I heard about that ChinaRocket thing the day it happened, but not before. Bizarre, I think, even that part -- that it wasn't making some headlines. Bizarre also, on the other hand, that it IS a big deal. For as fast as technology moves, or seems to move, or is said to move, or tells us it moves, weird that so long after Russia's first guy went up there, this should still be a big deal.

Maybe it's all about that speed, actually. That speedy delivery of fancy newness really makes that next step, that moving some human peoples out to a planet, have a huge oppurtunity cost. (Wife's RIGHT NOW trying to get help from me about accounting, stuff about which i wouldnt' know if I weren't peeking at her notes and things, and there's this oppurtunity cost thing rolling around in my head now.) So anyway, even if we're not talking about manned missions -- look at the cheaper, faster kick Nasa's got itself on. We can't accept big expenditures on unknown outcomes way out in the future because that money put towards another technology right now could get us a whole series of faster, fancier things.

It's frustrating as hell, but somewhere I think i crossed that divide between, "in my lifetime there'll be people on mars," to, "in some future generations' lifetime there'll be people on mars." It was invisible when that happened, but I think it must have, because everything about this space stuff seems a little more dull now. (I think that's too complex, I don't understand it enough yet, to get into now... but I don't wanna delete what I just wrote. So it's a halfthought.)

There's good science going on, I'm sure. A lot of health stuff, which is great but not what I hanker for, me, the armchair scientist. It just doesn't excite me the way other stuff could. That big spinny wheel of a space colony we were supposed to get... it's become some halfway-to-not-being-finished joint space station thing that's never going to be a big wheel at all. (Yeah, that previous paragraph becomes belied the more I let myself dwell here... I'm just a cynic now, more than ever. Still got that glimmer in here of hope that something like that's going to happen, though. Probably this is why I have that half-hidden "hope" that one of those "the sky is falling!" comet/asteroid reports turn out to be closer to true. If something was coming at us we'd have to really do something.)