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China Challenging U.S. as Space Power

Posted on: Sunday, 23 March 2003, 06:00 CST

Beijing plans to send astronauts into orbit in October, aims for moon

Shanghai, China (New York Times) -- Even as Americans question the purpose of manned space flight after the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, the world's newest space power, China, is recreating the glory days of Apollo.

China plans to send its first astronauts into orbit on its Shenzhou spacecraft in October.

When their re-entry capsule parachutes back to the grassy steppes of Inner Mongolia, the Chinese hope to have exceeded U.S. and Soviet records for the number of men, length of time in orbit and complexity of operations for a first flight. China plans to have two or three astronauts aboard for the first flight.

But China's aims go far beyond low-Earth orbit. Beijing is pursuing multibillion-dollar programs to construct a space station and explore the moon. Its scientists are energetically, if still dreamily, planning a colony on Mars.

China's Communist leaders are taking a page from the U.S. playbook of the 1960s to spur technological advances, give China a place at the pinnacle of military power and bolster the popularity of a governing party that still faces enormous social and economic problems.

"Space technology does not belong to the rich countries alone," said Zhang Houying, a scientific director of the Shenzhou program. "In science there is only a No. 1, no No. 2. We'd like to lead in contributing to mankind."

China's space program, controlled by the reflexively suspicious military, has long been shielded in secrecy. The program's managers do not disclose their budget, launch details or even the names of the 14 astronauts in training at a guarded complex outside Beijing.

But the country's top officials make it clear that they intend to challenge the United States in space, where it has faced little competition in manned spaceflight since the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Aiming for the moon

China intends to reach the moon by 2010. Some in China belittle the U.S. moon landing in 1969, proclaiming they will do more than "plant a red flag and pick up rocks," as one space planner put it.

Officials say they aim to exploit the moon's resources. They covet its apparently abundant supply of helium-3, a rare isotope on Earth that some scientists believe may prove to be a clean fuel of choice when used in special nuclear fusion reactors that would have to be developed.

"We've got to seize this moment when other countries have no comprehensive plan to return to the moon," Luan Enjie, the head of China's National Space Administration, told the official New China News Agency earlier this month.

The cost of these efforts is staggering for a developing country, even one with a decade-long streak of fast economic growth. Foreign experts estimate China's annual spending on space programs at $1.3 billion to $3 billion.

While that is no more than one-fifth of NASA's budget, it is at least 10 times what Russia spends on its much-depleted space program.

China's celestial ambitions are fueled as much by defense as discovery. The push into space has helped improve the range and accuracy of ballistic missiles and provided tools for military reconnaissance.

Military strategists now boast that the January mission of Shenzhou IV, the precursor to the manned voyage, showed that the People's Republic had mastered technology to remotely alter cruise trajectories, a skill it considers critical to frustrating America's planned missile defense system.

Mutual mistrust, in fact, may be contributing to the beginning of a new space race.

When the U.S. imposed sanctions on China for weapons proliferation in 1999, it targeted the country's commercial satellite launches, an important source of money for the space program.

The sanctions apply to any satellite made with even minor American components, such as microchips, and they have crippled China's once lucrative launching industry.

Not part of space station

Though it is arguably the world's third space power, China has not been invited to join the 16 nations taking part in the international space station. Chinese scientists said in interviews that they were enraged when the U.S. denied them visas to attend the World Space Congress last year in Houston.

"The Chinese perceive themselves to be deliberately excluded and slighted on even small things by the U.S.," said Joan Johnson- Freese, an expert on China's space efforts at the Naval War College in Rhode Island. "That has pushed them to pump more money into their own program."

It was the U.S., though, that inadvertently gave a boost to China's earliest efforts to reach space some 50 years ago. Qian Xuesen, formerly a leading rocket engineer at the California Institute of Technology, was expelled to China during the McCarthy era for suspected communist sympathies. He designed China's first missiles and is now regarded as the father of its space program.

Under his guidance, China launched its first satellite in 1970. It famously blared the Maoist anthem "The East Is Red" from orbit. But the country's manned space program did not begin in earnest until 1992 with the start of the current 921 project.

The program has not been flawless. Long March booster rockets suffered fiery failures in the mid-1990s. Government officials predicted that a Chinese would orbit the earth by 1999, the 50th anniversary of Communist rule. In fact, it was not until 1999 that China man- aged the first trial voyage of an unmanned spaceship.

As the manned mission approaches, leaders have begun stirring up patriotic support. Stamps and phone cards imprinted with images of the spaceship have become collectors' items. Space fairs have shown mock-ups of a robotic lunar vehicle and a Mars colony.

The military has dropped hints about the rigorous preparation of its astronauts, called taikonauts. State television has offered glimpses of them floating weightless in training sessions.

Astronauts are fighter pilots

The Chinese with the right stuff, like many of the first American astronauts of the Mercury and Gemini programs, are all fighter pilots. They average 30 years old, weigh about 145 pounds and are about 5 feet 6 inches tall, military officials say, ideally suited to minimize load and maximize maneuverability in flight.

"Appropriate and medium in stature, quick in movement and unafraid of hardship, China astronauts are clearly superior," said Su Shuangning, a space program director, was quoted as telling the state media.

Though such talk has made space a point of national pride, the program does not have universal support.

Some Chinese scientists also say privately that their country may be emulating the wrong achievements. When the U.S. and Russia embarked on their space programs more than 40 years ago, they were already leaders in making conventional aircraft. China, despite repeated attempts, does not build airliners or high-quality fighter jets.

It is also unclear how much of China's space program represents a scientific breakthrough. The Shenzhou is a knockoff of the Russian Soyuz. Like the Soyuz, it has three sections: a propulsion module, a pressurized re-entry capsule, and a forward module used as work space in orbit.

Chinese astronauts have been instructed at Russia's training center, Star City. Chinese scientists acknowledge that they bought life support systems from Russia.

More pointedly, the U.S. State Department says two leading American companies, Hughes Electronics and Boeing, helped China improve the guidance, telemetry and aerodynamics of the Long March rockets in the late 1990s.

Because the rockets have military as well as civilian uses, the companies were charged with violating export control laws.

This month, they agreed to pay $32 million to settle the charges.

Chinese officials deny that their space program depends heavily on foreigners. Officials have dismissed the U.S. charges as laughable. They say they have imported some Russian technology, such as the Soyuz, but have made innumerable improvements.

For example, the Shenzhou's forward module has a collapsible solar panel and separate thrusters, so that it can remain in space after the astronauts return to Earth, something the Russian Soyuz could not do.

Phillip Clark, a space expert at Molniya Space Consultancy in London, said China had benefited from studying what others had achieved in space, but China's indigenous efforts had allowed it to skip ahead.

"There's no reason for them to reinvent the wheel," Clark said.

"But they are doing things their own way."

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NASA

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