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NASA To Push Human Spaceflight
b00le wrote to mention a New Scientist article in which NASA chief Mike Griffin says that human spaceflight should be NASA's top priority. From the article: "Griffin countered that the same loss of expertise threatened NASA's human spaceflight programme, which had served to define the US as a world 'superpower'. He said NASA lost a substantial fraction of skilled engineers during a six-year gap between the end of the Apollo programme in 1975 and the first space shuttle flight in 1981. Letting the human spaceflight programme 'atrophy' after Apollo damaged the agency for three decades, he said."
The Article cites a senator saying that China will be on the moon in 2017... Do you have any bigger "Evil" competitors in mind?
I don't think we ever can spin China as our "evil" rival. We're just too tied to them economically. If Washington starts presenting China too strongly in this way, then China just threatens to make it harder for US companies to get to its goods/consumers. As more time passes, they will wield even more such power. The USSR was essentially isolated from us and that made it easy for the US gov't to propagansize against them. Apparently, China's cultural isolationism isn't enough.
I suppose a grassroots type of "evil-China" movement could emerge. But I don't see that happening any more than it already has when our economy is so tied to theirs. Too many people will want to avoid pissing them off.
Any space race we have with China will be "friendly".