Man has already landed on ‘Mars,’ in Gobi Desert
ABOUT 100 excited Chinese teenagers completed a five-hour tour of a space colony against a desolate backdrop not unlike the desert planet of Tatooine, the homeworld of Luke Skywalker.
However, they were not on the set of “Star Wars,” but at a Chinese-built Mars simulation base in the barren, windswept hills of Gansu Province.
The facility — several interconnected modules including a greenhouse and a mock decompression chamber — opened its doors to the public yesterday.
The Mars Base 1 Camp covering about 1,070 square meters — about one-fifth of an American football field — is the brainchild of a media company and officials in Gansu Province in northwest China.
Officials hope the camp, about 40 kilometers from the township of Jinchang, will boost tourism and allow visitors to feel as though they are on the Red Planet.
A plan to invest 2.5 billion yuan (US$374 million) will expand the site to 67 square kilometers and attract 2 million visitors a year by 2030.
“I am very excited to be here,” said a 13-year-old student from Jinchang. “We saw the monolith, a crater and a cave. It’s better than the Mars that I had imagined.”
In the iconic 1968 science fiction film “2001: A Space Odyssey,” a mysterious black monolith appears before a tribe of man-apes in the African Savannah.
China’s space program has fired up imaginations and public appetite for science and science fiction. In January, a Chinese probe touched down on the far side of the moon for the first time, a feat viewed with pride among ordinary Chinese people.
China is developing powerful rockets to help realize a more ambitious dream of sending a probe to Mars in 2020. After that, scientists hope to explore asteroids and even land on one.
“A nation needs people who look up at the stars,” said Bai Fan, CEO of Jinchang Star Universe Culture & Tourism Investment Co, the media company that codeveloped the base.
“We hope the base will let them feel the spirit of space exploration and not just experience the technology behind it.”
Apart from being a tourist attraction, the camp has collaborated with the Astronauts Center of China to eventually become an astronaut-training center. It is not the only Mars-themed site in China. On the neighboring Qinghai-Tibet Plateau, China unveiled its first Mars “village” in March.
(Reuters)