Poor Mark Whittington. He continues to grasp at any straw that offers him hope of the Great Race with the yellow hordes, despite their obvious slow pace and uncertain plans for their human spaceflight program.

Sadly for him, Dwayne Day sets the record straight, in comments:

I’m increasingly surprised by the shallowness of the coverage that the Chinese space program is receiving from spacedaily.com’s Australian commentator. See, for instance, here.

The commentator, Morris Jones, speculates based upon limited knowledge and data. For starters, he was not even _at_ the talk by Mr. Luo Ge (I was), and is making his judgments based upon a Reuters news article. That article was essentially accurate, but did not discuss Luo’s comments in detail or really in context. Thus any conclusions that one draws from the article are going to be a distorted assessment of what Luo actually said.

Read all, if you’re interested in this subject.