2003 - A Space Odyssey - I'm not sure if you can say taking an extra forty-six years to achieve manned space flight should be considered "challenging" American pre-eminence, but it seems the Chinese will finally meet the goal this year, as the NY Times reports today. People like to think of space travel as high-tech, but let's remember that the Americans and Soviets got pretty comfortable with the subject back in the days when a transistor was the size of a nine-volt battery and digital watches were still a couple of decades away from practicality. Check out the Chinese National Space Administration's website, which remineds me of the clumsily formatted style popular with Taiwanese memory manufactuers. I'm sorry, did they steal their symbol from the United Federation of Planets? I always thought the Chinese were supposed to be the Romulans.

On a personal etymological note, I'm dismayed to see nowhere in the mainstream media any enthusiasm for using the term "taikonauts" to refer to our new celestial competitors. The word was popularized by Arthur C. Clarke in his book 2010 which involved similar rivalry between a joint U.S.-Soviet space program and a secretive Red China project. It's a cool word (how many English words derive their roots from Chinese and Greek?) but -- alas -- it seems destined to be relegated to the insular world of space geeks.