ATV4 - better than the Space Shuttle?

Two years since my last post, but the theme is the same: the ISS. Last week I was lucky enough to see not just the ISS on its usual trajectory, but the brand spanking new Automated Transfer Vehicle 4 (The Albert Einstein) on its mission to resupply the ISS.
I found this exciting - much harder to spot than the ISS, so there is a certain thrill just in succeeding in seeing it with the naked eye, and from the centre of light-polluted Brighton, but also a new space vehicle, and a European one as well.
But yesterday I realised that three Chinese Taikonauts had just returned from a week long mission to the Tiangong-1 space module. Equally, if not more thrilling, perhaps? So why is it that I have never made any concerted attempt to see the Chinese space programme in action? I think I am still slightly in thrall to the late 1960s version of space exploration generated by NASA.
Lichtenberg said: 'Our inability to learn in later years is connected with our unwillingness to take orders in later years, and is so very closely.' Waste Book K §24, 1793-1796

Final flight of the Space Shuttle 'Discovery'

For the first time I actually saw the Space Shuttle (Discovery) this evening. As the International Space Station flew over Brighton just after dusk you could clearly see the shuttle following behind it. It was wonderful to watch them both traverse Orion against the southern sky - despite the light pollution you could see them very clearly. There is a certain sense of irony here - this is Discovery's last ever flight and this is its last day in space. I do hope they are all enjoying themselves in orbit - I wish I was there too.

Lichtenberg would, perhaps, have been surprised, although unlike some of his contemporaries he didn't discount the possibilities of human flight:

'Who would wish to say how far the perfectability of man can go? From the child who reels and staggers on his nurse's hand to Terzi [a famous tightrope walker that Lichetnberg has seen at Sadler's Wells theatre in London], who would wish to assert that men will never learn to fly?' Waste Book E §78, 1775-1776.