LJUBLJANA, Slovenia I wonder what the Russian spaceflight pioneer Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, one of the greatest futurist visionaries of the 20th century, would have made of the latest Chinese space mission. In 1903, at the dawn of wood-and-canvas aviation, Tsiolkovsky had already come up with the idea of a multistage rocket and calculated what speed would be needed to reach escape velocity and achieve Earth orbit. It was Tsiolkovsky who authored the famous utopian formulation "The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but humanity can't remain in its cradle forever" - probably the single most quoted sentence among advocates of human space exploration everywhere.
With two Chinese astronauts having blasted off early Wednesday and now in orbit of the Earth and with an American astronaut and a Russian cosmonaut currently crewing the International Space Station, it's worth reflecting on the fact that Tsiolkovsky didn't say that it was the Russians who would outgrow the terrestrial cradle, or the Americans, or any other nation for that matter. Rather he was concerned with the fate of the entire species. In any case, the maturation he was referring to presumably precluded such adolescent rivalries as superpower competition.
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