The Dallas Morning News September 07, 2003
Here comes the space competition
With China embarking on an ambitious program to put one of its own in orbit, the skies won't be just ours and the Russians' for long
By ALEXANDRA WITZE
The first rocket man came from China, and so may the next.
Around 1500, the legend goes, a man named Wan Hu strapped himself into a chair, had assistants light the fuses of 47 attached rockets and took off into the sky.
Next month, if all goes according to plan, another man, or possibly two, will climb into the more modern Shenzhou 5 spacecraft and blast off once again for space.
Whether Wan Hu made it or blew himself to bits remains lost in myth. But if these new rocket men succeed, China would officially join the United States and Soviet Union as the only nations to put people in orbit.
China's planned launch isn't the only flight activity stealing the space spotlight from the United States. Europe sent its first mission to Mars in June and plans to launch a lunar probe by the end of this month. India recently announced that it intends to launch a moon mission in 2008. And Brazil was trying to launch South America's first satellite when the rocket exploded on the launch pad on Aug. 22, killing 21 technicians.
How these foreign efforts fare could affect how NASA copes with the aftermath of the Columbia shuttle disaster. A successful launch by China, for instance, might reinvigorate U.S. politicians to formulate a national vision for space.
"Some of us specialists down in the trenches, we can see an overall impact way down the road that will force the administration to make real decisions about the future of space flight," said Charles P. Vick, a space analyst and consultant with the Web site globalsecurity .org.
In the near term, no country can threaten NASA's role as the world's premier space agency. "But the question is, what happens if NASA starts looking lame compared to China?" said astronomer Jonathan McDowell, author of an online newsletter about space launches.
For the most part, information about China's space program is limited to government releases through state-run media. Still, Western observers have cobbled together what they believe is a fairly comprehensive picture of what to expect this fall.
Decades of work
The Shenzhou 5 launch is the latest accomplishment of a space program that China has worked on for decades, said Phillip Clark of Molniya Space Consultancy in England.
China launched its first satellite in 1970, but its manned space flight program didn't take off until the government began Project 921 in 1992, as part of a national push to invest in science and technology. For help, China looked to Russia's expertise, sending its astronaut candidates to a Russian training camp and purchasing old Soyuz spacecraft, the mainstay of Soviet and Russian manned space flight.
Chinese engineers have since designed the series of Shenzhou, or "heavenly vessel," spacecraft. Some parts, such as the booster rockets, are technologically original, said Phillip Saunders, director of the East Asia nonproliferation program at the Monterey Institute of International Studies in California. Other aspects are adapted and expanded from Russian designs; from the outside, the Shenzhou looks like a Soyuz, but it is larger, more powerful and more maneuverable.
The first Shenzhou flew in secrecy in November 1999. It lifted off from the main launch pad at Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert of northwestern China, and landed after orbiting Earth for a day, said Mr. Clark, who analyzed orbital data from NASA for each of the Chinese flights.
Three following flights each lasted a week and grew progressively more complex: Shenzhou 2 did its first maneuvers in orbit in January 2001, Shenzhou 3 carried a dummy astronaut in March 2002, and Shenzhou 4 had a complete life-support system on its flight in December 2002.
Shenzhou 5 is supposed to fly sometime this fall, according to Chinese media reports. Oct. 1 marks the anniversary of the government's coming to power, and many space observers have targeted Oct. 10 as a possible launch date.
Because the Chinese space program has gone forward so slowly and carefully, it may very well pull off the Shenzhou 5 launch without the kind of setbacks that plagued the U.S.-Soviet space race of the 1960s, said Mr. Clark. The real question is whether anyone in the West will notice.
"It may be a two-day news story wonder," he said.
Whichever man China chooses - and all the candidates are reportedly men - he will join the ranks of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin and astronaut Alan Shepard as his country's first representative in space. (Gagarin made one full orbit of Earth in 1961; Shepard and Gus Grissom made suborbital flights before John Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962.)
The taikonauts or yuhang yuans, as Chinese space fliers are called, will probably become national heroes as astronauts and cosmonauts were in the 1960s, said Dr. Saunders. "This is something that is seen as a tremendous achievement, both for Chinese science and technology and for the Chinese system," he said.
What will happen after Shenzhou 5 remains a mystery. China isn't due to release another five-year plan for its space program until nearly 2006. But the government has floated ideas of a manned space station, an unmanned lunar probe, or even a manned trip to the moon.
"You can assume they will start working on a manned lunar landing," said Mr. Vick of globalsecurity.org. "That becomes a different game where they're in effect taking us on."
