Monday, April 28, 2008
SPACE DRAGON?
I'll start my post-repaired blogging with a note about this item at CNN, which strikes an alarming tone about China's ambitions in space. I found it via Mark Whittington, a space activist and blogger who is one of the few writers I regularly read who doesn't seem to get how deeply flawed NASA's Constellation program is, and who also seems to sound the "space race with China" song fairly often. It's another thing he's wrong about.
As I've noted here before, the glacial pace at which the Chinese space program is progressing is no accident. It's a function of the deeply conservative and risk-averse political culture that pervades the Chinese government. In that culture being wrong is a lot worse than being right is good -- in other words, it's a lot better to be safe than sorry. The people who work in the Chinese aerospace world are very, very competent people, but they simply aren't going to take the kind of risks that it would take to "overtake the US in space" any time soon.
Could the Chinese tortoise win the race? Yes, but only if all of the American hares get grounded or sidetracked. If the pathetic Constellation project was the only thing China was competing against, I'd be worried. But they're competing against LockMart and Boeing and, far more importantly, SpaceX and Blue Origin and Bigelow.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 6:40 PM
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