The two taikonauts aboard Shen Zhou 6 have made it safely back to Earth, an auspicious end to another actual mission accomplished. Good for them, and for the firm Chinese support shown towards their ambitious space program. Their achievement this time amounted to little beyond YES we can bang and shake and move around without seriously disturbing the craft and NO we cannot use chopsticks in space because they're too clumsy. Maybe in time their efforts will be tempered by problems yet unknown, but with plans for a spacewalk next year, it's clear for now their efforts are accelerating.

And as they speed up, back here in the rest of the "space-faring world" voices still clamor that it's time the rest of the planet slows down. As in, withdraw the human presence from space in favor of robotic senses. Caught up with recent tragedy and imposed upon by fiscal insanity from above, NASA is caught trying to decide whether to ravage the number of necessary shuttle flights from eighteen down to eight. Their budget is being whittled away while the money they need is wasted dousing sand with blood.

So look: As the Chinese put a little shine on their apple back here in bizarro world any optimism grows steadily more challenged if not besieged by critics. As I understand it blame for the free-falling foam during Discovery's return to flight mission has been attributed to "shoddy workmanship." That doesn't give me warm fuzzies that we won't see it again. Still we're looking at May of next year as the earliest opportunity for a shuttle launch.

And the space station continues with strange glitches; only yesterday the rockets aboard Progress 19 made little progress themselves introducing one more mystery aboard ISS. Seems they unexpectedly shut down during a routine burn to lift Alpha into higher orbit preparing for Progress 20 scheduled for December. Why, even William Shatner has been briefly hospitalized for a sore back. When will these blows stop coming?

Somewhere along the way towards our dream reality might throw a few curveballs. There's no compromising physics - designs either cooperate with plans or they don't. That's the hard thing about reality, it can't be faked. And it can get mighty tough. While developing this pitch a quote from "The Cage" jumped into my head, from Boyce to Pike regarding bartenders and doctors getting the same kinds of customers: "The living and the dying." Our space program cannot should not must not find itself associated more closely with the latter.