China's Lunar Landing is No Big Deal

I yawned when I heard about it.

But see Telegraph UK, "Why America lacks lunar ambition":

Barack Obama split the US space community when he abandoned plans for American astronauts to return to the Moon and set new sights for Nasa.

While China celebrated its lunar landing, America’s National Aeronautics and Space Administration has no plans to return to the Moon.

Many Americans believed they had won the space race when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in 1969 and Neil Armstrong set the first feet in the lunar surface, famously declaring: “This is one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Another 11 US astronauts walked on the Moon over the next three years. And nobody has been back since. A year after taking office, President Barack Obama controversially ditched the Constellation human space flight programme pursued by his predecessor George W Bush and with it plans for new lunar landings by 2020.

Instead, he set Nasa’s sights on further-flung targets, most ambitiously to tow an asteroid back to Earth and to launch a manned mission to Mars within the next 20 years. That left US space operations in what is known as near-Earth orbit to the private sector.

“Nasa is not going to the moon with a human as a primary project probably in my lifetime,” Charles Bolden, the agency’s administrator, told a panel this year.

Mr Obama’s decision to axe the Constellation programme and bypass the Moon has split the US space community. Buzz Aldrin, the second man to step on the lunar crust, agrees that returning there is a waste of limited American financial resources.

"Do not put Nasa astronauts on the moon,” he wrote in his book Mission to Mars: My Vision for Space Exploration. They have other places to go.”

And in the meantime, Nasa’s Mars Curiosity rover vehicle continues to send back intriguing evidence that the Red Planet may have once supported life.

But other space veterans and experts believe that the US is making a disastrous mistake. Former astronaut Harrison Schmitt, another Moon-walker, was scathing critical of the Obama space policy. "It's bad for the country," he said. "This administration really does not believe in American exceptionalism."

I'm with Aldrin on this one, and amazingly, with the president as well.