Bassically the Co-Founder of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was deported from the US to China during the McCarthy era and he became the "Father" of China's space program.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905862

Wikipedia writes, "Under Secretary Kimball, who had tried to keep Qian in the U.S., commented on the affair to say: "It was the stupidest thing this country ever did. He was no more a Communist than I was, and we forced him to go."

I know of three strands of rocketry research that contributed to American rocketry. There was Robert Goddard's experiments with liquid-fueled rockets, as early as the 1920s, Theodore von Karman (a Hungarian who emigrated to the US in 1930) and his team at Caltech, and von Braun and the Germans.

Goddard never got significant US Government support, but he continued his experiments right up to 1940. Of course von Braun did get government support, and apparently his team learned from Goddard's experiments. The end result was that von Braun's team knew more about large rockets, and he went on to head the NASA center (Huntsville) that is most associated with rocketry, and of course to develop the Saturn V. And von Karman, of course, was the founder of JPL.

As @err4nt's comment hints at, there is a rough parallel between von Karman's emigration from Germany to the US (his family was Jewish) and Qian's emigration from the US to China.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Whiteside_Parsons

Happen to run into his story while reading about the history of Rocketry. His story even takes a more bizarre turn with L Ron. Hubbard, and finally his death in a mysterious explosion.

Another interesting co-founder (one of the original handful, along with Parsons) was Frank Malina, who was the second director of JPL (after von Karman).

Malina was also suspected by the FBI of having Communist sympathies. He eventually left JPL and went to live in France.

No, it wasn't. America intentionally established Operation Paperclip with the intention of recruiting German scientists. The Chinese didn't have to do anything to get Qian (and most likely weren't even thinking about space in 1950) - America just handed him to them, thanks to the US government's enormous stupidity.

That's a pretty big claim

I'm not sure it counts as "exotic" by every definition, but it is probably far away enough...

Because I bought it a few years back off a nice lady who gave me a certificate. So keep off or I'll sue.

There were rumblings for many years now, with various semi-official announcements. Nobody took them seriously, so they didn't get much play.

> The Google Lunar XPRIZE, the largest international incentive based prize of all time, aims to do something we haven’t done as humanity since 1973, safely land on the surface of the Moon.

http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/prize-details

That sentence wasn't even correct yesterday, before Chang'e 3 landed. The last lunar soft-landing was Luna 24 in 1976 -- a Soviet sample-return mission.

What they meant is that nobody had done what the Google Lunar XPRIZE requires since 1973. The Google prize requires a rover, and the last rover on the moon was Lunokhod 2, in 1973.

The launch and landing of Chang'e 3 were both broadcast live on CCTV English.

If American news networks decided not to cover it live, then you can hardly blame that on the Chinese.

The Chinese don't want to be humiliated thus I'm surprised there were live feeds. This must show increasing confidence in the space program and their abilities to execute successfully.

Timing, of course, couldn't be better. The Chinese have managed their country admirably. No debt to speak of. Massive investment in infrastructure, technology and manufacturing capabilities. An environment where entrepreneurship is top dog and government seems to pretty much stay out of their way. And, of course, they are also ingesting massive amounts of intellectual and financial capital from the rest of the world.

Some have proposed this is going to inspire or push us to compete in this arena. I'll propose that will not happen at the same scale the Chinese are building-up to. Think of it this way: We have to actually borrow money from the Chinese to compete with them. I'll leave you with that thought.

"“Firstly, the moon is remote from us, and there is no clear short-term benefit for human beings,” says space scientist Yongchun Zheng of the National Astronomical Observatories in Beijing, by email.

But for China, he says, “the lunar exploration program is driven by its science goals. That is, to understand the history and prospect the future of the Moon, the Earth, and our solar system.”

...

“The implementation of China’s Lunar Exploration Program can drive forward the popularization, improve accomplishment of national science, and attract and encourage the youth to fall in love with science and seek after exploration and innovation,” they wrote."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/12/131214-chine...

At some level Mars is as intangible of asking someone to understand how a bird feels while flying. Outside of small circles there's no real appreciation for just how difficult these missions are. Therefore, the sense of awe isn't there. I'll bet most people in the US don't understand why you can't drive the robots on Mars like you do an RC car on the street. Yes, I am hinting at other problems.

I am not sure what the ROI of robotic or manned missions to Mars might be. And I am not necessarily in financial terms.

Not exactly - it's a low regulation environment, but there are huge centrally planned real estate developments and far less planning regulation or due process to stop the government building a road or a mall through your house.

Not to mention the capital controls, and the restrictions on foreign-owned businesses, the lack of free speech or free internet ..

There is speculation that it is actually a common descent stage design which will be used in upcoming science-orientated Moon landings. For example, emplacing a substantial telescope.

The Chinese, as seems usual now, are playing the long-game.

At least, US and Europe have got Mars rovers into working, with failure and success.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_National_Space_Administra...

Not to diminish the significance of this accomplishment, but the Chinese space program is still in a catch-up phase, which allows them to make significant advances quicker than if they were at the frontier.

I'm certain SpaceX could make a dollar go a lot further than NASA can. Perhaps the Chinese even further.

Some of the comments above are not very well-informed.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA

In particular, most of the local government is in great debt, tens of billions in some cases. The Central government has a lot of debt too. Just because there is a pile of money in reserve doesn't actually make the government wealthy.

Doesn't have to be.

Curiosity is usually described as a "rover." In-between commands sent from mission control, it operates autonomously.

Until today, the last rover to drive around on the moon was the Soviet rover, Lunokhod 2, in 1973.

Current renderings are based on real-time telemetry data being sent back from the probe.

40 years is a long time and instruments have advanced. I guess now that the solar panels are engaged and the rover is active, we will get some decent footage. The moon in 1080p? Yes please!

http://english.cntv.cn/program/newsupdate/20131214/104460.sh...

On a separate note, I was hoping the Chinese would install a big Bitcoin banner on the moon to further boost its adoption.

In real-time perhaps not, but yapcguy didn't say that. You can bet they'll be recording major events in high resolution/framerate (deployment, first drive, etc) and transmitting them back later, if only for engineering purposes. Rad-hard nonvolatile memory is relatively cheap when you're sending probes to other planets — even old Spirit/Opportunity had 256 MB.

We also know the rover has some real-time transmission capability (at unspecified resolution):

>The rover will be capable of real time video transmission, while it will be able to dig and perform simple analysis of soil samples. For the real time video transmissions Yutu will use the PanCam. These cameras will provide stereo images in high-resolution and will eventually give three-dimensional imaging for the scientists on Earth.

http://www.nasaspaceflight.com/2013/12/china-jade-rabbit-lun...

Anyway clearly half of that video was a simulation.

Our Conquest is the Ocean of Stars.

hmm hardware costs go up a bit

414K, or 285°F.

One of the hot-selling mining machines in China is the Friedcat Box, providing 38GH/s in 360W power. The dimensions of this thing is a 12cm cube. Using the data of this machine, and calculated with Stefan–Boltzmann law, the temperature will be...

520.6K or 477.5°F

Bitcoins are really hot, I think.

Perfect. Time for a steam powered generator add-on. BTC generating perpetual motion machine. :)