A little over thirty years ago, America's Apollo programme was in full swing. I was a schoolboy at the time and lapped up everything about the "space race" I could find. Then, our future exploration of space seemed assured. We would be on Mars by the '80s, the shuttle was coming, space stations would circle the globe and space tourism would be commonplace. It didn't happen...
Fast forward to today and we're little further ahead. Space stations there have been and still are, albeit on a very much smaller scale than the orbital behemoths then expected. The shuttle's here too, though it's also rather a compromised craft. Tragically, of course, it's currently grounded in the wake of the Columbia disaster.
It's just possible though to peer a little way into the future and construct a more promising scenario. It's likely that China will launch her first astronauts soon, perhaps within the next couple of months. Maybe, just maybe, this Sino space-programme could trigger a new wave of exploration.
Consider the parallels - the moon landing programme was a product of the Cold War. There's no cold war as such between China and the United States, but with one the world's only superpower and the other emerging as one, it's no great feat of imagination to envisage rivalry in a field of endeavour which could well become the next military "high-ground" ... the spin-offs of such activities could be literally out of this world!