Tibet: more ambitious than the moon?

Right, firstly, the "NASA going back to the moon" story. Let's skirt around the politics and assume it really is going to happen. Does anyone else feel, like me, slightly disappointed that more than forty years on, the best idea out there is a bigger better version of what was done before: "Apollo 2.0", as it were?

The real advances in space engineering since Apollo have been in satellite launching, reducing the cost of getting small payloads into orbit. By building the whole thing on the ground, NASA will need the biggest launcher ever, which is a nice bit of flag-waving, but doesn't take advantage of enough of the developments which have taken place since Apollo. Why not build it in orbit, and use what we've learned in the meantime?

Back on earth, it's worth reading about an incredible civil engineering achievement which is currently under way: the railway from China to Tibet. A wonderful piece of journalism rightly given six pages in The Guardian newspaper this week (see link below) quotes the travel write Paul Theroux, who once wrote that the Kunlun mountain range is a guarantee that a railway will never get to Lhasa: "That is probably a good thing. I thought I liked railways until I saw Tibet, and then I realised that I liked wilderness much more."

But next month, three years ahead of schedule, Chinese engineers will complete that line to Lhasa. Commercial services are scheduled to begin within two years. The political and environmental implications are enormous, and what this project says about Chinese engineering is equally fascinating. You'll need an undisturbed coffee break for this one.