Godspeed You, Little Taikonaut

The balloon is up, the Chinese have launched, and all of a sudden low-orbital manned spaceflight is sexy again.

It's exciting, it's rough, it's relatively crude and it's dangerous as hell—and for that very reason it should make us remember what first drove this species beyond the clutches of sullen gravity; when the space program was a human adventure, and not a bottomless trough for US aerospace contractors; when we dared to dream of colonizing Mars, not of training ants to sort tiny screws in zero gravity.

Some of the rage and shame I felt in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster in February has resurfaced, tempered by a glimmer of hope. Back in February, I wrote on the 'lith:

Exploration works like this: you pick a goal, then design a tool or a vehicle with which to reach it. NASA has spent years working backwards—designing goals (i.e., experiments) to fit the tool it already has (the shuttle)—mostly top justify the shuttle program's horrific cost and inefficiency—because nobody had the guts to say, "This thing is no longer useful—time to scrap it and start over."

And now somebody is doing goal-oriented space exploration—doing it with whatever technology they can get their hands on, and inventing some along the way. The Chinese are out there Doing The Work. They have made the choice, as John F. Kennedy said, "not because it is easy, but because it is hard."

On one level, I'm pissed that we're back to low orbits in the headlines—been there done that forty years ago and shouldn't we really have space arks on Titan by now?—but on a higher level, I am proud to be a human being. To hell with ideologies, to hell with nationalities: Mankind is serious about space exploration again—and it is with Mankind that I throw my fate.

Godspeed ye, Yang Lewei. Tonight you're up there for all of us.