"Space Odyssey": China' s aspiration in future space exploration

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"Space Odyssey": China' s aspiration in future space exploration

By Ji Shaoting and Wang Wen

(Xinhua) 07:41, March 11, 2014

BEIJING-- In near future, in outer space, Chinese scientists and their international colleagues, perhaps in the company of robots, will seek knowledge in labs on China's future space station.

Aboard the space station, deep in space, researchers will probe the profound mysteries of the universe, while explorers penetrate the darkness beyond both Moon and Mars.

This is no sci-fi movie, but a vision of the future presented to the people' s congress and members of the CPPCC during the two sessions. The vision is of a "space odyssey" for China' s future and for space exploration.

CHINA'S FUTURE SPACE STATION

By the year of 2020, the International Space Station is expected to be retired, while, in that same year, China's space station should be complete. China's station may then be mankind's only foothold in space.

Zhang Bonan, chief designer of the program, told Xinhua that the station will be multi-cabin with a large capacity and high power. "The 2020 space station will be a national space lab," Zhang said.

"Experiments there will be diverse and flexible," he said, "International cooperation will be encouraged and the door of the lab will open for any experiments that fit the requirements."

NEW FLIGHT SYSTEM

The first step to the stars is new technology, principally in supply lines. A cargo ship named "Tianzhou" (Heavenly Vessel) is planned to ferry cargo back and forth to the station.

China is expected to launch a cargo ship around 2016 to serve the Tiangong-2 space laboratory, said Zhou Jianping, chief designer of the manned space program and member of the National Committee of the CPPCC.

The cargo ship will be delivered into space by the new Long March-7 carrier rocket and dock with Tiangong-2 automatically, Zhou said.

A cargo transportation system that supplies goods and propellants is key to China building its own space station, he said.

Liang Xiaohong, Party chief of the China Academy of Launch Vehicle Technology, also a member of the National Committee, explained that the Long March carrier rocket series is already industrialized. By 2020, China will meet a market demand of more than 270 domestic and 460 foreign launches.

The Tianzhou cargo ship and the Long March rocket will be ready around 2016, heralding a new era in space transportation. Moreover, China is expected to launch a "space shuttle bus" this year to carry payload.

The "space shuttle bus", Yuanzheng-1 (Expedition-1) is an upper stage aircraft attached to a carrier rocket. It can carry spacecraft, using its own power, into an initial orbit, Liang Xiaohong said. It has the same function as a carrier rocket and can take multiple craft to different locations, Liang said.

Yuanzheng-1 will play an important role in future moon and Mars exploration as well as orbital transfer and space debris clearing, he said.

From the Earth to the Moon

While the Jade Rabbit moon rover sleeps on the moon, other dreams are taking wing.

Preparation for the 2017 launch of lunar probe Chang'e-5 is going as planned, said Ye Peijia, a top scientist with the Chang'e-3 lunar probe mission.

Chang'e-5, as part of China's third-phase lunar program, is expected to bring back moonrock samples to Earth, which Ye believes will be "a historic moment".

The more sophisticated Chang'e-5, including unmanned sampling and returning, requires breakthroughs in moon surface takeoff technology, sampling encapsulation, rendezvous and docking in lunar orbit, as well as high-speed Earth reentry.

To make sure the mission is a success, a Chang'e-5 test probe will be launched this year to rehearse the route, Ye disclosed.

Chang'e-2, launched on Oct. 1, 2010, is now China's first man-made asteroid, about 70 million km from Earth and heading into deep space. Ye said the ship could travel as far as 300 million km from Earth. "New discoveries cannot be ruled out," Ye said.

"We plan to send a manned mission to the moon. The Earth is our cradle, and humanity will go out from here someday. The moon is the nearest: if we cannot land on it, where else can we go?" he said.

THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES

China now has the capability to explore Mars by sending a probe to circle the planet and land, Ye said. The only question is when.

Humanity has launched more than 40 missions to planets in the solar system and over half of them have failed.

Zhang Bonan said that the logjam for a manned mission to Mars is still the technology.

"Exploration is the ultimate target of human beings. If we cannot break through the technological bottleneck, the future for the whole species will be bleak."

The life of Earth is limited compared with that of the whole universe, Zhang said.

"The future lies beyond the Earth," he said.

"We know so little about the Milky Way, and the whole universe is even more vast. There's too much for us to know," he said, adding that the "unknown" is the biggest drive for humans to explore.

Xinhua reporters Ren Qinqin, Hu Xing and Yan Qilei also contributed to the story.

"Space Odyssey": China' s aspiration in future space exploration - People's Daily Online

 

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What is China up to in space?

First published: Tuesday 11 March 2014 4:12PM

By: Antony Funnell

Image: Yang Liwe received the title of 'Space Hero' from China's millitary commission after becoming the first Chinese astronaut to be sent into space in 2003 on the Shenzhou 5 spacecraft. (Neville Mars; Flickr.com/CC/by-nc-nd/2.0)

China is already the world's third major space-faring nation and is likely to be number one within a matter of decades. According to space analyst Brian Harvey, US antagonism toward China’s space endeavours has only spurred the country on, writes Antony Funnell.

