Speaking of international space programs, here’s a news story claiming that Japan is going to establish a lunar base.

I don’t know how seriously to take it. It could just be a trial balloon by an agency official. But they don’t seem to be in any big rush about it.

Japan’s space agency, JAXA, is drawing up plans to develop a robot to conduct probes on the moon by 2015, then begin constructing a solar-powered manned research base on the planet and design a reusable manned space vessel like the U.S. space shuttle by 2025.

This was interesting too:

Long Asia’s leading spacefaring nation, Japan has been struggling to get out from under the shadow of China, which put its first astronaut into orbit in October 2003. Beijing has since announced it is aiming for the moon.

Some people think that China’s sending a man into space has kicked off a new space race with us. It may have kicked off a new space race, but the competitors will be Japan and India. And perhaps South Korea (if they can afford in the face of what’s almost certain to be a messy collapse north of their border).

The Japanese program has always been a derivative of NASA’s–the H2 is a knockoff of the Delta, and this talk about their own “Space Shuttle” is just more of that. I’ll take all of these countries seriously when I see significant creativity, and private space activity, and not just government chest thumping.