SHANGHAI: Chairman Mao, like the British and the Americans, was stunned when the Soviet Union launched the space age in 1957 with Sputnik 1. “How can we be considered a great power?” he asked. “China cannot even put a potato in space.”
But now Chinese scientists have promised the ultimate great leap forward: a Chinese astronaut in orbit by 2005, a manned landing on the moon by 2010 — followed by a permanent lunar base to exploit the new high frontier of commerce.
“China is expected to complete its first exploration of the moon in 2010 and will establish a moon base just as we did on the North and South Poles,” promised Ouyang Ziyuan, head of China’s moon exploration programme as he launched the country’s national science and technology week in Beijing.
After its first man in space, China plans a space laboratory, a lunar orbiter to look for valuable elements and minerals, robot landings on the moon — and then the human touchdown.
The price of space exploration is enormous. Russia and the US are struggling to keep their brand-new investment, the international space station aloft. But China has a long tradition in physics, mathematics and engineering and its doctoral graduates have been welcomed in the US and Europe for decades.
Space flight is a gamble and the stakes are high. If successful, China could have founder membership of the world’s most exclusive club as well as a powerful hand at the strategic bargaining table.
It could also partner a new generation of space entrepreneurs in a game of ultimate high finance. Groups in the US and Russia have always had plans for new industries in space. But to cash in, they first need a foothold on the moon.
China has been putting payloads into orbit since 1970, with the first launch of its Long March rocket. Since then, it has made 73 launches, 62 of them successfully. It has been putting up western satellites on a commercial basis for more than a decade. There have been setbacks. A Long March rocket with a telecommunications satellite aboard exploded on launch in 1995, killing six people. The following year another launch put a 120 million dollars Chinese satellite into the wrong orbit.
Since the beginning of the 1990s China has signalled its plans to move cautiously into manned flight. Engineers began building a space centre in Jiuquan City, in Gansu province, and in 1992 a Hong Kong-based news agency quoted an official as saying: “The launch and retrieval of the first space shuttle will take place in the new space centre and the bases in its vicinity. It will take about ten years to accomplish this grand project.”
In 2001, China sent a monkey, dog, rabbit and snails into space aboard Shenzhou II. And a test in March of the Shenzhou III unmanned spacecraft, with dummy astronauts aboard, was hailed “a major step forward in China’s ambition to send a man in space”.
Many of these developments were conducted in secret. Normal Chinese practice is to move with caution. But Prof Ouyang’s statement was given national publicity the other day on the Communist party People’s Daily website.
President Jiang Zemin has recently shown his personal enthusiasm for the space programme. The Beijing science and technology week is staging an exhibition at the China Century Altar — symbol of the nation’s hopes for the future. Space exploration is its central theme.
Chinese scientists have also predicted that Mars will be the next target after the moon.
A “Mars Explorer” is now on show in Beijing, modelled on Nasa’s Mars Ranger.—Dawn/The Guardian News Service.
