China launches first Moon orbiter

China has launched its first lunar orbiter, on a planned year-long exploration mission to the Moon.

The satellite, named Chang'e 1, took off from the Xichang Centre in south-west China's Sichuan province at 1800 local time (1000 GMT).

Analysts say it is a key step towards China's aim of putting a man on the Moon by 2020, in the latest stage of an Asian space race with Japan and India

Earlier this month, a Japanese lunar probe entered orbit around the Moon.

India is planning a lunar mission for April next year.

Full Report from BBC

Not quite the envy of the International Geophysical Year (1957-1958), whose 50th anniversary, embodied by the launch of Sputnik fifty years ago this month, has passed with barely more than a mention in the press. The New Space Race, spurred by The Vision that emerged from the Bush Administration after the loss of Columbia in February 2002, the emerging health of the American, European and Russian commercial launches, the near-completion of the long-delayed International Space Station, and now by China demonstrating its prowess at precision manned and unmanned successes, is well underway.

America is not being left behind. In fact, we're still light years ahead of our global competition, unlike in 1957 when the capabilities of our military launch vehicles was demonstrably lacking, giving rise to the perception of 'the missile gap."

Scientists, like Doctors, are not in love with politics, which they finds as illogical and more unpredictable than quantum mechanics. Nevertheless, while being careful not to mention George W. Bush, they cannot deny the need for a compelling vision of the future outlined by the return to the Moon with a flight to Mars in the offing. They simply call it the "Vision," and anxiety is high concerning that Vision beyond the elections in 2008.

The Compassionate Conservative President John Kennedy saw the Apollo program as the necessary vision to demonstrate the abilities of the West to overcome the advantage given to the Soviet Space program of Korolev in 1961. After the Apollo 17, Richard Nixon and Congress put all of their eggs into a Space Shuttle, which, in the end, proved to everyone the potential of challenging technologies on what was, as it turns out, never more than an experimental vehicle, fraught with dangers.

No more. The Constellation of vehicles, utilizing the best of technological advances and the methods and proven parts of Apollo and the Shuttle fleet, is well underway. The Old New Left, however, controls a Democrat Party pretty much blind to the scientific possibilites of permanent habitation of Earth's Moon.

If the hard Left retains congressional power and takes the White House in 2009, will George W. Bush's "Vision" survive ungutted?

Even if inclined to spend the modest funds necessary to keep The Vision on life support, will the growing competition from the rest of the world supply the inspiration it did during the Cold War with Soviet Russia?

The constituency in favor of Space exploration can't be ignored any longer.