Yamanouchi said China's progress towards launching its first manned space flight was aimed at showing off its military strength.

When I "cheer on" the Chinese, I hope of course that any ensuing space race won't lead to nukes raining from the sky. While there were obvious military and otherwise testosterone-driven motives behind the race of the 60s, it had at least an ostensibly scientific face. National pride was based partly on where we could go and what we could learn, not just on who we could blow up.

I hope, perhaps naively, that the Chinese are mostly free from any ongoing Marxist dreams of universal communism. The flip side of that coin, of course, is that we need to free ourselves from the dream of universal Americanism. Maybe then we could compete "safely," without the unspoken belief that victory in the contest proves some sort of socio-economic superiority. Perhaps it could even keep the most hawkish on both sides from beleiving that the whole exercise was, in the end, simply a search for a bigger and better gun.