Congratulations to Fei Junlong and Nie Haisheng, China’s second and third astronauts, on their successful launch today.
It is ironic that NASA, after three decades of wasted work on the Shuttle and Station, is returning to the modular, capsule-based approach that worked well the first time around, which the Russians have perfected, and now the Chinese are carefully developing. The Chinese station will be built out of (shock, horror) Shenzhou orbital modules stacked together.
One can only dream of the kind of infrastructure that could have been in place had NASA similarly used spent Shuttle tanks, for instance.
