It made the cover above the fold on both Seattle dailies. But murder in Gaza leads; that's just the way things are with the media.
--LAN3 Wed Oct 15 12:43:41 2003
Reading through some of the space-related blogs on the topic of the taikonaut, because China has been launching heavy things into orbit for some time now; that they can build a life-sustaining capsule isn't a dramatic accomplishment. Part of this attitude comes from Americans space fanatics who are noting the total failure of human spaceflight to accomplish anything it set out to do; the failure of the Space Shuttle program, and the dead-end that is the ISS. These are people who prefer to send robots into orbit to do the freefall science, and want to send people to the moon and Mars (and beyond, I presume) because those goals would require actual technological innovation. (And many of them are right-wingers who want to deregulate private spaceflight efforts, and I agree.)
http://www.rocketmanblog.com/2003/10/chinas_first_hu.html
is a good place to start. Also seek out anything written by James Oberg, retired engineer(?) from USA (the contractor that ran the shuttle program). He is an excellent space policy analyst and an expert in foreign (especially Russian) space programs. He's written a few excellent books, he's all over the place in USENET (I got to know him because of our parallel efforts of "skeptibunkering" in alt.alien.visitors) especially sci.space.* (shuttle and policy, IIRC). And of course, Jamesoberg.com is your Oberg portal.
--LAN3 Wed Oct 15 19:59:09 2003
Most of my LJ friends seem to think they've landed on the moon already.
That animation looks a little like Conway's Life.
--Nick Bensema Thu Oct 16 01:41:49 2003
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