"You will again show that the Chinese people have the will, confidence and capability to mount scientific peaks ceaselessly, Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao told veteran fighter pilots Col. Fen Junlong and Col. Nie Haisheng after they blasted off from the Jinquan Satellite Launch Center in Ganju province in China's desert northwest.

First, the Chinese are not going to sit on their laurels. They are entirely serious about developing their own space station and permanent base on the Moon and, indeed, look likely to have far more industrial and financial resources to do this in the foreseeable future than either the United States or Russia.

For while the Chinese waited for a full two years to follow up their first manned launch of taikonaut Col. Yang Liwei on Oct. 2, 2003, they were not content simply to repeat the exercise: They sent up a two man capsule rather than just another single-man one.

Second, two years is quite a long time, so the Chinese made clear that while their goals in space are ambitious, they are not going to needlessly risk taikonauts' lives or international embarrassment by pushing ahead too fast with their program.

Without access to any base closer to the equator like Cape Canaveral, Florida is for the United States, or France's launch base for its Ariane satellites in French Guyana, the Chinese limit their manned space launches from Gansu to either spring or fall, when the climate is temperate, and conditions are neither too hot nor too cold. They therefore allowed three previous windows of opportunities for a manned space mission go by before going ahead with this one.

Third, the Chinese are not in a rush because they do not have to be. They have no serious rivals for their expanding manned space program over the next decade or so.

The Chinese, of course, are watching closely what the United States and Russia are doing in space. While the Russian space program is on schedule, and looking good, even with Russia's booming oil revenues, there is no plan at the moment to spectacularly expand it. The Russians have only made clear that they are prepared to operate the International Space Station by themselves if the United States cannot or will not pull its own weight on it. Russia appears to have no plans to send its cosmonauts to the Moon by itself.

The U.S. manned space program is in far worse shape. NASA still plans to fly the remaining shuttle fleet on 19 missions over the next four years before retiring the three craft in 2010. But in reality one knows when, or even if, the three remaining space shuttles will fly again following the concern about possible possible being caused to the Discovery on its most recent mission at the end of July, the first since the February 2003 immolation of the Challenger shuttle on reentry.

And NASA's recently announced plan to send U.S. astronauts back to the Moon will have to wait for the successful development of man-rated missiles and space capsules to replace the shuttles. That is certainly not expected to happen before 2010 at the earliest and even if all goes well, the next U.S. manned mission to the Moon may have to wait until 2018, 46 years after U.S. astronauts last set foot on it.

Fourth, the Chinese are confident. Unlike most of the Soviet launches through the Cold War, but like all U.S. manned space flights, they broadcast the launch of their Shenzhou-6 space craft Wednesday live on national state television. That augurs a great deal of confidence in the reliability of their technology. (There was at least a touch of U.S. cultural influence: The Long March rocket booster blasted off to the accompanying theme music from "Battlestar Galactica")

Fifth, the two year leap for a single manned space craft orbiting the earth for one day to a two-man mission that will stay up for five days is also revealing. It compares well with the similarly rapid evolution to two-manned space flight in the U.S. and Soviet space programs in the early 1960s.

The United States, indeed, went from orbiting its first astronaut around the earth, Col. John Glenn, the second American in space after Alan B. Shepard, Jr. in 1962, to orbiting the moon only six-and-half years later at the end of 1968. If the Chinese can develop their booster rockets reliably over the next six or seven years, there is no reason why they could not become the second nation in history to send men around the Moon by 2011 or 2012. Their current big Shenzhou spacecraft certainly has the size to carry the necessary air and provisions. And orbiting the Moon is a far less complex and risky undertaking than having a spacecraft land upon it and then take off again.

Finally, the Chinese are methodical as well as patient and determined. They have already announced what the next major stepping stone in their space program will be. Sun Laiyan, head of the China National Space Administration has said it will be a space walk by a taikonaut in 2007. If all continues to go well, one should not bet against them.

First of six parts Next: The vision of Tsien Hsue-Shen

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