The sky's the limit

China's Shenzhou 7 just brought 3 chinese 'taikonauts' into space and allowed China's first space walk in its thousands of years of history. This piece of news didn't exactly shock the world the way China's kinetic weapon did 2 years back. However, this incident made me speculate a couple of things in the space eploration arena. One thing that made me quite impressed with was how China could conduct this operation with the lack of media clout in the world. While the world greived at the wallstreet crashes and Singapore roared to the sounds of Fernando Alonso kicking everyone's ass in the Singapore Grand Prix, China has opted to play the, as of now, quiet game of space exploration.

One small step in space exploration, one giant leap for chinese projection of influence. China has thus far never failed to impress me with its suddeness and stubborness of its operation. The testing of their anti satellite kinetic weapon for one was a bold show of defiance to American imperialism in space. So the Chinese showed the Americans that they couldn't guide GPS bombs over China, what next? To the moon and back I'll say. It would be a matter of time before China went to the moon and build sancastles there while NASA plays with its space shuttle replacements.

The American space projects suffers from extreme democratic bureacracy while the Chinese have the advantage of swift, efficient governorship. This launch has no doubt been a project that has swept the world off its feet. Watch out : the Chinese can throw bombs into space now.

Now how many space shuttles have crashed and burned and got delayed before every flight now?

China : 1
NASA : 0