Dublin-based space analyst Brian Harvey uses the analogy of the tortoise and the hare to describe the progress of China's space programme in comparison to its rivals. The Chinese actually invented the rocket, he likes to point out, and they've been using them since at least the 13th century. But it wasn't until the 1970s that the country finally developed the capacity to put a satellite into orbit. Since then, they've been slowly and quietly developing their expertise.

Harvey, the author of the book China in Space: The Great Leap Forward, argues the country's success in building a substantial space capacity has been significantly underestimated. And he says while there's been a tendency in the West to dismiss the Chinese as mere copycats—simply playing catch-up with America and Russia—the growing size and depth of Beijing's space program can no longer be ignored.

'China is now effectively the third space-faring nation in the world if you look at the total number of launches per year, if you look at the ambition and scale of the Chinese space program and if you look at the fact that they are one of only three countries able to do manned spaceflight,' he says.

In June last year China's international standing as a leading space-faring nation was boosted by the staging of the International Astronautical Federation's 64th Congress in Beijing, an event which brought together leading space industry figures from around the world. Then, less than six months later, the unmanned Chang'e-3 spacecraft successfully soft-landed a lunar rover onto the surface of the moon. The mission, declared China's national space agency, reflected 'the new glory of China to scale the peaks in world science and technology'.

Leaving patriotic exuberance aside, the landing of the 'Jade Rabbit' rover was a significant achievement—only the Americans and the former Soviet Union have accomplished a similar feat. Yet the Chang'e-3 mission garnered only minimal international coverage; with the little media attention it eventually did receive dominated by the lunar rover's subsequent technical problems.

Harvey believes US antagonism toward the Chinese space program is keenly felt in Beijing: 'I think a key factor driving the Chinese is that they do not necessarily plan or want to overtake other space nations, but they do want a sense of parity and respect with them, and that is something that they feel they are being denied by the United States.'

The United States Congress, Harvey points out, has long had an openly hostile attitude toward China and its interests in space. 'This is essentially driven by American politics. There is a very strong sentiment against China. We know that there's a lot of respect for the Chinese at NASA and among the American space community,' he says. 'The problem is the Congress.'

'The Congress is implacably hostile to a Chinese presence in space, to the point where, under what is called the Wolf Amendment, Chinese space officials may not even set foot in NASA facilities. The administrator of NASA is prohibited from any cooperation with the Chinese in space,' says Harvey, adding that that heightened level of antagonism has also had serious ramifications for US and European firms hoping to do business with Beijing's space program.

'In the late 1980s the Americans did permit the Chinese to carry out a number of commercial spaceflight launchings of communication satellites, but a ban on Chinese communication satellite launchings was reintroduced in 1997, and that remains in place to this very day under something called ITAR which is a prohibition on any components from anywhere in the world flying on Chinese satellites,' he says. 'Any companies who put even the smallest microchip onto a Chinese satellite have heavy economic sanctions invoked against them.'

One effect of the United States' strict ban on collaboration with China has been to force Chinese engineers and scientists to be more self-reliant. They've learned to work on their own. Beijing has plans to build its own space station by 2020 and to send an unmanned mission to Mars around the same time. It has also publicly announced its intention to undertake crewed flights to both the Moon and Mars in coming decades.

Despite that heavy schedule, Harvey says a characteristic of the Chinese space programme is its refusal to be rushed: 'When the Chinese began their maned flights most observers expected to see something like what happened between the United States and the Soviet Union in the 1960s with astronauts and cosmonauts being sent into space every few months, each flight trying to do better than the other side's. That is not the way the Chinese do their business at all,' he says.

'Their first manned flight was in 2003 and then they astonished everyone by saying the next one wouldn't be for two years more, and the next one wasn't for another three years. Then they did two only a year apart, Shenzhou 9 and 10, but they won't do any manned flights next year. The next one probably won't be until the end of next year. So

it's quite a slow and unhurried pace and a very deliberative pace.'

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Another notable characteristic of the modern Chinese space program is the level of political support it receives, along with the consistency of its funding. President Xi Jinping visited Beijing's aerospace control centre mid-last year to make a video conference call to the crew of China's fifth manned space mission, orbiting aboard the Tiangong 1 space lab. He was back again in December for the Chang'e-3 launch. By contrast, US political leaders have spent most of the past two decades scaling-back NASA's activities and downplaying the importance of space exploration.

'In terms of technology, are the Chinese at a peer level or more advanced than us? No, absolutely not!' exclaimed Professor Joan Johnson-Freese of the US Naval War College in a recent interview with the technology magazine IEEE Spectrum, before adding: 'What they have that we don't have is political will.'

Political will, it seems, but not extravagant funding. Compared to its US counterpart, the budget for China's space agency is decidedly small, reportedly accounting for only around AUD$4.6 billion a year—less than a quarter of the amount allocated by the Obama administration to NASA in 2013. But the Chinese program carries with it the sort of prestige that once saw the best and brightest in America and Europe flocking to NASA.

'If you look at the workforce in the Chinese space program, the average age of a worker in the Chinese space program is about 27, 28,' says Harvey. 'Most of them could get four, 10 times the wages working in private industry, but working in the Chinese space program is so prestigious that people are queuing up to get into it.'

'I think it's worth remembering if the Chinese are currently achieving what they're doing with engineers in their late twenties, what are they going to be able to achieve when they reach their professional maturity at the top of their careers in 10, 20, 30, 40 years time?'

What is China up to in space? - Future Tense - ABC Radio National (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)