Hi Raoul -

everything is lining up, sort of...

It looks like the representatives of the people on Taiwan have offered peaceful re-unification at some indeterminate time in the future, and the government of China has accepted. If there's a commitment by both sides that re-unification will only be done peacefully, and China continues to evolve its own democratic processes, and China manages to develop docking technologies, then they're in... Chinese designers have announced desire...

Japan has two resource disputes, one with Russia on Kuriles, another with China on China sea, both headed for peaceful resolution..

Japan and the US have announced, ESA has not... yet

Russia - Back when their nuclear electric industry was bankrupt, in the middle of Russian winter, while Strobe Talbot was begging for aid, and Gingrich was attacking a man who had risked his life smuggling out Kruschev's memoires for being too pro-Russian, Russia entered into a deal to build a nuclear reactor in Iran, a country which has abundant uranium deposits. Despite those massive uranium deposits, Iran promised not to work on enrichement, and completion date was far in the future.

Since then, Israel has still not reached a peace agreement with the Palestinians. Pakistan and India, two of Iran's neighbors, both have nuclear weapons...

Immediately, Walt Anderson, who funded the Space Frontier Foundation's Rick Tumlinson's attack on ISS to the tune of 10's of millions of dollars per year, is under indictment for massive tax evasion. Also, his MirCorp diverted some $65 million worth of spacecraft and laundhers from ISS in his futile attempt to keep Mir in orbit, and now recovering those assets from him for immediate use for ISS is tied up with a tax case...

I'm sure everyone right now is working far harder than they would have had to, had
1) Gingrich realized the importance of Talbot's request
2) Everyone realized just how insane the Space Frontier Foundation's plan was

When Gingirch was trying to make Clinton's life miserable, I'm sure he did not anticipate handing Bush Jr an immense problem.

Russian General Designer has announced.

The architecture will either be like http://www.geocities.com/epgrondine, with EELV's replacing the shuttles, or like Mazanek's CAPS

Need for very early "small" asteroid and comet detection becoming increasingly realized... SETI accepted as valid science...

If Zubrin wants Mars, I think he would do better to work with Aldrin on cyclers built out of 20 ton chunks, using in situ propellants for the up/down on Mars... back contamination problem may be a real show stopper for this, in any case clearing it is going to be difficult, requiring the use of autonomous rovers...

ep