China’s latest launch of three astronauts puts the country on a firm space footing. That’s impressiveand not.

HE YUAN / EPA

Liu Yang, Liu Wang, and Jing Haipeng, the three astronauts for the space voyage on the spacecraft Shenzhou-9, salute before their departure at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in Jiuquan in northwest China’s Gansu province on June 16, 2012.

There are a lot of reasons to be both very impressed and very unimpressed by Chinas announcement that it successfully launched a three-person crew into space todaya crew that included Liu Yang, 33, the countrys first female astronaut. Before 2003, China had never conducted any manned launch at all. That year they put one astronaut in orbit; in 2005 they lofted a two-man crew; in 2008 it was three menplus a spacewalk. Last year they launched Tiangong-1, an unmanned space station, that the new crew will attempt to dock with this week. So just like that: the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs in four deft vaults. The Great Leap Forward was never like this.

But what about those Mercury, Gemini, Apollo and Skylab programs? Chinas been in the manned space game for nine years now and has managed four successful launches. The U.S. flew six Mercury missions from 1961 to 1963; ten Geminis in the 20 months from March 1965 to November 1966; and elevenApollos from 1968 to 1972. In the nine months from Oct. 1968 to July 1969 alone, we popped off the first five Apollosincluding three visits to the moon and the first landing. The fact that China lofted a female astronaut so early in its space program is a very good thingbut that achievement comes a whopping 49 years after the U.S.S.Rs Valentina Tereshkova first made space travel a Title IX sport.

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Dont lose sight either of the fact that the U.S. and U.S.S.R. were inventing the systems and the flight techniques pretty much on the fly. Its a familiar joke that before Yuri Gagarin became the first human being in space in 1961, people didnt know whether or not a human beings eyeballs would explode in zero-g. But the fact is,people didnt know whether or not a human beings eyeballs would explode in zero-g. The spacecraft, the spacesuits, the ability to rendezvous, dock, walk in space, reenter safelyevery bit of it was new.

China is standing on the shoulders of those long-ago giantsas is the U.S. private sector as it tries to crack open the space travel industry itself. You have every reason to be proud if youre able to summit Mt. Everest, but dont kid yourself: you aint Sir Edmund Hillary.

Much more important though than the fact that China is able to travel in space is the fact that its decided to. The most resonant phrase in Pres. Kennedys 1962 speech speech at Rice University committing the U.S. to a manned lunar landing before the end of the decade was, We choose to go to the moon. JFK speechwriter Ted Sorensen may have beenin the words of Bernard Malamuds The Naturalthe best there ever was, the best there ever will be. He knew the power of the carefully curated verb, and choose said everything. The U.S. has chosen to dither in space (at least in the manned portion of the program) for the better part of 40 years now. The Soviets chose to blow their entire social and political system up 20 years agoan admittedly very good decisionand have been a bit too busy and a lot too poor for an ambitious space program since. That left a big void, and no other wealthy, technologically advanced nation chose to step into it. Props to China for having the spine to do it. But whether it will continue to reel off the successes is very much an open question.

(MORE: China Prepares to Send First Female Astronaut into Space)

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