So, to get back to Damon's comments, let me ask a question. Why should a PR victory for a communist dictatorship elicit all that much interest?
Because now there is another major player, a potential rival of our country, that is capable of independently putting a human being in space. If they can put a human in space, they can build their own space station (which I believe is a stated goal of theirs), they can eventually lauch their own manned Mars mission if they choose to, and they could eventually become the world leader in terms of space exploration. How likely those things are to happen are open to much debate. But the potential is there, and therefore this event is newsworthy; maybe not front-page, dominating all news kind of newsworthy, but certainly worthy of being reported and noticed.
As to the issue of whether having a human presence is space at all is important... just having a presence in orbit is an advantage because there are things at this point that we don't even know that we don't know. Without continuing to have people travelling into space on a regular basis, we have no idea what kinds of new information we won't have access to.
And there have been (and will probably continue to be) practical scientific benefits. FREX, without a manned space program, the Hubble project would have been a bust; remember, it took a manned repair mission to fix some problems with Hubble that weren't discovered until it was already in orbit.
There are other arguements for having a manned space program, even one that does science that is questionable at best, but I'll wait for your reply to my points so far and will also see if anyone else wants to dive into this issue.
Reggie Bautista "At The Core" Maru
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