Its got to be disheartening to be an international member of the Chinese space program. Within the borders of China, Taikonauts are hailed as national heroes, their missions aired as event broadcasts everywhere from bars to school-houses. In the West, however, their achievements get little press. When your local space agency is putting robots on Mars, popping an astronaut up to low Earth orbit is a hard sell to broadcasters. Still, we ought to appreciate some of the remarkable achievements of the worlds fast-rising second runner is aerospace. After all, it was just 10 years ago today that China put its first man into space.

On October 15, 2003, Yang Liwei rode the Shenzhou 5 mission to become the countrys first non-terrestrial citizen, making China just the third nation ever to achieve this on its own. To put this into perspective, in 2003 NASA was working to perfect its reusable shuttle program to help with traffic to and from an orbital space station though that quest resulted in the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster and a major blow to American confidence in the space program, it still shows the large disparity in technology that existed between the two administrations.

The launch of Shenzhou 10.

In the ten years since China put Liwei into space, the country has managed to launch a functioning space station, dock with it several times, and is even working on three different lunar landers one of which is designed to return with samples and act as a model for a manned mission to the Moon. In the same 10-year span following astronaut Alan Shepards 1961 foray into space, NASA focused entirely on winning the space race by putting a man on the Moon. It shows the difference in priorities that comes with the modernization of space, as China focuses on satellites, rovers, and orbital platforms and makes a manned mission to the Moon a second priority.

Remember, though, that NASA launched Apollo 11 just eight years after its first manned space flight; Chinas most optimistic flight-to-lunar-landing advancement will at least double that span of time. Still, during the space race the US was spending between $6 and $33 billion per year on space technology; China now spends on the order of about $1 billion per year. If the history of the US is any sort of model, China has a major increase in spending still to come, one that could help it cement its place as a world power in the way both the United States and the Soviet Union sought in the 1950s and 60s.

The Change 3 lunar lander.

In America its an aging population that still remembers the early landmarks of space exploration, but in China its the young. If you were eight when China first reached space, you were eighteen when it completed its first lunar lander. These are important stepping stones for a rising national economy, and for a population that seems to hunger for validation on the world stage. This is an ambitious space agency that constantly looks at least three or four missions ahead, and which plans for success. Dont be surprised if, in 15 years or so, its China who first announces concrete plans for a manned mission to Mars.

Chinas impressive progress is to be expected of course, since it have the benefit of seeing research done by earlier American and Soviet scientists over the past 50 years or so. The struggling giant of the American economy can still outspend its rivals though; despite having the lowest portion of the federal budget since its second year of operation, NASAs funding is still roughly fifteen times that of its Chinese counterpart. If China continues to expand economically, we could see its ambitious plans meet with the funding to truly take off.

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A decade after its first manned space flight, China is becoming a power in the skies