How stupid can Americans be????

I ask this because last night I happened to watch the NBC TV nightly news telecast and they had a story about the Chinese moon rover landing. They went on about how China is poised to jump ahead of the US in space exploration, that if China feels like it they maybe would be the FIRST to land on an Asteroid....

Well....

NASA DID IT IN 2001!!!!!!!!!!!!!

It just shows how stupid Americans can be...

Here is the press release in Feb 2001:

Yesterday NEAR-Shoemaker became the first spacecraft to land on an asteroid and send signals back from its surface. Since the robot spacecraft was not designed for such a contingency, the success of the landing on asteroid 433 Eros was not assured. Shown above is the last picture taken by NEAR-Shoemaker before its touchdown. The streaking on the lower part of the image was caused by the loss of telemetry as the satellite impacted the surface. The image was taken 130 meters above the surface and spans 6 meters across. Rocks as small as a human hand are visible. As engineers continue to try to communicate with the beached car-sized spacecraft, scientists will work to understand features visible in the highest resolution photographs ever taken of an asteroid.

The space craft sent pictures and data back for two weeks. It was never planned to land but they decided at the end of the mission to see if they could land the craft on the surface and they did. So landing on an asteroid has been done.

And for the China landing, great they landed a rover. Now try to do it with computers and hardware from 50 years ago, without all the data and knowledge (stolen by China from all the hacking they do). Russia and the US landed 50 years ago with craft that were so primitive by today's standards that most people today would be shocked at the low technology. So great China landed on the moon, but just like everything, China bought plans for their space craft from Russia and stole technology from everyone else to come up with this tech marvel...