On Mar 8, 2:56�am, Pat Flannery wrote:
On 3/5/2010 9:21 AM, wrote:

"We've recently had another short "up periscope"
moment in monitoring China's human spaceflight
program. This latest scan, produced from some
Chinese media statements, suggests that the
Tiangong space laboratory will be launched in 2011,
and three Shenzhou missions will be sent to it in
the future."

See:

http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Tw...ngong_999.html

What I can't understand is what this whole thing is about; unless
Tiangong has some sort of a military mission it is to perform, it's so
small as to be pretty much worthless for a manned space station, or even
building a multi-modular design using this small of component modules -
you would end up making a large number of booster launches to build a
little space station where the crew would be constantly going through
hatchways between the small modules.
They really need something in the Proton payload capacity range to make
even a small station really practical.

Pat

microgravity experiments are ideally performed in small unmanned
laboratories, with occasional crew visits.

this was orignally proposed for nasa, but they choose the large manned
type that ended up as ISS.

People moving around mess up microgravity experiments. hopefully they
will get somer real results

unlike nasa who only has excuses