China details space plans

BBC News ^ | 10.6.03

[mhking]

More details have been emerging about China's ambitious space programme, just days before the country is expected to launch its first manned space flight.

A top defence official, Wang Shuquan, confirmed what has been reported before in Chinese media - that the country is planning lunar landings after it succeeds in putting a man in space.

And the state-run Beijing Youth Daily newspaper has reported that China plans to send a research satellite to orbit the Moon within the next three years.

A lunar orbiter would be launched by rocket and reach the Moon in eight or nine days, the paper said.

It would circle the Moon for a year, gathering information about the lunar geology, soil, environment and natural resources, it added.

The BBC's correspondent in Beijing, Louisa Lim, says these comments are a sign that Chinese ambitions in space go far beyond a manned space flight.

Ready for blast-off

But our correspondent says that what happens to those plans is likely to depend on the success of China's manned space flight.

Although no dates have been officially revealed, the mission is believed to be just days away.

The speculation in the Chinese press is that it will blast off just after a plenary meeting of the Communist Party's central committee, which ends on 14 October.

A leading space expert, Chen Lan, said that "the launch cannot come before 14 October because Chinese leaders will be attending an important meeting in Beijing and I believe some of them, like (former president and military chief) Jiang Zemin, will want to be at the launch site to witness the launch".

Mr Chen, curator of the Go Taikonauts! website, said the Shenzhou V would orbit the Earth at least 10 times in a flight lasting less than 24 hours.

A successful launch is likely to spark an outpouring of national pride, boosting the credibility of the Communist Party.

It is not yet known who China's first man in space will be.

But reports say 14 would-be astronauts have arrived at the launch pad at Jiuquan in western Gansu province and are training inside the actual spacecraft.

[Noachian]

The United States should work on joint space projects with China, which is preparing to send its first person into space, the China chief of U.S. aerospace company Boeing said.

I'm of two minds on this subject. Either we have pie-in-the-sky liberals running our space program without any regard for national security, or we've people in the Pentagon who want to get close to Chinese technology. Or, perhaps we have both.

In either case the Chinese come out ahead because they will have space flight and the ability to put warheads in space in short order. Our military may get to know some of their technology, but that won't stop the Chinese, and nothing will stop the dreamers who will only wake up when the Chinese start making ultimatums. By then, of course, it'll be too late.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Bush's battle to dominate in space***As of now, the 1967 Outer Space Treaty governs the military uses of space, but China argues that strategic plans openly discussed in the Pentagon, including the Missile Defense Program, involve deployments that will violate that treaty. In the words of John Steinbruner and Jeffrey Lewis, writing in Daedalus, "The Chinese were particularly alarmed by a 1998 long-range planning document released by the then United States Space Command. That document outlined a concept called global engagement -- a combination of global surveillance, missile defense, and space-based strike capabilities that would enable the United States to undertake effective preemption anywhere in the world and would deny similar capability to any other country."

If the Chinese were alarmed in 1998 by such "full-spectrum dominance," as US planners call it, imagine how much more threatened they feel now that Pentagon fantasies of preemption and permanent global supremacy have become official Bush policies. For decades, "deterrence" and "balance" were the main notes of Pentagon planning, but now "prevention" and "dominance" define the US posture. Such assertions can be made in Washington with only good intentions, but they fall on foreign ears as expressions of aggression.

When it comes to space, the Chinese have good reason for thinking of themselves as the main object of such planning, which is why they are desperate for a set of rules governing military uses of space. (At the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a study of such rules is underway codirected by Steinbruner and the academy's Martin Malin).***