The Chinese government has launched a space station module into orbit and are undeniably heading towards total dominance of space. Is this a good thing or bad? Once space is dominated by the communist countries then where will America be in this whole picture. Their economy is going downhill and there seems to be no way that they will ever reach the heights of the sixties where they went into space for the first time with the orbits around the Earth, the spacewalks and then the moon landings by the Apollo astronauts. Now China are going to do this themselves and show the world that a communist nation of billions can do this just as well as the Americans did. Arthur C Clarke in his novels mentioned the rise of China as a world superpower and their ventures into space and now that is coming true. Science Fiction authors such as Jules Verne have written stories about space travel for over a hundred years, the Jules Verne novel From the Earth to the moon wrote about a trip undertaken by some astronauts in a capsule launched near Cape Canaveral, they were fired out of a gigantic 900 foot (274.32 meter) long cannon, with 100 feet of the barrels length taken up by gun cotton. Of course the giant acceleration forces of the shot would have instantly flattened the passengers into a stain on the floor, even if the vehicle could survive the blast at all.
But that is what some science fiction authors of the past thought was possible and there is nothing wrong with that really, having an imagination and thinking of cool ways to get into space has always fascinated mankind. But of course we use rockets to get into space not firing people at 12000 yards per second (10972.8 meters per second) out of a giant gun barrel. But that is what the gun club did in the novel, but imagine if we did build a gun that big, and you could bombard a continent on the other side of the planet with it. The gun in the novel had a 10 foot bore, (3.048 meters) which is pretty big. Even the giant cannons used by the Nazis did not have such an enormous caliber. in the Warhammer novels they described a giant gun that one of the Space marines spaceships had that used a 50 meter bore, firing skyscraper sized shells. That would destroy a small city. And the gun was manned by a team of slaves that were whipped into action, just like a sailing ship in the 17th century. Although with guns on a much larger scale and with shells with far more power. The ship was named the Vae Victus and was one of the more powerful ships with her gigantic bombardment cannon in her belly. But getting back to the Chinese domination of space, does this mean they will build the first Moon base and their own mission to mars to plant the red flag instead of the Stars & Stripes?
America might recover from the great depression that they seem to be heading into, but this is not certain at this point in time, we will have to wait until the worst is over and we move into a new world with a better leader who can lead us out of the darkness into the light. But due to the fact that all manufacturing and information technology industries are moving overseas to countries like China and India, how can they recover, they are sending all their jobs overseas and moving all wealth from richer countries like America and Australia to the poorer countries and also ripping off the people with a BS carbon tax. But that seems to work as it does not take much to pull the wool over the eyes of the populace and keep them entertained with many distractions like sport, X Factor and American Idol. I have heard that the Big Brother show is coming back, God help us. Reality television is the drivel that every channel is feeding us these days, the only good one worth watching is Monster Garage.