China space station signals shift in space race

Richard Luscombe 
Guardian

September 30, 2011

After edging out the Soviets and winning the race to land a human on the moon in 1969, the United States has enjoyed more than four decades unchallenged as the world’s dominant force in space. The launch on Thursday of the first stage of a new Chinese space station could be seen as the beginnings of a shift in that power.

That China has joined the US and Russia as the third nation with the capability of a permanent crewed presence in space is not, in itself, a significant challenge to American supremacy. Nasa launched its first habitable research laboratory, Skylab, in 1973, and even if China’s Tiangong-1 remains safely in orbit after its arrival, it is still likely to be at least another year before its astronauts are able to make any kind of extended-duration stay.

The wider concern of those who follow the US space programme is the converse trajectories the two nations appear to be taking in support of their ambitions in space.

China, which has invested millions of dollars in recent years into a burgeoning space programme, now has a flagship piece of hardware already off the launchpad. Nasa currently has no manned launch capability of its own for crewed vehicles following the retirement of the space shuttle fleet this summer.

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2 Responses to “China space station signals shift in space race”

  1. The Tinkertoy space station is hard to believe when I’ve see the TR3B, just one of the “super-luminal” (faster than light–their own expression) fleets of spacecraft. It’s hard, indeed, to believe in the Space Shuttle! I thought the Aurora fleet (isn’t that plasma-driven?) was going to be the new replacement for the Shuttle fleet. They’ve displayed, at least tomy own satisfaction) that they are about 120 years more advanced than what they have shown to the public. All public knowledge BTW.
    More of the public knows these things than NASA thinks, apparently.
    So I wish they’d just cut the crap and come clean. Let the chippies fall where they may.

  2. It seems like some of the proponents of manned space travel are making a halfhearted attempt to get ye olde space race gravy train thing going again, which is actually rather silly since the global elite who control NASA and the rest of the aerospace/industrial complex are busy demolishing the whole concept of the nation-state.
    It is very true that competition can indeed be an effective method of manipulation and mind control but the trendy motivator of choice nowadays is terror. Most people will go along with anything if you make them afraid. So if you want us to support spending trillions of dollars on “deep space exploration” you’re gonna have to come up with a credible boogie man. So far, we’re not impressed. How about this: Tell everybody that Iran is conspiring with aliens from an al-Qaeda ruled planet in the Alpha Centauri system to crash a huge asteroid into the heartland of America. A lot of NASA’s dupes would fall for that one, hook, line, and sinker. After all, you’ve played them for suckers before. Kids that grew up on Star Trek and Star Wars will believe almost anything as long as it is endorsed by their infallible NASA Gods. Wasn’t Nazi Wehner Von Braun just a wonderful human being? Would Walt Disney lie?
    But the true believers in the NASA gospel aren’t the problem—you’ve got to scare the rest of the sheeple.

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