China’s Zheng He moment in space

The completion of China’s highly successful 15-day Shenzhou 10 orbital mission didn’t set any dramatic world records: It essentially confirmed that the Chinese manned space program is now where America’s was at the end of the Gemini program in 1966. But there is far more to that statement than meets the eye.

Within three years of the end of the Gemini program the U.S. space program had successful landed two American astronauts on the surface of the moon and brought them home safely. Over the following three years from 1969 to 1972 total of 12 U.S. astronauts landed on the moon and safely returned home, and in all 24 U.S. astronauts orbited the moon, 240,000 miles from the Earth and safely returned home. Even a full-scale explosion on that wrecked the Apollo 13 spacecraft could not prevent the intrepid astronauts on board and the extraordinary engineers at Mission Control in Houston from surviving and returning safely.

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Shenzhou 10 mission marked the triumphant end of the first 10-year period of China’s manned space flight starting in 2003. (screenshot)

But that was then and this is no. In the 41 years since the Apollo 17 mission, not a single U.S. or Soviet/Russian astronaut or cosmonaut has ventured more than a couple of hundred miles above the Earth. None of them have left Low Earth Orbit (LEO). The exploration of space has stagnated in both countries.

By contrast, China’s Manned Space Agency is now pushing ahead with the most ambitious manned space exploration program the world has seen since the golden age of Apollo.

The three takonaut Shenzhou 10 mission marked the triumphant end of the first 10-year period of China’s manned space flight starting in 2003. Now, almost ignored by the Western media, CMSA director Wang Zhaoyao has announced an ambitious research and exploration program for the next seven years.

In a speech in Beijing reported in the official China Daily on June 26, Wang confirmed the CMSA would launch it second manned space laboratory, the Tiangong (Heavenly Palace)-2 around 2015 and then construct an experimental core permanent space station module by 2018. This would then be expanded by teams of taikonauts to complete a 60-ton multi-module space station by 2020, he said.

Funding has been approved and planning is already underway for the series of manned and unmanned boosters to deliver the necessary payloads into orbit to achieve these goals, Wang said.

Wang also confirmed that a new space center capable of launching man-rated boosters was being constructed on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. Already, the new launch site’s main infrastructure has been completed, including the testing laboratories for carrier rockets and spacecraft, he said.

The new projected Long March-5 booster can be roughly compared to America’s Delta 4, although it would still be far smaller than the gigantic Saturn V that carried the astronauts of the Apollo program on their successful missions to the moon more than 40 years ago.

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China ranks second only to Russia in its capability to independently send its own human crews into Low Earth Orbit . (Wikipedia Commons)

The new Hainan complex is being expressly constructed to repair and launch the new generation of larger boosters with increased capabilities. It will be able to carry a 20-ton payload in LEO.

Ouyang Ziyuan, an academician at the Chinese Academy of Sciences and also the chief scientist of China’s lunar orbiter Chang’e missions, spelled out more details of the coming moon exploration program to the conference of the Chinese Society of Astronautics in Beijing on Oct. 11, 2012 at the end of World Space Week, China’s Global Times newspaper reported.

Chang’e-3 will carry out a soft landing on the moon, the first time China has attempted that maneuver. It will carry an unmanned lunar rover powered by an atomic energy battery that will keep it operational for 30 years, Ouyang said.

“We (have already) also solved the problem of the large temperature difference on the moon through high-end technology,” he said.

The mission will study the surface and geological structure of the moon and carry advanced equipment to study the plasmasphere electromagnetic fields above the earth, he said.

In addition to their ambitious Moon mission plans, China’s scientists are planning a major program of pure scientific research in space in the next few years.

On September 4, Zhang Shuangnan, an astrophysicist at the Institute of High Energy Physics of the Chinese Academy of Science (CAS) told the Xinhua news agency that his country planned to put its own first space telescope into orbit three years from now, in 2015. It will be called the Hard X-Ray Modulation Telescope (HXMT) and will focus on exploring black holes, neutron stars and other space phenomena based on their X-ray and gamma ray emissions.

The projected 2020 space station will carry out a Dark Matter Detection program and a Cosmic Lighthouse Program to explore the birth processes of stars and the origin of the universe, Zhang said.

Zheng He (1371–1433), formerly romanized as Cheng Ho, was a Hui-Chinese court eunuch, mariner, explorer, diplomat and fleet admiral, who commanded expeditionary voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa from 1405 to 1433.   Zheng He statue in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum. (Wikipedia Commons)
Zheng He (1371–1433), was a Hui-Chinese court eunuch, who commanded expeditionary voyages to Southeast Asia, South Asia, the Middle East, and East Africa. His statue is in the Quanzhou Maritime Museum. (Wikipedia Commons)

Already China ranks second only to Russia in its capability to independently send its own human crews into Low Earth Orbit for a wide variety of missions.

China continues to focus primarily on small capsule-type manned space craft and large, relatively inexpensive boosters. It has been incrementally improving existing technology rather than investing heavily in, and gambling on, major leaps in technological capability such as the U.S. Space Shuttle was intended to provide in the 1980s.

The long-term implications of the Chinese program are enormous, and go far beyond the sums invested. A non-white, non-European based major power for the first time is set to take the lead in cutting edge areas of scientific research and technology. The 1960s A U.S. space programs generated enormous technological advances ranging from computers to the invention of Teflon. The U.S. economy was driven by these new technologies for the next half century.

Today, however, the driving force for the manned exploration of space is coming from Beijing, not Washington or Moscow. And it is visionary scientific program directors like CMSA’s Wang and Ouyang and Zhang of the CAS who have inherited the heroic trailblazing roles pioneered by Werner von Braun in the United States and Sergei Korolyev in the Soviet Union.

For the first time since the famous Admiral Zheng He in the Ming Dynasty 500 years ago, China is back in the forefront of exploration and research for the entire human race. This is a Tipping Point of enduring lasting importance.