"If the Chinese can figure out how to raise dogs and rice up there, good for them."
I can see them putting a guy in space, and perhaps doing a small space station by 2010, but as Jim Oberg pointed out, the logistics for a moon base are beyond them right now.
I have to think that the real reason they're doing this is because it's a status thing. Space is what Great Nations do. This probably increases the chances that they may actually try -- it's much easier to justify it on nationalistic grounds than it is on technical ones.
However, the essentially political nature of the attempt also makes me think that it'll be the first thing to go when China's domestic difficulties begin to mount.
They did?
Sad to say, but I bet she'll still be a Congress critter if she hangs around that long. No amount of redistricting will carve up her district enough for her to lose.
BEIJING (AP) - Training in secret, a dozen fighter pilots are getting ready to make history as China's first astronauts.
Two attended Russia's cosmonaut school, but little else is known about them. China's communist government, pursuing a unique, costly propaganda prize and worried about embarrassing setbacks, hasn't announced their names or a launch date.
But with confidence growing after three test launches of empty spacecraft, foreign experts say China's astronauts could carry its gold-starred red flag into space as early as this year.
"The day that we achieve our dream of space flight is not far off," program director Su Shuangning said in a rare interview with the state newspaper Liberation Daily News.
A manned launch would make China only the third nation to send a human into space, after Russia and the United States.
It's a prize that Chinese leaders covet.
They have cast off leftist dogma in favor of economic reform, and now try to bind China together with such flag-waving appeals to nationalism - a strategy seen prominently in the effort that secured the 2008 Olympics for Beijing.
Success in space also could boost the Communist Party's public support after corruption scandals that have ruined its image.
China's propaganda goals echo the U.S.-Russian space race of the 1960s that made heroes of Yuri Gagarin, John Glenn and Neil Armstrong. Yet Beijing so far is striving to keep its pilots anonymous.
State media say the first trainees are 12 pilots from the People's Liberation Army, picked from among 2,000 applicants.
Space officials won't release other information and rejected a request to visit their training center, said to be a converted medical laboratory in Beijing.
"I think they're saying as much as they think they can," said Phillip Clark, a British expert on China's space effort.
Russia's cosmonaut training center outside Moscow says two Chinese astronauts studied there in 2000. Clark said a friend of his met the pair, and they gave their names as Li Qinlong and Wu Zi.
In the only disclosure about their training in China, the newspaper Labor News said in April that the astronauts were preparing for possible emergencies during liftoff by practicing escapes from a space capsule at a launch site in the Gobi Desert.
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One way to stop that is to just acknowledge that whomever gets there gets the goods. There will be some Bill Gates type that will fund a way to get up there faster than the Chicoms can say boo. And no matter what, it will be built here in the US, because we have all the technology (so far).
The US became a real coast-to-coast country by building the transcontinental railroad. We built it by loaning the companies money to build it, and by giving them a part of the land they built across. Prior to then, the land had been virtually worthless, there being no transport system. The railroads paid back their loans on time, and with interest. The US got a continent sized country, with a tax base that's still growing. The railroads sold the now-worth-something land, and made money. Everybody won. (don't bring up the indians. They "won" too, but won't acknowledge it)
Why not do the same thing with the moon?
I used to work for NASA. Anybody worth a damn left in the mid 70's, and all that's left are lousy bureaucrats.
Once that happens, the stuff we are scrapping about now won't matter anymore, and it won't matter who won or lost battles no one cares about anymore.
Who cares who has Taiwan, or the West Bank, or Chechnya, once you have planted your boots on Mars, and set your sights on the Asteroid Belt? Who will care who controls which oil fields?
If the Chinese are thinking in these terms, they are right to do so, and if we are not, we will wish we had. We should plan to have private contractors operating on the moon in 7 years, Mars in 12, and the Asteroids in 20, if we plan to matter at all in our grandchildren's time. We are headed down a blind alley, and the only way to save ourselves is to make the big jump, and make it now.
This will be after they learn how to organize a fire drill.
Red Chinese unveil new shuttle design for moon landing
If we could open space to commerical ventures, China will be beaten.
If NASA has to do it, then we'll lose.