Former House Science Committee chairman believes China is headed to the Moon.

Though we keep hearing optimistic pronouncements about China's goals for its manned spaceflight program, this is certainly the most interesting. Former House Science Committee chairman Robert S. Walker writes in The Washington Times that China appears headed to the Moon. What strikes me as possibly fanciful is the timetable: within a decade.

Remember, Shenzhou 5, the first manned Chinese space mission, is scheduled for a fall 2003 launch (probably in October). Given China's economy, an ambitious program to launch manned missions beyond low-Earth orbit seems a bit optimistic, especially when one factors in the country's plans to loft a rudimentary manned space station into orbit.

It would be great, but one wonders.

http://www.washtimes.com/op-ed/20030...2308-4284r.htm

Ah, but the first of two robotic rover proxies is headed that way come June, which certainly has you excited (hell, we're all excited about that). And, of course, there's a Japanese mission and a European mission getting revved up. Mars will be taking centerstage first of the year, if all goes well. (Please remind everybody to agree to a measurements standard this time around, Ms. K.)

If the Chinese economy were more robust I'd be more optimistic about all this Moon talk.

But now there are digital cameras.

Because the vehicle that ended up getting built was the result of numerous compromises, intended to a) appease Congress and keep the costs down (thus, instead of building the completely reusable vehicle with the liquid-fueled, manned booster stage, we got a semi-reusable vehicle with strap-on SRBs and one-use-only External Tanks) and b) satisfy the USAF's requirements (the payload bay had to be wider than the Orbiter's original design specifications called far, to accommodate the Air Force's unmanned spy satellites; if the USAF didn't go along with the STS program, Congress was set to cancel it).

The vehicle NASA wanted is not the vehicle NASA ended up with. Also, remember, the only thing that even saved the STS program was a memorandum from Caspar Weinberger to Richard M. Nixon. Nixon, never enthusiastic about the manned space effort (it was a monument to John F. Kennedy, not him), was ready to scrap the manned effort altogether, and Congress was thus inclined.

This apathy/antipathy continues to this day, evidenced by the fact a successor to the STS has never been funded, designed, and built; evidenced by the fact that the X-33/X-34 program has been cancelled despite billions having been spent on it; evidenced by the fact that the Space Launch Initiative has pretty much been shelved (a successor program to the ill-fated X-33/X-34 VentureStar, it was to have culminated in a new-generation manned transport to replace the STS); as evidenced by the fact that even the scaled-back Orbital Space Plane may be cancelled by Congress, despite the fact the remaining three STS Orbiters are grounded and we are solely dependent on the Russian Soyuz-TMA spacecraft to get our astronauts to the ISS; as evidenced by the fact that in all the maudlin' eulogies uttered in remembrance of the heroic crew of STS-107 ("a strong space program is the best way to honor the memory of our fallen heroes"), the talk in Washington now centers around scaling NASA's manned effort still further, with some calling for grounding the remaining Orbiters for good and suspending the manned program indefinitely.

NASA hasn't lost its way. No, it's the powers that control NASA's funding who have lost their way.