by Phil McKenna
12 February 2014
The first taikonauts return to Earth after 15 days in space. They won't be the last (Image: ChinaFotoPress)
China's new-found footing off-world is changing the rules of today's space race – find out how the rest of the world is rethinking its strategies
ON 14 December 2013, the top trending topics on China's biggest social networks were a popular TV show and a football match. If it hadn't been for a concerted push from China's state-controlled media, the casual observer might never have noticed that China had just become the third country in the world to land on the moon.
The news was not greeted with sweeping enthusiasm. After all, landing the Yutu robotic rover, aka Jade Rabbit, on Earth's closest neighbour was a feat human explorers had bagged many decades before. "We're now only 50 years behind Russia and USA," quipped one commenter on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. "Our country's designers have some catching up to do," wrote another, before worrying that the joke would lead to police detention.
But if China itself seemed a little bored, that was nothing compared with the collective yawn echoing around the world. Apart from failing the novelty test, the mission was accomplished using knock-off equipment, and Yutu was dismissed as a tragic "me too" exercise by a country lagging decades behind the world's leading space powers.
This common reaction missed the point. Jade Rabbit's successful launch, landing and exploration is evidence of China's meteoric rise in the space stakes, and one that will only accelerate. "It is a classic example of the tortoise and the hare," says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC. From the sophisticated communications network that guided the rover to its destination, to emerging satellite technology that is the envy of other nations, to its plans for a new international space station, China is a force other space superpowers ignore at their peril. The ripples are reaching out to affect everything from your phone's settings to the first future footprints on Mars.
To get an idea of China's burgeoning space programme, look no further than its satellites. Starting in 1970, China launched low-quality transponders and rudimentary spy satellites capable of only the most basic tasks at an entirely unimpressive rate of one per year. By 2012, the country had surpassed the US with 19 launches in a single year. China had also sent its first taikonaut into space, conducted its first space walk and completed its first rendezvous and docking with a small space laboratory. "The manned program they are building is progressing a lot faster than the US did with theirs in the sixties," says Richard Holdaway, Director of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space division, one of the UK's closest collaborators on the Chinese space programme. "They are catching up at an astonishing rate."
"In 15 years they have gone from bit player to leading player," says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they have done so on a shoestring. China's space budget is less than one-tenth of the US one, according to a recent estimate by the Space Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Colorado Springs.
So what accounts for the rapid acceleration? A common, and not entirely charitable, answer is that other nations have already solved many of the challenges. "When it was just the US and the Soviets, there were basic questions of survival – like what would astronauts breathe, how much oxygen, how much nitrogen – that no one knew the answer to," says Cheng. "Today China can benefit from much of that having been worked out and made publicly available."
His words reflect a familiar attitude that China's technological progress has been built largely on the ideas of others – whether given freely or not. "We get hacked from people in China every day," Holdaway says. "Most systems are pretty robust but some stuff gets through." Indeed, the received wisdom is that China has acquired so much intellectual property from external and sometimes unwilling sources that they may not be capable of innovation. "They are still in a developmental stage using essentially Russian technology and knock-offs," says Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company in Las Vegas.
However, on closer inspection this picture seems incomplete. Granted, as Bigelow points out, China's Shenzhou space capsule looks nearly identical to Russia's Soyuz capsule. And beneath Chinese spacesuits, taikonauts often wear an inner pressure suit made in Russia. And yes, Jade Rabbit looks like an updated version of Lunokhod 2, a Soviet rover that landed on the moon in 1973.
Long march
Many of these similarities stem from a deal that took place in the mid-1990s, when China purchased much of Russia's human spaceflight technology, including Soyuz capsules, spacesuits, life support, and docking systems. However, China has made vast improvements to the original designs. For example, the Shenzhou capsule is roughly 30 per cent larger, with solar panels, advanced avionics and electronics. "China has developed what the next generation would have been," says Leroy Chiao, a former US astronaut.
