It is impossible now to appreciate the real sense of fear that existed in the West in the wake of Sputnik I. No event between Pearl Harbor and 9/11/01 had more shock effect on the US government and people.

Back then there was genuine concern that the Communists would pull ahead in science, technology, and nuclear weapons while we capitalists fussed around with bigger tailfins on our cars.

Even the CIA was predicting that the USSR would pull ahead economically by 1982, just like Khrushchev promised. I recall an editorial in LIFE magazine that actually advised us that panic was an appropriate response.

And this concern existed just as strongly in many other nations as well.

Opinion polling conducted in "non-aligned" countries revealed a real shift in public perceptions of the relative strength of the competing alliances. As Osama bin Laden said much later: "Offer people a choice between a weak horse and a strong horse, and they will always choose to go with the strong horse." The democratic free-market system looked like the weak horse in 1957-65.

But Oberg's article leaves out an interesting aspect of the Fear Factor: the fact that it doesn't work anymore, despite numerous attempts by space advocates to use it to puff up government expenditures on space travel.

Back in the late 1980s (when the USSR was visibly collapsing) the fear of "The Rising Yen" from a fully rebuilt and techno-charged Japan was a popular bogeyman. The NASP crowd constantly claimed that Japan was about to start a huge hypersonic research program. Of course this went the way of the Japanese fifth generation computer program and their analog HDTV system, billion dollar failures that are forgotten today.

More recently it has become customary to trot out a new Yellow Peril from China.

Ex-Congressman Bob Walker has become notorious for this during his second career as a hired lobbyist for the US aerospace industry. At every opportunity during the past few years, he has promoted wildly exaggerated claims about the Chinese space program and its dire implications.

I once thought that this scam could actually work. Most people seem to have a wildly exaggerated view of China's current power and technical base, probably derived from all those cheap but efficient Chinese products they buy at K-Mart.

But then China did fly a man in orbit, and hardly anyone cared. It was a p.14 story in most media outlets. This lack of interest is about the only aspect of the current space crisis that was a surprise to me. Even Bob Walker seems to have given up; he was a member of the Aldridge Commission, but very little "Yellow Peril" rhetoric showed up in their final report.

Why aren't people scared? I can't speak for the masses, but I can speak for myself and other intelligent observers. Many people keep close tabs on China because they are the only government on the planet A) stupid and nationalistic enough to provoke a war with the USA and B) big enough to cause real damage if they had a modern military.

Fortunately, there are two Chinese economies: the new capitalist one on the coast that makes that stuff at K-Mart, and the old Red rustbelt economy of the interior. It's the old rusty socialist industrial base that designs and makes China's airplanes, missiles, and other weapons. The results are terrible - fortunate, but hardly surprising.

Every nation that has bought Chinese weapons finds that they are hopelessly obsolete in design and dangerously defective in manufacture. In Iraq, ordnance disposal teams find that Chinese-made ammunition will often explode spontaneously just from being left out in the summer sun. In Pakistan, brand-new Chinese tanks fresh off the boat are run through a huge "repair" depot that dismantles and remanufactures them to meet Western quality standards.

And the Red Chinese aerospace industry is the worst part of this noncompetitive Iron Rice Bowl system. They have spent 40 years trying to develop improved versions of pre-1961 Soviet aircraft designs and failed every time.

In the 1990s, they even failed to copy the ex-Soviet Su-27 even with the help of the Sukhoi Design Bureau, and were forced to buy the planes ready-made at a much greater cost. If they decided to fight Taiwan today, most Chinese squadrons would be flying the MiG-19 against Mirage 2000s and F-16s!

At international arms shows, the Chinese state firms are always showing models and posters of advanced high-tech missiles, but somehow they never seem to actually hit the market, or even get deployed with China's own forces. Possibly this is because Chinese generals spend so much money on dressing their troops in the flashy comic-opera uniforms that all totalitarian states seem to love.

Chinese space boosters seem to be a little better than their military aircraft and missiles, but not by much. Their Long March series has a terrible record of crashes, in which at least two farm villages have been incinerated with human losses that are certainly far larger than the absurd official figures. The Shenzhou program has been characterized by long periods of assembly and checkout. In at least one case a booster was dismantled and returned to the factory for rework.

Indeed the pace of the Shenzhou project is so slow that I have often wondered what the launch crews do to entertain themselves out in the Gobi Desert in the ~1yr intervals between launches. The answer is clear from a satellite picture on a recent cover of Aerospace America: most of the base is covered with the distinctive pattern of irrigated farming based on the center-pivot system.

So my take on the Chinese manned space program is that it is a cheaper copy of Nikita Khrushchev's space program - a propaganda exercise to conceal the weakness of their obsolete mass army in the age of smart bombs (both from the ignorant masses abroad and their own people). The low funding and the glacially slow schedule are consistent with this. Even their sudden decision to have women taikonauts (taikonettes?) is vintage Khrushchev.

This propaganda exercise may fool the Chinese people in their little walled-off corner of the Internet, but its not fooling anyone on the outside. It's not 1957 any more. Back then the outside world was totally ignorant about the true nature of the Soviet missile program before spy satellites ripped off the veil of secrecy. Today we know the Chinese program much better and it just is not scary enough to justify a big response.

In fact, the details that have leaked out about the new Bush administration space initiative suggest that it will also be a modest program, carefully scaled to keep the US just barely ahead of China in space at minimum cost.

Frank Seitzen says that the new program is designed around a 4-person vehicle that will fly to the Moon once per year. (This agrees with a calculation I did some time ago based on the surplus capacity of US booster factories.) Shenzhou appears just big enough for 3 or 4 seats and flies about 0.7 times per year.

So if there really is a "New Space Race" as a hysterical headline assures us every three months or so, it will be a race between the tortoise and the snail. Nationalistic competition is no longer a reason for a real manned space program, and it is unlikely that it ever will be again. Space advocates need to find a stronger horse to put their money behind, because this one is played out.

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