Rattle wrote:
] China already has ICBMs and all of our space based
] surveillance capability comes from unmaned satellites. We are
] past the point where those are the goals to be attained by
] space travel technology. They have already been attained.

I don't think its that simple. Imagine having to run a large website without ANY physical access to the equipment. You can't even get remote hands support. Its in a locked box. You can't upgrade it, you can't change it, and if the hardware fails, its gone.

I know you know what its like. You know the difference between doing a hairy config change on a network device locally versus from remote. You have to put three times more thought and care into it from remote. You typo a single character and you're either getting on the phone or you're getting in the car.

In space there is no phone, and there is no car... Well, unless there is...

Manned space flight makes a lot of things a lot easier. Many of them are scientific. Many of them aren't. Eitherway, I think its unwise to view the "space race" between the Soviets and the West in purely altruistic terms, and you can rest assured that the Chineese will have manned military missions. Hell, Columbia had a top secret DOD payload. Consider that they freely told the press that they had an Isreali Colonel taking photographs of "dust storms" in Iraq. Thats the stuff thats NOT secret. Think about what is.

RE: China firm on its first manned space flight : HindustanTimes.com