Posted for Laura Starr

Last week The Great Beyond reported on the achievements of China’s spacewalk mission and https://blogs.nature.com/news/thegreatbeyond/2008/09/post_11.html. Basking in the glory of this triumph, the China National Space Administration (CNSA), at the 59th International Astronautical Congress in Glasgow has officially declared plans to launch an orbiting space lab by 2011.

And the ambitious developments don’t stop there. If the setup of the space-lab is a success, China will continue with developments on creating a human-tended space station, which will be composed of several of these labs. The target date for its assembly is in 2020, two years after NASA allegedly plans to send an astronaut back to the moon.

An administrator of CNSA, Sun Laiyan, believes that his country has to make “step-by-step progress” in order to lay solid foundations for progress and minimise the risks. If a space race is underway, China is tortoise, not hare.