Watching history in the making

China's Shenzhou-9 soared from the launch pad into history on Saturday. The capsule carrying China's first female astronaut, Liu Yang, and her two male colleagues, Jing Haipeng and Liu Wang, blasted off from the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in northwest China, atop a Long March-2F carrier rocket.

On Monday the spacecraft successfully docked with the Tiangong-1 space lab, a vital step in China's plans to build its own permanently manned three-module space station by 2020, which will be the only space station after the programmed retirement of the International Space Station in 2020.

The ninth "Divine Vessel" adventure is more than just a milestone in space exploration; it marks the rise of China as a space-going nation, just as the Russian and the US programs lose their luster. This can be compared with the world-changing rise of Spain in search of the New World. Spain's dominance of centuries of ocean-going exploration was based on advanced shipbuilding technology and a burning quest for what has been characterized as "God, gold and glory". China now has the technology, but unlike the conquistadors it is not proselytizing and not seeking to steal gold.