China’s space race

‘China reveals Five Year Plan for space travel’ reports the Dutch news site nu.nl, referring to the twelfth Whitepaper in which the Chinese government reveals its plans, including a permanently manned Chinese space station by 2016. How credible is that?

Professor Boudewijn Ambrosius has little doubt about China’s space plans. The space missions’ expert from Aerospace Engineering is in between two lectures as he reflects on the recent Chinese progress. “In fact they’re already doing parts of the operation,” he says. “They launched an experimental module and docked with it live on television. That’s a courageous operation.” Indeed, the fully automated docking involving the Shenzou-8 capsule and the Tiangong-1 module was broadcast in the early hours of 3 November 2011.

“Afterwards, it decoupled. A few days later coupled again, then the capsule decoupled definitively and returned to Earth in Soviet-style,” Ambrosius adds. This year a manned version of the coupling procedure is slated to occur with the Shenzou-9.

Ambrosius admires the gradual and steady progress of China’s space programme. Of course, docking procedures in space have been known for some 50 years, but the Chinese had to develop the technology from scratch.

The reason for the Chinese isolation lies partly in the violent suppression of pro-democracy protests in 1989. Since then, China has been banned from the space elite club. This meant scientific exchanges were no longer permitted and export of space technology was blocked.

After the successful docking last year, Wu Ping, a spokeswoman for China’s manned space program, said in the ‘New York Times’ that Chinese scientists had arrived at this moment largely on their own, having domestically produced hundreds of components and instruments. Some Western scientists were sceptical and said the successful mission provided stark evidence that the 20-year-old sanctions had failed.
Be that as it may, China’s plans extend far beyond orbital docking. Over the course of the next five years we should see a permanently habited space station. And from there: on to the Moon and Mars.

Ambrosius references the original plans by Werner von Braun, who led the early US space programme and argued that one first had to develop a space platform in an orbit some 400 kilometre high and a system that could routinely ferry people and materials to and from it. That platform was to become the springboard to the Moon, and the Moon was then to be the launching pad for Mars expeditions.

This seemed to make sense, but the Cold War hastened matters and reshuffled priorities, as Ambrosius explained: “So they skipped the space platform and rushed right through to the Moon, which was an incredible feat. I have great admiration for that achievement, but in retrospect it went a bit too quick.” The US space programme now dearly misses the space ferry that they leapfrogged in the 1960s, and now must buy seats on a Soyuz to reach their own space station.

During the next five years Ambrosius expects the Chinese to continue to develop their space programme independently, partly because of patriotic pride but also because the space programme is partly a military operation.

Patriotism however does not stop the Chinese from sending their students to foreign aerospace engineering institutions, like TU Delft. “The knowledge flow is unidirectional, going east so far”, Ambrosius says. “The Chinese don’t share their technology as openly as Nasa or ESA does. Still, China has a strong ambition and a clear plan for space exploration. I think the TU should get involved if it can.”