China Announces Manned Lunar Mission In 2017 Options

[GregM]

Several published reports today finally disclosed China’s much anticipated long-term human spaceflight aspirations. Audacious would be an understatement:

EVA in the next few years
A space station by 2010
Robotic exploration of the Moon
Human landing on the Moon by 2017
Helium-3 mining on the Moon
Observatories on the Moon

Bold? Yes. Difficult? Very. Expensive? Without a doubt.

Crazy? Maybe. Overambitious? Maybe. A ruse? Maybe.

Possible? Yes. If the national will to do so exists in the long-term.

Likely? Who really knows?

Very symbolically, the day before, the NASA administrator spoke before the relevant congressional subcommittee and told them flat-out that NASA simply does not have nearly enough money to carry out its mandate. They cannot fly the shuttle in any quantity, finish the ISS in whatever form, or get to the moon at all, with the monies currently available. Whether that needed extra money will ever come is still a very open question. Political support for human spaceflight in the United States is currently lukewarm at best, and outright hostile at worst. Essentially, if the United States as a nation and society does not recommit itself to human space exploration in the very near future, it will falter and possibly disappear from the endeavor over the next decade. This is not my prediction, but the prediction of many experts in the US.

Although predicting the future is foggy at the best of times, the general trend lines here are unmistakable: China is aiming to be a dominant, if not the dominant, player in human spaceflight. It may take time - but they will get there sooner or later. The United States on the other hand seems uncertain, or possibly unwilling, to remain a major player. It is currently in unmistakable decline, in spite of still being the current dominant space power. In 1985, the United States successfully flew 9 Space Shuttle missions in that year alone, including two just two weeks apart. Today, even if all the current shuttle technical problems did not exist, the US could not under any circumstances even come close to matching that ability. It is simply not physically able to do so any more, the institution has been allowed to atrophy and whither. It is in a state of not only negative growth, but negative development. If left on their current trends, those trend lines will meet and cross at some point in the future. The paradigm will have changed, probably permanently. When they will cross is open to debate, but the larger issue is the fact that if left unchecked, the trend lines will cross.

Does America have what it takes to reverse the trend? Does America care to? Will it become to human spaceflight what Portugal became to exploring the Americas 500 years ago? Or will it come back from its current state of decline?

Will we have to learn Mandarin to really get the most out of the next lunar landing by humans?

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Here are those two short items in the April 10 Aviation Week on China's space program:

(1) "China still lags 15 years behind the US and Russia in space program developments, but could catch up in 10 years with enough funding from the government. Huang Cunping, who leads manned launcher programs, made the assessment to the Chinese Peoples Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), a major Communist Party planning organization. The fact that his statements were aired publicly by the government-controlled Xinhua news agency may suggest that a spending boost is at least under consideration.

"In Washington, Luo Ge, one of two vice administrators in the China National Space Administration (CNSA), says his country presently spends about $500 million a year on space activities, a figure he admits is difficult to calculate. For that sum, Luo says, China gets about 200,000 full-time space workers, compared with the 75,000 public and contract workers NASA believes it keeps employed.

"Also appearing at the CPPCC and covered by Xinhua was Qi Faren, chief designer of China's first five Shenzhou spacecraft. He called for an overhaul of the way Chinese space programs are planned, saying China needs a unified organization to plan its manned space missions, satellites and lunar exploration as a whole. China's current space program activies are split, with launch vehicle development and planning carried out by the People's Liberation Army, and science satellite development managed by the CNSA. Top CNSA managers have complained that they have little insight into many Shenzhou operations because of the military's tight control of the program."

(2) China is completing assembly of a 132-ft. diameter deep-space network antenna specifically designed to communicsate with the Chang'e lunar orbiter set for launch next year. The antgenna is located atop Mount Phoenix, a 6600-ft. peak near Kunming. It will be used in connection smaller dishes in Shanghai nd northwest China to send and receive data during the Chang'e mission and to communcate with follow-on unmanned Chinese lunar orbiters and landers. The new antenna stands 148 ft. tall and weighs 400 tons.

"China intends to follow the Chang'e mission with an unmanned soft lunar landing by bout 2012 and an unmanned lunar sample return mission in 2017, cccording to CNSA Vice Administratio Luo Ge."