ON JULY 20, 1969, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong slowly climbed down the small ladder leading from his 32,000-pound lunar module and soundlessly stepped onto the moon’s “beautifully desolate” surface.

With few exceptions, America’s human space flight program has been one gigantic cock-up ever since.

Almost four decades after the lunar landings and look at us now: flying a rickety space truck to a moldy orbital station. We’re like that boring family that drives to the same run-down, seaside amusement park every summer.

What’s our problem? In a word: planning. Or rather, the lack of a long-range plan we’ll stick to. When it comes to long-term plans for our manned space program, we’re about as reliable as a frat boy managing a brewery.

Things are different in China.

October 15, 2003: Jiuquan Space Facility. Shenzhou 5, a Chinese variant of the Russian Soyuz spacecraft, blasts into space. After 14 orbits, it safely returns taikonaut Yang Liwei to Earth. Outside of space geek and military-surveillance circles, this came as a bit of shock. We all know that everything from tube socks to region-free DVD players came from China—but men in space?

Although many people were surprised, the Shenzhou 5 mission—and its more ambitious successor, Shenzhou 6—were not sudden developments, but the result of decades of effort by Chinese aerospace engineers to create the PRC’s spaceflight capability.

The program started, as all space programs do, as a military effort.

In 1956, China’s Central Military Commission decided to improve the nation’s missile technology to match the West and keep up their end of the PRC-USSR partnership. Tsien Hsue-Shen, co-founder of the Jet Propulsion Lab, deported from the U.S. on suspicion of being a communist spy, was put in charge of the Chinese rocketry program. The first fruits of this effort were ballistic missiles such as the Dongfeng.

The Russians were already very far along and, during the period of Sino-Soviet cooperation, shared their considerable expertise with PRC rocket men. All that came to an abrupt halt in 1960, however, when Moscow and Beijing had a dramatic falling out.

Despite this setback, the Chinese program, benefiting from Tsien Hsue-Shen’s exceptional guidance, was making solid progress. By 1970, after successfully launching a series of ballistic missiles throughout the 1960s, China sent its first satellite, the Dong Fang Hong 1, into orbit using the indigenously designed Long March rocket.

By 1985, in time to benefit from Deng Xiaoping’s policy of economic development and opening, the PRC began a commercial satellite launch service.

It may seem unimpressive to note that China’s first satellite was launched during a year when Americans were strolling on the Moon, that its satellite service officially began while we were enjoying “Battlestar Galactica” re-runs and that the recent Shenzhou missions are, technically speaking, replays of the kinds of flights the U.S. and Russians boasted about decades ago.

This would be missing the point: China’s slow and steady program—which patiently builds programs (with the emphasis on patiently) one-atop-the-other—is, in many ways, the exact opposite of the American effort. Like crazy strippers, we’re long on exotic technology, grand ideas, and flashy one-offs like the Apollo program, but short on consistency (see: the story of Skylab for a frustratingly typical example). Step by step, taking incrementally larger steps each time, the Chinese have built a solid human spaceflight capability.

And they plan to do more.

Last week’s launch of the Chang’e-1 lunar probe marks the beginning of China’s entry into robotic space science and, it is thought, a manned lunar landing. But, in keeping with their consistently modest style, China National Space Administration officials aren’t making outsized promises. “A manned moon landing is a project with great difficulties, high risks and huge investments. A wish-list approach is not the way to go about it,” says Luan Enjie, chief commander of China’s lunar orbiter project.

Barring some calamity, the PRC will no doubt, using their proven methods, eventually land men on the moon. This makes the tendency toward understatement all the more intriguing. It’s hard to imagine an American space program director making a statement that’s so down-to-earth.

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