So, China is expected to become only the third nation to send a man into space, sometime later this week. I have mixed feelings about this.

First, it perpetrates the meme that "manned spaceflight is extraordinarily difficult and only national governments have the resources necessary to accomplish the feat". This ignores the fact that the computer you are using, right now, is far more complex than any of the Apollo missions - your home computer (if it is less than a few years old) is more than the total computing power that NASA had available in 1969. It also ignores the 46 years of spaceflight that have already occurred, with the reams of spaceflight data freely available on the Web.

However, I see any competition to the current Russian/American stranglehold on manned spaceflight as a Very Good Thing. Now, if only Scaled Composites and the other Xprize contenders get their acts together and start launching... oh happy day.