X-Message-Number: 19159 Date: Tue, 28 May 2002 02:01:15 +0800 (CST) From: =?big5?q?kurt2100kimo?= <> Subject: Moonbase ChungKuo by 2010 Yes, the Chiness have, in deed, announced thier intentions of establishing a permanent base on the Moon by 2010 as well as manned missions to Mars shortly thereafter. However, one must realize other issues occuring in China to realize that this probably will not happen. Much has been said about Japan's banking problems. What is not covered by the financial press is that China has a banking problem which is much worst than that of Japan's. The large Chinese banks are dominated by the government, trying to keep the giant state corporations alive, in order to prevent an unemployment rate of 100 million people. These enterprises are bankrupt by Western accounting standards, and the money being lent to them will never be paid back. At the same time, the government is trying to promote the private sector in order to get it to creat as many jobs as possible. However, 70% of Chinese workers still work for the state enterprises, the private sector can't absorb them all right now. Hence, the lending of money to the state enterprises to keep them afloat, at least for the short term. Analysts think that all of this will come to a head sometime between 2005-2010, and that the results could be quite ugly. The space program, intended as a boost for nationalist sentiment and to get people to rally around the current government, will probably be shut down during the coming political-economic crises. The next government, trying to create jobs for 100 million unemployed people without a whole lot of deficit spending, is unlikely to view a government-sponsored space program as the solution. Hence, it will get cut. Do remember that the Japanese made the same kind of annoucements (space hotels, moon-bases, etc.) about the time that I moved there in 1991. Of course, nothing came out of it and NASDA (the Japanese equivalent to NASA) has the same kind of problems (defense-like cost overruns, bureaucracy, etc.) as NASA. So, I have a similiar skepticism of the Chinese space program. Maybe, I am wrong. However, I do know enough about Asian bureaucracy that I think it unlikely that they will be successful in establishing a moonbase, at least by 2010. ----------------------------------------------------------------- < C Yahoo! _ > www.yahoo.com.tw Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=19159