China re-affirmed its goal of building a full-fledged space station by 2020 on Sunday, following a successful manual docking between a manned spacecraft and an experimental orbiting lab module.
"Mastery of rendezvous and docking technology is a decisive step towards realizing the goals of the second stage in the development of China's manned space flight program. It also lays a firm foundation for the further construction of a space station," said Wu Ping, the spokesman for China's manned space program at a press conference following the docking exercise.
The more people we have doing this, the better our chances of actually getting off this rock one day.
