Agence France-PresseFeb 11, 2021 13:33:26 IST
The successful entry of the Tianwen-1 probe into Mars orbit on Wednesday confirmed just as far as the country has come to fulfill its space dream. Beijing has poured billions into their military-run space program, hoping to have a crew space station by 2022 and finally send humans to the Moon. The country has come a long way in its race to catch up with the United States and Russia, which have astronauts and cosmonauts with decades of experience in space exploration. But Beijing sees its space project as a sign of rising global status and growing technology.
file image released by Xinhua News Agency in China, a Long March-5 rocket carrying a Tianwen-1 Mars probe picks up from the Wenchang Space Launch Center in Hainan province in southern China. The Mars probe in China Tianwen-1, which entered space in July, is now more than 15 million kilometers long. Image credit: Cai Yang / Xinhua via AP
Here’s a look at China’s space program over the decades, and where it’s led:
Mao’s oath
Shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong said: “We will also make satellites.”
It took more than a decade, but in 1970, China launched the first satellite on the Long March rocket. Human space lighting took decades longer, with Yang Liwei’s first Chinese “taikonaut” in 2003. As the launch approached, concerns about the viability of the Beijing mission sent off live TV broadcast at the last minute. But it went smoothly, with Yang orbiting the Earth 14 times during a 21-hour flight aboard the Shenzhou 5.
China has since launched five crew missions since then.
Space station and ‘Jade Rabbit’
Following in the footsteps of the United States and Russia, China is trying to build a space station around the planet. The Tiangong-1 laboratory was launched in September 2011.
In 2013, the second Chinese woman in space, Wang Yaping, gave a video class from inside the space model to children across the world’s most populous country. The craft was also used for medical experiments and, more importantly, experiments intended to prepare for the construction of a space station.
This was followed by the lunar rover “Jade Rabbit” in 2013, which first appeared dud when it turned asleep and stopped sending signals back to Earth. However, he eventually recovered from studying the lunar surface for 31 months – well beyond the expected lifespan.
In 2016, China launched its second orbital laboratory, the Tiangong-2. Taikonauts who visited the station have run experiments on growing rice and other plants.
‘Space dream’
Under President Xi Jinping, plans for China’s “space dream”, as he calls it, were implemented. China is finally looking to catch up with the US and Russia after years of matching their milestones smoothly.
In addition to a space station, China also plans to build a base on the Moon, and the country’s National Space Administration has said it aims to launch a crew moon mission by 2029. But work has been addressed lunar as a stop in 2017 when the Ship Failed March-5 Y2, a powerful heavy-duty rocket, launched a mission to launch communications satellites into orbit. That delayed the launch of Chang’e-5, which was originally scheduled to collect lunar samples in the second half of 2017.
Another robot, the Chang’e-4, landed on the other side of the Moon in January 2019 – the first historic one.
This was followed by a man who landed on a side near the Moon at the end of last year and raised a Chinese flag on the lunar surface. The unmanned Chinese spacecraft returned to earth in December with rocks and soil from the Moon – the first lunar samples collected in four decades.
And the first images of Mars were sent back by the five-ton Tianwen-1 this month, days before it entered the orbit of the Red Planet. It includes a Mars orbiter, a lander and a rover that will study the planet’s soil. China hopes to complete the rover in May in Utopia, a major impact center on Mars.