Other crucial improvements, however, are not incremental – China has leaped ahead of other countries, thanks to basic science. For example, to operate a rover successfully on the moon, Chinese engineers had to make it impervious to lunar soil, an incredibly sharp, fine-grained, and sticky substance that nearly scuttled the Apollo missions. To test rover prototypes without advice from countries with access to fake moon dust, Chinese scientists developed their own simulated lunar soil from scratch. They did it using only a tiny sample of moon rock acquired decades earlier from the US, says Yongchun Zheng, a planetary scientist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.
China's rocket technology has a similar tale to tell. Its Long March rockets are an original design, and quickly became more advanced than Russian rockets, which have changed very little over the years, relying primarily on kerosene, a low-power but easy-to-use fuel source. The Long March 3 – which sent the Jade Rabbit on its path to the moon – uses a more advanced hydrazine and dinitrogen tetroxide fuel. "It's something the Russians have tended to stay away from," says McDowell. "It has more oomph but it's harder to work with." He refers to the Chinese success with this fuel as a "high-tech achievement".
And so, thanks to these and other rapid advances in China's space programme, Jade Rabbit spent six weeks mapping lunar regolith before an equipment malfunction froze it in its tracks. This week, the end of lunar night will reveal whether the rover survived.
If space were simply about moon rovers, the story might end there. But China has also been busy elsewhere, developing a full suite of systems including software, satellites, and communications infrastructure with the goal of total space independence.
To communicate with its probes on previous lunar orbiting missions, for example, the country relied heavily on the European Space Agency's global deep space antenna network. But not for much longer perhaps. "The Chinese are building up their own network," says ESA's Karl Bergquist. "There is less necessity to rely on us." For the Jade Rabbit mission, China still used both networks, but depended less on ESA's.
Satellite navigation is in the middle of a similar overhaul. China is a little less than halfway done with BeiDou, its answer to the GPS satellite navigation system. As of today, 15 navigation satellites are in orbit with plans for 20 more by 2020.
Indeed, satellite technology is where the country really shines. In 2010, China demonstrated its capacity for precision manoeuvrability when two satellites appeared to rendezvous and briefly touch before continuing on their separate ways. "It's one thing to simply come screaming in at high speed and bounce off or destroy the other," says Cheng. "But to come in, nudge something and back off is indicative of very high-end technology and very highly advanced skill sets." A satellite this sophisticated could repair other ageing satellites to stop them becoming space junk – or help assemble a space station.
Indeed, a second space lab will be in low-Earth orbit by 2015, placed there by the next-generation Long March 5 rocket, capable of lifting 600 kilograms more than the now-retired US space shuttle. A full-scale Chinese Space Station (CSS) will join it by 2020. A report published by the Chinese Academy of Sciences spells out China's next steps, which include a crewed lunar base – a goal Holdaway considers reasonable – a human mission to Mars, and robotic planetary exploration by 2050.
For a country that has yet to set foot on lunar soil, such projections may seem unrealistic. But China's long and persistent march is not the only reason to believe the road map: the country also possesses at least two resources no other country can compete with. The first is people. "A quarter million people are working on their space programme," says Holdaway. And these scientists and engineers are young, says Gregory Kulacki, China expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists based in Washington DC. Echoing the idealistic, young NASA culture of the 1960s, he says, "the average age is low 30s, which is 20 years younger than other countries' programmes."
Another key to China's present and future success is the unique ability – granted by one-party rule – to stick to their plans longer than the political cycles of most Western governments. "The Chinese have a long-term plan and they're willing to devote resources to it," says Cheng. "I don't just mean money, I mean human resources, industrial resources, and political resources. Eventually we should expect they will surpass us."
But perhaps the most important catalyst for Chinese innovation was being frozen out of international collaboration. The US strictly forbids their scientists, astronauts, and aerospace contractors from collaborating with China in space, citing concerns that the country would co-opt any shared technology.
