Fly me to the Moon

I was given some more great info on China's Chang'e program, I put some of the pics up on my flickr site. I still get the general impression that the western media knows more about a manned Chinese lunar landing than China's CLEP(China's space agency). But if you take away the Chinese red moon rising threat(hyped by western media) what reasons does NASA truly have to justify the very large amount of money needed for the current CEV program?. There is a strong interest in the Kliper/PTK replacement, ESA/RKA's upcoming Advanced Crew Transport System, but contrary to western reports there is no Chinese manned lunar program at the moment. FYI the Chinese showed greater interest in kliper than both ESA and JAXA did. Yang Liwei(first taikonaght) and various representatives of China's space program made frequent trips to energia for updates on the kliper program. If ESA/RKA selects the ACTS as the soyuz replacement, I wouldn't be surprised if the Chinese end up playing a big role in the ACTS program.

My Flickr site

Congrats to Discovery on a clean launch, Can't wait until its back home safe and sound. Hopefully the shuttle missions become common again.
And congrats to Bigelow on the succesfull launch of Genesis 1

KSLV- I had hoped to have it done today, But I ended up learning how to use a program called sketchup, I didn't plan to spend much time with it, but the proogram is really good, so simple but very powerful, I just wish it wasn't so expensive, $500 for the full version, $%#@!!!!!. Ahem, but if you use the free version to model with and then use the 8hour full version demo for conversions to other file formats, I should be able to crank out lots of orbiter models from sketchup. I have noticed that you can write scripts for freebie version to convert to other file formats. It would be great if someone wrote one to support Orbiter's .msh format.
Great program, hopefully a programmer from the orbiter community will make a conversion program for the freebie version.

Sketchup site