Out of the Loop

I’m afraid I’ve been out of the loop again blog-wise these past few days, simply haven’t had the time to stay up to date with things these days. The good news is that this week we *finally* got broadband in the house I’m lodging in (upgraded from 64k ISDN) which is going to make life a whole lot easier! I’m at my parents home again for the weekend helping them prepare for their house move. This has basically involved putting together a tonne of flat-pack furniture from instructions which look more like hieroglyphics than anything you could use to put together a bookcase! At least it’s all looking quite nice.

It was cool to watch the Chinese blast their two-man rocket into orbit earlier in the week especially considering the technology involved was more cold-war rather than 2005 (they used a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, developed in the 1960s).

Does this hail the beginning of a new space race? I doubt it as neither China, Russia nor the US can really afford one right now with everything else that’s been going on in the world but it’s exciting to see some new life to space exploration. However, how much of this is about real science and how much is political is a matter of debate!