[Lake]

>>No doubt their funding will be increased as a result of their continued success.

There are people inside China opposing the manned space project. THey think the defense budget should be the first priority. BTW what did the US gain from the Moon landing?

[cibco]

"BTW what did the US gain from the Moon landing?"

ROCKS :0)

[MarkWar]

>There are people inside China opposing the manned space project. THey think the defense budget should be the first priority.

[laughs] There are benefits to living in a non-democracy! Once the people in charge figure out what they think is the right thing to do, they can Just Do It.

What did we get from our space program? How about the ability to tell which brand of watch is on bin Laden's wrist from orbit? The military "payback" is obvious. And, once someone establishes a serious presence in orbit, say at L5, the real economic returns may become, so to speak, astronomical -- don't forget, it costs almost nothing to ship goods down to Earth... (If resources could be gathered, say, from the Moon or from passing asteroids, rather than shipped up from Earthside...)

Mark W.

[zog]

--I think the biggest thing they learned was to quit pharting around with 18 ton mainframe computers and get with miniaturization if they really wanted to go high tech. That and some machining and materials advances. I think they lost 20 years on abandoning the x projects and going to the dumb capsule concept though.