China's epic space walk
When the Olympic flame extinguished on Aug. 24, it ended a phase of modern Chinese history that began more than 15 years earlier, when Beijing first bid to host the 2000 Olympics. Then comes the question: what’s next for China?
The answer is simply. The Shenzhou-7 rocket carried three taikonauts (China’s word for astronauts, from ‘tai kong,’ the Mandarin Chinese word for ‘space’) into space. Two days later, Zhai made China’s first space walk.
So what now?
Think on a smaller, more commercial scale. China already leads the world in numerous technology market sectors, including as an Internet market and mobile phone market. It’s also Asia’s largest producer and consumer of computers.
It may well be that Yang Liwei will always be remembered as the first Chinese in space, and, perhaps, another name will eventually be immortalized as the first Chinese on the moon, but the role models for China’s youth are the founders of companies such as Alibaba, Baidu and Tencent. They are the entrepreneurs who have reached for the skies. Who have made technology their very own. For them and China, it seems that in technology the sky is the limit, and that may only be a theoretical limit.
Source: PC World
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