Rand Simberg wrote:

On Tue, 14 Oct 2003 23:07:53 CST, in a place far, far away, Pascal
Bourguignon made the phosphor on my
monitor glow in such a way as to indicate that:



Assuming China makes it to become the third nation to successfully orbit
humans, who does the group think will be next?

Note, I am thinking of national efforts at orbiting rather than private
sub-orbital launches eg X-Prize. I am not aware of anyone else making
firm plans yet. Time for some interesting specualative discussion!


In the absence of any other information, India.


Politically, perhaps.

Technically, I would say that Europe is closer.

Perhaps the fact that a third-world communist country launches men
into space will motivate first-world capitalist Europeans leaders to
do something about it. (We can always dream...)



I suspect that the subcontinent will be much more threatened than
Europe, and they've got more technical ability than people think.



I agree that India is the most likely candidate, but Europe is a close
second. What
I think is interesting is that there are many others. Maybe it will be
Japan, or Brazil
or ...

Maybe one of them will even do it smartly.

Alain Fournier