Expensive goal
But to do so, China would have to develop a new launch vehicle that could break out of Earth orbit - something that would take many more years and a lot more money. China currently spends an estimated $ 2 billion annually on its entire space program; the United States spent $ 7 billion each year, in modern dollars, just to develop the Apollo program to the moon.
Instead, China may take Russia's approach and develop a space station like the now-defunct Mir, Mr. Clark said. Such a station would give taikonauts a platform for doing long-term scientific experiments and a base for further exploration. (China has made overtures to join the 16-nation International Space Station, now in orbit, but was rebuffed by members of Congress including Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., chair of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics.)
As for going to the moon, no official announcement has been made, much less any sort of schedule set.
"I've always had the view that the Chinese have penciled in 2020 or thereabouts as being the time that they'd like to have their first people on the moon," said Mr. Clark. "In July 2019, there won't be anyone else there to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Neil Armstrong's landing."
In essence, China is now where the United States and Soviet Union were four decades ago - practicing the first steps into space and perhaps harboring dreams of further exploration. But in the earliest of those steps, space experts see no problems with the Shenzhou 5 launch going off as planned.
"The things that could set it back would be technological problems on their side," said Dr. Saunders, "or if there is a renewed focus on safety concerns, not just in light of the U.S. shuttle disaster but also the Brazilian launch."
Brazil's rocket tragedy has decimated its technological workforce, said Dr. McDowell, of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Mass. It was Brazil's third attempt at launching a satellite aboard its own rocket. Government officials have not pinpointed a cause for the disaster, but the country has pledged to continue its space program even as the investigation continues.
Joining the crowd
Nine other countries have gone where Brazil has not yet, launching their own rockets successfully. In 2002, according to Dr. McDowell's satellite catalog, the launch roster looked like a list of ethnic restaurants: 23 were Russian, 18 American, 11 European, four Chinese, three Japanese, one Indian and one Israeli. That breakdown roughly corresponds to current list of space powers in the world, a list once dominated solely by the Soviet Union and the United States.
France and Great Britain have also launched their own satellites, but now work under the aegis of the European Space Agency, or ESA. Fifteen countries belong to ESA, which is based in Paris. Its members have worked smoothly together as a freestanding agency in which countries can spend money on as many or as few projects as they like, said Alasdair McLean, a space policy analyst in Aberdeen, Scotland.
ESA's new Mars Express mission, and its upcoming SMART-1 probe to the moon, reflect how Europe has always emphasized science over manned space flight, he said. ESA does maintain a small group of astronauts in Germany who hitch rides into space aboard U.S. or Russian launch vehicles.
"Europe is just getting to the point now where it's competing as an equal, but it's definitely Avis to NASA's Hertz," said Dr. McDowell.
The last guest astronaut to go into space was Israel's Ilan Ramon, who died in February aboard Columbia. The next will be Spain's Pedro Duque, who is slated to launch to the International Space Station aboard a Soyuz spacecraft on Oct. 18.
Mr. Duque will fly up with U.S. astronaut Michael Foale, a veteran of the Mir station, and cosmonaut Alexander Kaleri. Mr. Foale and Mr. Kaleri will replace the current two-man space station crew, while Mr. Duque will come back to Earth after a week in space.
The ever-changing roster aboard the space station continues to reflect that most of the money for the station comes from the United States and most of the long-term space experience from the Russians, said Dr. McDowell.
Even the new U.S.-Russian cooperation may not set the standard in space for long. Decades ago, Arthur C. Clarke envisioned such a pairing in his novel 2010, the sequel to 2001: A Space Odyssey. But as the Americans and Russians fly together to Jupiter, they are caught offguard by another mission - a spaceship from China.
E-mail awitze@dallasnews.com
FILE 1963/Associated PressThe crowded frontier
October 1957: Soviet Union launches Sputnik, kicking off modern space race.
January 1958: United States launches its first satellite, Explorer 1.
April 1961: Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbits Earth, the first human in space.
May 1961: Alan Shepard becomes first American in space.
December 1964: Italy becomes third nation to send a satellite into space
November 1965: France launches its first satellite.
July 1969: Neil Armstrong walks on the moon.
February 1970: Japan launches its first satellite.
April 1970: China launches its first satellite.
April 1971: Soviet Union launches Salyut 1, first of many Russian space stations.
October 1971: Great Britain launches first satellite, after government has already shut down its space program.
May 1973: Skylab, the United States' first and only space station, is launched.
July 1980: India launches its first satellite.
April 1981: United States flies its first space shuttle, Columbia.
September 1988: Israel launches its first satellite.
November 2000: Two Russians and one American become first residents of International Space Station.
October 2003: China is expected to launch its first man into space
SOURCES: Space Almanac, Dallas Morning News research
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