Tiangong 3 - - International Participation
Russia announced that it will fly Soyuz spacecraft and crews to the Chinese station from Vostochny or Kourou, and the European Space Agency has an agreement with the Chinese space agency CNSA as well for its astronauts and research to use the Chinese station.
China has signed an agreement with the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs to allow the Chinese station to host international experiments, and some of these experiments have already been chosen. In the future, this cooperation could extend to hosting astronauts from developing countries without their own program, along with ESA and Russian crewmembers.
China and the ESA had been working for years toward a potential visit of European astronauts to China's Tiangong space station since the China Manned Space Agency and ESA signed an agreement in 2015.
For example, in August 2017, ESA astronauts Samantha Cristoforetti and Matthias Maurer joined 16 Chinese astronauts for nine days of sea survival training off the eastern Chinese coastal city of Yantai. In 2016, Chinese astronaut Ye Guangfu joined ESA's caving course in Sardinia to experience an extreme environment as part of a multicultural crew, according to ESA.
ESA astronauts Matthias Maurer and Samantha Cristoforetti had trained with the Chinese program and its taikonauts, as part of preparations for a future cooperative spaceflight. As ESA astronaut Maurer stated, “I am very much looking forward to expanding our cooperation with our Chinese friends into space.”
ESA Director General Josef Aschbacher said in late January 2023 during an annual press briefing in Paris that "for the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let's say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station; that is participating on the Chinese space station," the Space News reported.
After the space station entered the application and development phase at the end of 2022, China repeatedly vowed to adhere to the development concept of openness and sharing, and carry out more and deeper pragmatic cooperation with countries and regions committed to the peaceful utilization of outer space, so that the scientific and technological achievements of China's space station will benefit all mankind. International collaboration at the China Space Station includes sending international payloads and welcoming astronauts from other countries to enter its space station to conduct experiments, the CMSA has said.
China is aiming to grow cooperation with emerging space nations including Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates. Space was named as one of a number of priority areas for the next three to five years during the first China-Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) Summit held in Riyadh in December 2022. “China stands ready to work with GCC countries on remote sensing and communications satellite, space utilization, aerospace infrastructure, and the selection and training of astronauts,” according to the text of the keynote speech made by Chinese President Xi Jinping at the summit, 09 December 2022.
The GCC intergovernmental group comprises Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman and Qatar. “China welcomes GCC astronauts to its space station for joint missions and space science experiments with their Chinese colleagues. China welcomes GCC countries’ participation in payloads cooperation in its aerospace missions, and will consider establishing a China-GCC joint center for lunar and deep space exploration,” the text continued. While broad in apparent scope and ambition, the words indicate only an initial expression of interest in establishing cooperation in these areas, with no indication of a commitment in terms of funding or practicalities.
The project of Spectroscopic Investigations of Nebular Gas, or SING, was one of the first batch of nine international scientific experiments from 17 countries and 23 research bodies that passed extensive evaluation of a team of around 60 experts from the UNOOSA (United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs), the CMSA and the international space community in June 2019. SING is implemented by two institutions from two countries - The Indian Institute of Astrophysics and the Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences. An application for the export license for the SING equipment was submitted by a team from the Indian Institute of Astrophysics in Bangalore in 2022.
SING is an imaging spectrograph in the ultraviolet spectrum. Ultraviolet is not observable from the ground because of the ozone layer and it is essential to take observations from space. The goal is to observe hot gas in the galaxy, which we will be able to identify through observations of emissions from the different parts of the gas. This has to be done from above the Earth's atmosphere, Murthy noted, spelling out the significance of sending the payload to the China Space Station.
"We cannot speculate on why it has taken so long to get clearance or what the issues are," Jayant Murthy, a senior Indian astrophysicist and manager of a project dubbed the first-ever space technology collaboration between China and India, said 15 August 2023. It was expected to be the first international payload to go to the China Space Station but it has now hit a roadblock, with the key equipment produced by India for the China Space Station waiting for export clearance from the Indian Ministry of External Affairs (MEA) indefinitely. "As far as we're concerned, we are ready to fly to the China Space Station. Our equipment is ready and we just have to settle on interface issues with the program," Jayant Murthy, a senior professor at the Bangalore-based Indian Institute of Astrophysics who oversees the project, told the Global Times.
"As you might expect, we will require formal approval from our Indian MEA to send any complex equipment outside India, particularly when it involves a space mission. We have told the China Manned Space Agency (CMSA) about our request to the MEA and that we cannot do anything until we get clearance," the professor said.
Murthy said, "We have no information on the progress of our request for an export license. We have had questions from the MEA and have answered them, stressing that we are a purely scientific mission with no commercial implications." Murthy said "We cannot speculate on why it has taken so long to get clearance or what the issues are... We do think it is a great opportunity to rise above whatever political issues affect daily relations between the governments and to show that we do have the ability and the will to cooperate in the cause of science," he said.
Chinese space watcher and TV commentator Song Zhongping said that as two leading developing countries and members of the BRICS and the Shanghai Cooperation Organization, China and India should enhance cooperation in all fronts, especially in the space domain. "If Indian authorities set roadblocks for normal scientific exchanges and politicized space collaboration at the China Space Station, it will definitely be a heavy loss for not only individual scientists in the country but also one for India's future space development," Song told the Global Times.
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