Japan Today: China to establish base on moon in 2010

China plans to launch its first mission to the moon in 2010 and to establish a base there, the China Daily said on Monday.

"China is expected to complete its first exploration of the moon in 2010 and will establish a base on the moon as we did in the South Pole and the North Pole," the newspaper quoted Ouyang Ziyuan, chief scientist of China's moon exploration program, as saying.

Good for them. Maybe that will get us off of our space butts a little bit. As Ralph Cramden would say: "To the mooooon!"

And if you doubt that they can do it, remember that it took us almost exactly 8 years from Kennedy stating the goal to the first moon landing. And we had less technology at our disposal and faced the unknown.

We've probably got all of the equipment needed fully-designed, so we could probably go back permanently in three or four years. But if we're not interested, why don't we just sell our plans to the Chinese so they can save themselves the time and trouble of doing it themselves?

If you happen (as I do) to think that that's a really bad idea, wouldn't you rather we were already there once they showed up?  

12:29:56 PM  comment []    

Satirewire: Reminder

1:00:22 AM  comment []    

T[H]anks!

And they did. Thanks!

Update.

Spoke too soon. I think they were just in mid-redesign when I looked at the site last night. They're back to the white on black. Grrr. I wish that IE would allow me to modify style sheet settings per site, rather than simply globally. Or they could give me a keystroke to switch between my styles and colors and the site's. I'd have that one memorized in a flash!  

12:38:01 AM  comment []    

Business Week: Five Questions Bush Must Answer

Why, if Attorney General John Ashcroft stopped flying on commercial aircraft over the summer, did Justice not issue sterner warnings to airlines and the public about threats to commercial aviation?

Rice says because the Administration believed the hijacking threat was primarily a foreign problem, it didn't caution the public about a possible hijacking of a domestic airliner. Still, Senator Richard Durbin (D-Ill.), at a closed-door Capitol Hill briefing with Rice, raised a Fox News report that Attorney General John D. Ashcroft was warned by the FBI in July not to fly commercial. He used leased government aircraft to travel to a summer fishing vacation in Missouri

12:23:29 AM  comment []