Being barred from sending astronauts to the US-led International Space Station (ISS) led China to develop its CSS. Similar examples abound. It was only after the European Union ended Chinese participation in the Galileo project – the European rival to GPS – that China began working on BeiDou in earnest. Its exclusion from the party also accounts for much of China's rapid advancement in satellite development – access to which has been most heavily restricted by other countries. "They decided to rely on their own technology," Kulacki says. "They have advanced faster because of the sanctions."
Global effects
And even as China is busy developing its capacity in space, the abilities of existing space powers are on the wane. "It is not clear that the United States' rate of technological improvement will continue as you look 10 to 20 year out into the future," McDowell says. He cites budget cuts, political gridlock, and failing educational systems. Much existing US and European space infrastructure is also ageing.
To hedge its bets, ESA is now positioning itself to partner with China in human space flight. "We have currently three or four astronauts and astronaut trainers who are in language training," says ESA's human spaceflight director Thomas Reiter. "We are taking steps to intensify our links with the Chinese Space Agency."
But what's in it for China? After decades of being shut out of collaboration, Cheng says China may be at a point where it would prefer to continue going it alone. "It's not at all a given that China wants to cooperate with us. Given the US hiatus on manned space flight, it's not at all clear what we would bring to the table," he says.
Collaboration with Russia may be equally unattractive. In 2011, Russia launched a Chinese space probe to Mars as part of its Phobus-Grunt mission, but the Russian spacecraft never made it out of Earth's orbit. "From the Chinese perspective, it was a high-visibility, high-prestige project that failed because of the Russians," Cheng says.
Indeed, the shifting balance of space powers could have all manner of unexpected consequences. The Pentagon recently acknowledged that the US military command in Africa now relies on a Chinese satellite for communications, reflecting the military's ever-larger appetite for bandwidth, which has surged in recent years as it relies increasingly on remotely operated drones and satellite radio communications.
For the same reason, many commercial applications will benefit from Chinese satellite development, such as smartphones, which can already access both GPS and its Russian alternative, GLONASS, as a backup. BeiDou would offer a third option. While GPS is robust, it has been vulnerable to jamming,causing chaos at airports from San Francisco to New Jersey and leading towidespread concerns about overreliance on the system. A significant number of car manufacturers are also reportedly equipping their systems to access BeiDou in case of GPS failure.
Then there's the US's ageing weather satellite infrastructure, a topic subject to annual congressional hand-wringing. Last year a controversial government report found that the agency's best alternative would be to turn to China for help.
But these are not the only ways China's space dominance could affect the world. For one thing, it might motivate other countries to reinvest in their languishing space programmes. On 9 January, shortly after the Jade Rabbit landing, the US administration announced at a space conference that funding for the ISS would continue for four additional years. While McDowell doubts that the landing had anything to do with the decision, officials could well have cancelled the ageing space station's $3 billion a year funding. Chiao is sure the spectre of the CSS influenced the decision not to. "There was a threat that we were going to sit on the sidelines as all of our partners go over and start working with China," he says.
But perhaps the most utopian consequence of China's space ambitions would be a renewed realisation that space is not divided according to national boundaries. At the same forum, US deputy secretary of state William J. Burns announced an international space road map aiming to unite the separate paths of the national space agencies. "It didn't say 'except China'," says Chiao, noting that this is a subtle but significant departure.
The road map, Burns told the assembly, would create realistic prospects for long-shot projects commonly considered too expensive for individual governments to undertake, such as human missions to the surface of Mars, and an asteroid defence shield. In any case, none of this can happen without China, says Holdaway. "My educated guess is that the US, which can't afford to go to Mars on its own any more than ESA can, will initiate some dialogue with China about a global human mission," he says.
Stranger things have happened: Chiao points out that US cooperation with Russia was thought similarly unthinkable – right up until the moment it happened.
This article will appear in print under the headline "Red Star Rising"
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