moon is gonna belong to CHINA, not Japan,
not the USA, not Russia. Only China has the resources
to turn an eclectic collection of space tech into a
moon base. They've got the money (unlike western
nations OR Japan), they've got the manpower, they've
got the WILL and they've got the work of the US/Russian
programs to build upon.

I don't think that it would be that difficult to build a manned moon
base. To do it on the cheap would require thinking in ways that are
fundamentally different from Apollo though. It'd put out bids to
everyone one the planet with heavy lift capability and buy from all of
them. I'd have some standard moon lander that could be used to take
whatever amounts of cargo that particular launcher could lift.

Trips could take weeks, months or even a year as I harvested the energy
in the gravitational eddies between where pure rocket power could get us
to where we wanted to go, the Moon's surface. I'd investigate landing
cargo on parts of the Moon which are flat and not very rocky so that
some of the velocity could be used up bouncing perhaps for hundreds of
miles.

People would arrive one at a time after much of the base was configured
by automation. They would literally arrive with nothing but a spacesuit
and a rocket pack on their back. Errors in landing location would be
corrected by sending automated vehicles on the surface out to help. The
rocket needed to do that for one human to the Moon one way is much
smaller than Apollo. In fact, it might even be currently in production.



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