Shenzhou 5

[mmcirvin]

Yang Liwei heads for orbit.

Update: Spaceflight Now is doing its usual running report and has a feature story. Of course, the Chinese state media being what they are, it's unlikely we'll get a gigantic flood of information.

Update: Here's astronautix.com's background page, with links to large amounts of deeper background. According to this site, they're doing the manned-spy-satellite thing. That's a bit surprising to me, given that both the Soviets and Americans already tried that approach and ultimately abandoned it as not cost effective. (The Soviet one was, as far as I know, the only manned spacecraft ever to have a big honking gun mounted on it; one American attempt was with the space shuttle Challenger in 1984, and the Soviets actually hassled the astronauts with a ground-based laser. Cold War fun all around.)

Comments

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Don't be surprised. All the Party ever does is spy on people, they don't care how lame the methods may be. They try it every way they know how. It's just the ingrained mentality.

Trust me, I know, our family lived in China for a year around 1979-1980 and my Dad is Chinese. It's like, Duh. ;-) And my sister just spent some time there. Things have not changed, let me tell you.

Of course, the FBI are spying dumbasses as well. I know this because they followed our family around for like a year, after we got back from China. They had convinced their little pea brains that *we* must be spies.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I just read your post to Sam and she mentioned having just read Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We", in which all apartments have glass walls, and you're only allowed to lower the blinds during regularly scheduled copulation sessions.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

Wow, harsh.

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

The novel being a dystopian satire on conditions in the early USSR.

[chicken-cem.livejournal.com]

How would you say it differs from Orwell's 1984?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

Well, I haven't read it; Sam did. But it sounds as if it's more emphatically science-fictional and also somewhat lighter and funnier than 1984. The plot sounds rather similar; We was supposedly an influence on Orwell and Huxley.

[(Anonymous)]

I had to read "We" for a college course. I remember not liking it very much, but "assigned reading" was never my favorite literary genre. We were then forced to read an Ayn Rand book, which was, as far as I could tell, the same exact thing, only a few decades later and 1000% crappier. I think it was called "Anthem". It was named after a Rush song, I'm pretty sure.

-Andrew N.