Posted on 02/03/2003 11:47:10 AM PST by Arthalion
China vows to push ahead with its first manned space flight
BEIJING (AFP) Feb 03, 2003 China has vowed to push ahead with plans to launch its own first manned space mission this year despite the Columbia tragedy, state press reported Monday. "China will launch its first manned space shuttle this year," said Tu Shou'e, an astronautics academic at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, according to the People's Daily
"The key work now is to learn lessons from the accident to make our program better and to make the dream of the Chinese people of reaching into space come true."
The Columbia Space Shuttle broke up Saturday over central Texas as it re-entered the Earth's atmosphere, killing all seven astronauts on board.
While expressing regret at the incident, Tu said accidents were bound to happen as humanity pushed back the boundaries of space exploration.
"Human exploration into space is very dangerous and very hard and accidents are inevitable, but the accident won't stop the human step into space," he said.
Chinese President Jiang Zemin on Sunday expressed condolences to US President George W. Bush over the Columbia tragedy, but he too insisted space exploration must continue.
In a message to Bush, Jiang said China "deeply regrets" the disaster and the death of Columbia's seven-member crew, the Xinhua news agency reported.
However, Jiang said he believed humanity "should continue and make further progress in space exploration despite the setback."
Officials at China's space program have told AFP their first manned mission will be launched around October.
If it succeeds, China will become only the third country to send a human into orbit, after the United States and the former Soviet Union.
Hey, any bets on how closely it resembles the US shuttle?
And we will probably not have anyone aboard the ISS, if past experience with launch delays are any indication. Whatever they haven't gotten from clinton, they can lift from there. </tinfoil-hat>
Personally i believe it will be the next evolution of their 'Lomg March' rocket systems and not a legit 'shuttle' like the Columbia and Atlantis. The Chinese will probably launch the Taikonauts (US: Astronaut; Russia: Cosmonaut; China: Taikonaut) on an adapted Long March rocket system.
Here is a gif. of the long march series:
However the Chinese do have a shuttle program on line, and they were already doing advanced tests on it in wind tunnels in the mid-nineties. I have not managed to get its name yet but here is picture of what it will look like.
As for shuttle designs from other nations the Europeans have been working for over a decade on an advamced design next-generation shuttle system, and there are many photos of some of the concepts, but they do not have the money to go any further.
India was looking at some concepts for itself (with a military leaning) but they decided to abandon it for spy satellite systems that they should start putting up within the next 2 years (i.e to spy on China with relative safety since flying planes over China is a major problem due to the S-300-clone SAM system ...against Pakistan they can still fly high altitude planes with impunity ).
The Soviet Union did have a working Shuttle design called the Buran (it means Blizzard), and it looked like a doppelganger of a NASA shuttle. The reason they worked on it was because they were afraid the NASA shuttles could be used for war, and thus they wanted something similar. Sadly for them the Buran was extremely expensive for the Soviet coffers and it only made one flight to space (the flight was done solely by computers) before further flights were halted (today if you go to Gorky park you can ahve lunch in it since it is now a restaraunt). Buran was one of the reasons the Soviets ran out of cash (the other major reason was their quest to keep up with US submarine technology).
Here is a photograph of the Buran (in the pic it is already a restaraunt):
Currently the only country that seems to ahve the funds and the will to work on a shuttle STS program is China ....which seems extremely focussed on having access to space (they have had 73 space launches already, but still have to have a manned space flight).
The Columbia disaster may alter my last statement (at least i hope it makes more funding available for NASA), but that remains to be seen......
However one advantage China has over the US (and Russia and Europe) is that they can do this at an extremely cheap cost, yet have systems that work pretty well. They may not have the sigma quality levels of US systems but they seem to have better results than European Arienne (sp) systems ...which i find particularly hilarious (but then again i am a pretty strange character and my sense of humor is a tad bit twisted). Anyways that is a major advantage the Chi-Comms have, and who knows what technological 'assistance' the US and Russia helped it with.
Remember the US 'helped' China with warhead miniturization and advanced guidance technology (read the Chinese stole or bribed to get it), while the Russians 'were kind enough' to assist the Chinese with their new advanced Topol-M missile (again the Chinese stole or bribed)! Maybe their space tech was also due to some 'friendly one-sided exchange' with the US and Russia.
There are days i feel China is just a parasite that feeds to its North (Russia) and to its East (the USA).
Before someone posts i should have said 'West' when referring to the US remember the West coast of the US is closer to China, and the West coast of the US (California) is to the East of China.
Sorry for that.
I followed the mission mentioned in #s 8 & 20 fairly keenly though, curious as to what it may have been about. I was struck at launch by its exceptionally wide roll maneuver, which sure seemed to aim it further north. There was a lot of speculation by the media that it was to release a classified payload. And maybe it did. But that landing too, seemed quite unusual. I yet wonder that there wasn't something pretty heavy in there.
Conversely though, I don't think there's been such a highly classified mission since. But having and continuing that kind of access to orbit has yet got to be militarily important. I don't think capitalism has permeated the Chinese psyche quite so deeply yet to consider it primary to their applications.
If we chicken out, then I say more power to the Chinese. I would love to see them colonize Mars while the meek inherit the Earth.
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