The race into space - Is the U.S. in it?

re: Space exploration has contributed little to science and less to philosophy. )))

Given the space labs' basic science that led to everything from digital imaging to advancing in optics, amazing contributions to medical science...what a bizarre and curious assertion to make.

So, in it strictly for the thrill ride?

As for philosophy, that's a given, though lots of astronauts besotted with their own transcendent reflections from the inside of the space helmet would beg to disagree...don't you know that it made artists of them, poets, gods even, to ride miles above us for a few moments?

Andrew Roberts: China's century - China's space shot is a warning for the West***"Whether you like it or not, history is on our side," a threatening Nikita Khrushchev warned a group of Western diplomats in Moscow in 1956, adding: "We will bury you." Two events last week should warn us that, although the Soviet Union never succeeded in burying the West, Communist China might. For if history is on anyone's side at the moment, it seems to be moving in favour of Beijing's totalitarian rulers.

The astronaut Yang Liwei orbited the earth 14 times in 21 hours on Wednesday, adding China to the elite club of America and Russia as the only three powers to have undertaken manned space exploration. By 2010 China hopes, in the words of its chief space scientist, Ouyang Ziyuan, to "set up a base on the Moon and mine its riches for the benefit of humanity". Since China's entire space programme is controlled by the People's Liberation Army (PLA), it is unlikely that humanity's benefit is high on China's agenda. As Lt-Gen Edward Anderson, the deputy commander of US Northern Command, has put it: "It will not be long before space becomes a battleground."

Also last week, the banking colossus HSBC announced that 4,000 British jobs are to be lost when it closes its processing and call centre operations in Birmingham, Swansea, Sheffield and Brentwood. Those jobs will now go to China, India and Malaysia, where labour costs are far lower. Unlike the space mission, the HSBC news was confined to the back pages, but its long-term implications are no less momentous; service-sector as well as manufacturing jobs are migrating east.

Napoleon called China "a sleeping giant", and predicted that "When she awakes she will shake the world". Well, now China is wide awake, and armed with an economy that is widely expected to outgrow that of the US by 2025. Moreover, she is casting baleful stares at the English-speaking civilisation that she believes kept her backward in the days of Western imperialism. The Second Boxer Rising has begun, but this time it is being fought on the battlefield of trade. (Beijing's trade surplus with the US now stands at $100 billion.) China's rulers are utterly ruthless; she has an army of 2.3 million men; her neighbours are understandably fearful; and she nurses proud but wounded national ambitions. It is high time that we woke up to the threat that an awakened Chinese empire poses to our present global hegemony.***

Smiling Like Venus, Wary Like Mars*** BEIJING - There is no space race or cold war, but China's success in sending an astronaut into orbit last week is a reminder that any modern aspirant to world power down on Earth ultimately ends up in space. The reasons are ego and potential plunder, but also the fact that the world's most powerful nations fear that space could one day be a setting for war.

If that sounds like science fiction, consider this passage: "We know from history that every medium - air, land and sea - has seen conflict. Reality indicates that space will be no different."

The futuristic prose of Ray Bradbury? Closer to Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The passage comes from the 2001 report of a panel appointed by Congress and led by Mr. Rumsfeld, who was not yet defense secretary. The commission, which studied space-related national defense issues, called for a greater military presence in space and warned of attacks on satellites that could be equal to a "space Pearl Harbor."

For decades, the principal players in space, the United States and the former Soviet Union, have pursued parallel tracks. They have launched spy satellites and other space-faring military hardware. But each has portrayed its manned space programs as civilian endeavors more about scientific achievement, national pride and mankind's desire to explore the cosmos.

China is following a similar playbook. It has military communications and imaging satellites and is reportedly developing ground-based lasers capable of attacking satellites. Yet China's leaders insisted that their Shenzhou 5 mission was not a military venture. It was about, yes, scientific achievement, national pride and mankind's desire to explore the cosmos. ***

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