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.

…and I’m back, but busy doing things around the house that weren’t happening because of the conference. Based on a discussion with Jim Muncy, one of the people who helped draft the new legislation (and Congressman Rohrabacher’s former staffer on space issues), I’ve got some further thoughts on this post.

[Monday morning update]

I’m asked in comments how the conference was. Not as good as previous years, in terms of either presentations or attendance–it had the look’n’feel of being thrown together at the last minute (which is, unfortunately, often a result of being put on by a volunteer organization). I’d hoped to see some people who ended up not attending, but it was worthwhile nonetheless. There was a disappointing panel of SF writers toward the end on Saturday that I’ll blog about a little later (or perhaps even write a column about).

I missed the Saturday evening partying due to another engagement in Hollywood (an event at which, if anyone didn’t have a good time, they didn’t deserve to, and thanks to Brian Linse for his unending and gracious hospitality). But there were sufficiently few people at the conference that I managed to talk to everyone there that I had/wanted to anyway.

However, because I was schmoozing in the hallway at one point (actually, at many points–it’s the main reason I attend these things–I rarely hear anything of which I’m not already aware, one way or another) I did miss the one bit of news to come out of it–a new X-Prize contender. Fortunately Jeff Foust, who was also in attendance, didn’t, and he’s already written up the story.

I’m going to be attending the Space Frontier Conference over the next couple days (and attending an LA blogbash tomorrow night), so posting will likely be sparse until Sunday.

Phil Bowermaster fisks an anti-anti-aging piece in SciAm.

Science writer Carl Zimmer has a blog. It’s as good as one might expect, and I’ve added him to the roll.