Comment Re:We Are Aleady in a Space Race (Score 1) 275
Their proposed time table has them returning moon rock to earth in 2017, launching a space station in 2020, and a moon walk in 2024. So arguably, in a little less than ten years from now, they will have caught up with where the US was around almost two decades ago.
Your point makes more sense in the "race" analogy than you realize. Basically the US won the race handily in its "space technology prime" but now "two decades" later it's 50 pounds overweight and too lazy to train for the next one, while China is putting everything it can into it. Using the moon landings as a bar for progress only makes sense if the US could trivially go back. Which it clearly can't.
Not that I'm arguing the US *should* spend the money to compete with China on another moon landing. It's already been proven the task is just a matter of resource expenditure, so doing it again would be about as interesting as another Rocky movie.