There were congressional hearings on the nation’s goals in space today, and Keith Cowing was apparently present.

Drs. Griffin, Huntress, and Murray all called for dramatic increases in NASA’s budget and a clear, cogent focus on a clear destination in space – going to the Moon/and or Mars featured prominently in their remarks. Dr. Koss semeed a bit unsure of where he stood, and Dr. Roland repeated his assertion that we should slow down and that we retreat from human spaceflight with our tail between our legs.

Not surprising, considering that the lineup of witnesses was the usual suspects. As Clark Lindsey points out, “no alt.space types in this lineup.”

And to quote Keith in another context, “Yawn.”

First it was Tokyo Rose, then Hanoi Jane, and now this.

“It’s difficult to be in France and criticise my government…”

But not too difficult apparently, because she manages.

My latest Fox column is up. It’s a more concise version of my previous analysis of the new launch regulation legislation. Bottom line–I endorse it, and encourage people to get their representatives to become sponsors.

Shenzhou should be landing in a few minutes (Oberg predicts 22:25 UT).

[Update at 4 PM PDT]

He landed safely. Congratulations to the engineering team.

Someone talked the Gray Lady into publishing a boilerplate proposal to fix our space program–let’s go to the Moon! (registration required)

Yawn…

These pieces always assume that there’s nothing wrong with the way we’re doing space that a spiffy new goal won’t fix up. And of course, we should not only go to the Moon, but we should do it as an international venture. Sure, why not? After all, just look how well it worked out with the space station…

These people need to realize that, until we tackle and truly solve the problem of access to orbit, the rest of this is pipe dreams, and if we do solve it, we won’t have to argue about what we should be spending NASA’s money on, because we’ll be able to afford it ourselves.

According to the Christian Science Monitor, we haven’t been teaching college students to think, but things are getting better.

I’m not going to bother to point to any particular post, but Professor Hall has been blogging up a storm this week (and the week’s still young). Ah, the life of a professor…

Jim Oberg has a good analysis of their plans.

China has launched five Shenzhou vehicles in a period of four years, which is not an impressive launch rate. But each one was meticulously handcrafted with improvements based on previous flight experience. Now that the design has been validated and standardized, the same level of expenditure will probably be able to manufacture and launch at least twice as many vehicles in the same time period.

That means we should be able to expect two to four Chinese manned flights per year over the next five years, with mission durations of up to several weeks. Some flights will test new technologies and new flight techniques. Others will assemble and use the ?space train? of linked orbital modules. Depending on international negotiations, one or more may visit the space station as a symbolic demonstration. China may take representatives of its own space partners ? perhaps a Brazilian, perhaps a Pakistani, perhaps even a European ? into orbit.

Sorry, but it doesn’t sound to me like anything likely to cause angst in the American psyche any time soon.

[Update on Tuesday]

Well, the comments section is on fire. I may have to reconsider my position, because Marcus Lindroos and I seem to be in agreement. 😉

I’ve got some response to a lot of this, but I think that I’m going to put it in a column, either for Fox or National Review, so I’ll just let the commenters continue for now. Suffice it to say that I continue to believe that this is much ado about, if not nothing, then very little, and that in fact people who fear, for whatever reason, China’s space program should take great heart from the expensive (perhaps ultimately unaffordable) and unimaginative way in which they’re going about it…

When they stop emulating the Russians (and NASA) and start taking their technical lead from the American entrepreneurs, then I’ll start to worry.