Some believe that the International Space Station solved the issues of the race for space and the types of military ramp ups we saw with the cold war. And indeed the cooperative nature of such programs between the Russian Cosmonauts and the American Astronauts has yielded a new level of peace. But we see a new race for space is brewing with China and we have lots of competition with the European Union for Mars unmanned aerial vehicle and robotic exploration.

We are also seeing some commercial applications and free market competition for the commercialization of space. Most notable Burt Rutan's Mojave Desert Group and SpaceShip One with some 38,000 deposits taken from would be space tourists who will be paying an average of some $200,000.00 each to go into space and land safely back on Earth's terra firma.

Will China put a man on the moon soon? Yes, but as NASA scientists say not by this June. But let's not count China out, as even the United States roadmap for Space is a decade away and is nothing less than a slow boat to China. Some are rather excited about the prospects of putting a colony on the moo

n, yet we should have done that in late seventies or early eighties, as now we are looking rather silly saying it will take 25 years for a manned mission to Mars and 15-20 years to establish a lunar colony. For such a Super Power like the United States, that is a dismal and pathetic if not totally modest goal.

Surely we can do better than that. However with this said expect greater advances in BioTech, Nanotech, robotics, new materials and propulsion in 2006, as part of the United States Roadmap to Space, which is a very good thing indeed. More on this in 2006.

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