Mark Shuttleworth says: There are individuals on either side of a political divide who could be described as enemies, but that does not make enemies of nations. US-based script kiddies poking at Russian websites, or Chinese script-kiddies poking at US websites, isn’t a rational basis for declaring the nations to be enemies.

This is true even where the “attack” is state-sponsored. I’m sure the CIA and NSA continuously probe for weaknesses in the infrastructure of both allies and non-allies, that doesn’t make the US the enemy of every country in the world. At least, it wouldn’t be constructive to say so, because then *everybody* is the enemy of *everybody*, and it would be hard to get anything done.

The reality is that China and the USA need one another, and thinking people on both sides understand that. The US economy has been entirely dependent on Chinese willingness to extend credit, for decades. Think about that. One of the poorer per-capita nations of the world, extending credit to one of the wealthiest, to support the consumption of individuals and companies. Conversely, China is dependent on the US for its export industry.

It’s easy to conjure enemies out of strangers – just ascribe “hostile intentions” to culturally different behaviour. But this works both ways. Imagine what the Chinese could say about America: “you’ve systematically debased the value of our loans to you”, “you’ve launched attacks on small countries with no evidence of hostility, and been shown to have violated the human rights of prisoners”. But those sorts of statements really don’t help to get anything done.

Even in cases where people ARE sworn enemies, it’s better to negotiate. Decades of strife in Northern Ireland were only put to rest after economic growth created opportunities for all, and real negotiations between sworn enemies took place behind the scenes. The same is true of South Africa. It will be true of Iran, too: the only way to resolve differences is to celebrate the willingness of leaders on both sides to find constructive things to do together.

In the case of space, the US is weak. The shuttle will be grounded soon, and becomes more dangerous with every flight. If they don’t ground it for political reasons, they will be saying that the lives of astronauts are cheap compared to national ego. Russia and China are important countries. Space access is a matter of pride more than military strength (all countries that care have sufficient military presence in space, and that has NOTHING to do with civilian manned spaceflight), so it’s a great area for high-profile collaboration.

SpaceX is testing their Falcon 9 soon, if it all goes well then all they need is to get the Dragon capsule working and they’re in business, right?

Let’s hope they work overtime.

Space is a huge opportunity for us. We live on a planet of finite resources, floating in an ocean of infinite resources. We would be far better off using space as a platform to help ease our ill’s, as opposed to sitting on our thumbs by staying here on Earth and waiting for an asteroid to hit us, whilst worrying about how many billions of people we need to cull in order to reduce our carbon footprint.