Astronauts off to new space station
China’s space program marks a key milestone
Tall as a 20-story building, a rocket carrying the Shenzhou 15 mission roared into the night sky of the Gobi Desert on Tuesday, carrying three astronauts toward a rendezvous with China’s just-completed space station.
The rocket launch was a splitscreen event for China, the latest in a long series of technological achievements for the country, even as many of its citizens have been angrily lashing out in the streets against stringent pandemic controls. The air shook as the huge white rocket leaped into a starry, bitterly cold night sky shortly before the setting of a waxing crescent moon.
The expedition to the new space station is a milestone for China’s rapidly advancing space program. It is the first time a team of three astronauts already aboard the Tiangong outpost will be met by a crew arriving from Earth. The Chinese space station will now be continuously occupied, like the International Space Station, another marker laid down by China in its race to catch up with the United States and surpass it as the dominant power in space.
With a sustained presence in low-Earth orbit aboard Tiangong, Chinese space officials are preparing to put astronauts on the moon, which NASA also intends to revisit before the end of the decade as part of its Artemis program.
“It will not take a long time; we can achieve the goal of manned moon landing,” Zhou Jianping, chief designer of China’s crewed space program, said in an interview at the launch center. China has been developing a lunar lander, he added, without giving a date when it might be used.
The launch of Shenzhou 15 comes less than two weeks after NASA finally launched its Artemis I mission after many delays. That flight has put its uncrewed Orion capsule into orbit around the moon.
At the same time, Beijing has engaged in a charm offensive since the Group of 20 summit in Bali this month, wooing European nations and developing countries in particular. That includes space exploration. China’s leader, Xi Jinping, emphasized that point in a letter on Nov. 21 to a United Nations symposium.
“China is willing to work with other countries to strengthen exchanges and cooperation, jointly explore the mysteries of the universe, make peaceful use of outer space, and promote space technology to better benefit the people of all countries in the world,” Xi wrote.
While European nations are working with the United States on the Artemis missions and the International Space Station, they so far have not expressed much interest in Tiangong. Germany’s Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Climate Action said in a written reply to questions that Germany had no bilateral projects with China for its space station.
And while Germany and Italy each sent an astronaut four years ago to China’s Shandong province for training to fly aboard a Shenzhou rocket, neither country has announced plans to send astronauts on a Chinese rocket. Some European researchers are involved in scientific experiments that will be carried to Tiangong, however, including a proposed high-energy cosmic radiation detector. Researchers from India, Peru, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia have also received research opportunities on the Chinese space station through a UN program.
Officials in Europe have been wary of closer cooperation in space at a time of rising frictions over China’s human rights record and military buildup. They have asked China to share highly detailed information about its space operations, partly to ensure the safety of astronauts. But China’s space program has grown out of the country’s military, like the early US space program decades ago, and has been wary of extensive sharing.
That military connection was on display at the Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center in the desert. Camouflaged vehicles were visible in and around the base, and some signage referred not to Shenzhou civilian space rockets but to Dongfeng, the ballistic missiles used in China’s nuclear weapon arsenal.
On Tuesday, foreign journalists were given uncommon access to the launch center, which began construction in 1958 and is usually out of bounds even for Chinese citizens.
Two journalists for The New York Times and a photographer from Kyodo News of Japan were allowed to attend the launch, as were a small group of journalists from mainland China, Hong Kong, and Macao. Visitors from Beijing and other cities were required to spend a week first in quarantine at a village hotel about 50 miles away, and to pass daily PCR tests. Foreign journalists paid for their travel, accommodation, and quarantine.