【09.10.18 泰晤士报】One giant step for China

Iam_zhcn

One giant step for China
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/science/space/article6877034.ece

Michael Sheridan October 18, 2009

These children could be visiting the moon, Mars and Jupiter by 2050 if China’s space programme succeeds. But what are its government’s real ambitions — and should the rest of the world be worried?


(China Daily)
Children play in front of the Shenzhou-7 manned spaceship at Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center


(Xinhua)
Zhai takes China's first spacewalk


(Vincent Yu)
Celebrations marking China's debut flight to space in 2003

Any day now, at a hidden airbase in the forests of northeast China, a panel of doctors and air-force officers will make the final choice of the first Chinese woman to go into space. When that happens, she will step out of the shadows of military secrecy to become the most famous woman among 1.3 billion people.

We can guess a little bit about her identity. She will be one of the 16 women who graduated in April as fighter pilots to join an elite band of China’s “top guns”. She has made it through the most daunting selection process on Earth — 200,000 women between 17 and 20 years old applied for the aviation course, but only 35 made it to China’s Air Force Aviation University outside Changchun, a city near the borders with Russia and North Korea. The first 16 graduates are the best of the best.

The chosen woman will have three years to prepare herself for a mission to a Chinese space laboratory that may take place as early as 2012. Chinese scientists have disclosed to the state media that volunteers, including university students and parachutists, are already submitting themselves to rigorous tests to establish how men and women differ biologically in space.

The winning candidate will have to be very close to physical perfection, according to doctors at No 454 Hospital of the People’s Liberation Army in Nanjing. “These astronauts could be regarded as superhuman,” said Shi Bing Bing, an official at the hospital. Members of the medical team, one of five around China screening male and female aspirants, let slip that even bad breath could rule out a person. So could ringworm, a runny nose, allergies, tooth cavities or a history of serious illness in the past three generations of their families. Not one surgical scar between head and toe is to be permitted.

The Chinese are also pursuing studies by other nations that have put women into space — Russia, Japan, the US, South Korea — indicating that a zero-gravity environment may have less physical impact on women astronauts. Then there is the unique Chinese psychological perspective. “Women are better at handling loneliness in space, where you can only hear the buzzing sound of machines,” said Pang Zhihao, a researcher with the China Academy of Space Technology.

Nobody is talking about it in the state media, where all is grandeur and heroism, but a military attaché in Beijing suggested that the selection process will go beyond the bounds of what Nasa would dare to do. “From the Korean war to the cultural revolution, the Chinese military became the world’s experts on psychological torture, isolation, brainwashing and breaking down mental resistance,” he observed. “A candidate who survives the kind of tests they could devise is superhuman indeed.”

So, the right stuff in China means more than floating in a weightless test-plane flight. It means having the guts to strap yourself into a Shenzhou space capsule stuck on top of an upgraded intercontinental ballistic missile — and be fired off a launch pad where disasters and deaths are rumoured to have been covered up for decades.

Up close, the Shenzhou, or “sacred vessel”, capsule looks awfully small and cramped. It resembles the Soviet Soyuz spacecraft, although the Chinese fiercely insist that it is of wholly original design. There is one in the Military Museum in Beijing, where wide-eyed schoolchildren listen to hymns of praise for the party and its engineers. So much of all this — the glorification, the pride, the search for the best and the brightest to leap towards the heavens — would seem like decades-old news in the United States. But the space programme represents one giant step for China.

Less than a hundred years ago Manchu women still had their feet bound. As recently as the 1930s, women were regarded as chattels of their fathers or husbands. Concubinage was abolished only in 1950 and remained legally recognised in Hong Kong until 1971. And now a Chinese woman is to go into space, making this endeavour, in the minds of millions of her fellow citizens, a metaphor for the nation itself.

In 1958, when Mao Tse-tung ordered troops just back from North Korea to start building a satellite launch base in the desert at Jiuquan, the place was so bare that the men went without washing for weeks and got no fresh vegetables for years. Today, Jiuquan is just one of a chain of high-technology facilities spanning the country.

The man leading the search for the first female astronaut is Major General Yang Liwei, who became the first Chinese man in space on October 15, 2003. He circled the Earth in a Shenzhou V capsule, bumping down in the grasslands of Inner Mongolia to an exultant welcome. “I dared to challenge space and make our nation’s dream come true because the party and the government nurtured me and millions of people supported me,” he said. “I felt very honoured, for I was to complete a sacred task. I had no time to miss my family and I was not scared because I trusted our nation’s scientific and technological prowess and had faith in our equipment.” Yang did not miss a beat when he was asked if the sight of the Earth from space had moved him to reflect on the miracles of God’s creation, as it had some of the Apollo astronauts. “Space is very splendid, but if divinity exists then it resides in the wisdom and genius of human beings.”

Yang’s wife, Zhang Yumei, a former secondary-school teacher, has less lofty memories of years trailing him around airfields in boundless deserts and hidden valleys. “When our son was born I reached out my hand for him in the pangs of childbirth to dull the pain, but Yang was aloft in the sky,” she said. “In three years of kindergarten and four years of school, he never once took our son to school or collected him.” She described a long-distance marriage connected by telephone. “Two years ago I loved him more than he loved me and now he loves me more than I love him. Why? Because I’m so exhausted that I am ill.” Yang’s voice trembled when he spoke of his wife. “I owe her so much,” he said.

If Yang is the self-sacrificing officer of propaganda parables, the first Chinese astronaut to walk in space, Zhai Zhigang, provides an even more fascinating insight into the psychology of success by which the government hopes to use the space programme for its own political purposes. The spacewalker represents an aspirational triumph over vicissitude and poverty. It was no coincidence that the Chinese space programme was revived in 1979 at the same time as Deng Xiaoping, the former leader of the party, let loose the economic reforms that have raised more than 200m people out of absolute poverty.

Nor was it a coincidence that Zhai stepped out of the Shenzhou VII capsule on September 27 last year, just as the regime was reaching the climax of its Olympic celebrations. In a year that saw bitter exchanges over human rights between China and its critics, a revolt in Tibet and an earthquake in Sichuan province that killed 87,000 people, the first spacewalk set the seal on the Communist leadership’s preferred image of the country.

Zhai was born in 1966 to a poor family in Heilongjiang province, far beyond the Great Wall, where the winters are bitter. His father was bedridden and his mother supported their six children by selling snacks in the streets. Universal education gave him the chance to go to high school and he was talent-spotted by recruiters from the Third Aviation College.

It is said that his mother could only offer him three yuan, about 30 pence, as a gift on leaving home. Zhai turned round and handed her 200 yuan, about £20, which he had saved over the years by selling nuts and roasted seeds after school. “The whole family was moved to tears,” declared the commentator on China Central Television who related this improving tale.

After his spacewalk he returned to his home country to find that a proud local government had bought a house for his brothers, named his old school after him and commissioned a statue of him for the main square. “What quality do you value most as an astronaut — perseverance, energy or confidence?” he was asked. “If I could only pick one it would be perseverance,” he replied. “In our training it’s easy to do something once or even 10 times, but to repeat it thousands of times — that takes perseverance.”

Zhai is rumoured to be one of the leading candidates for the next manned space mission, which could come as early as 2011 and is expected to focus on the construction of a space laboratory.

So what is China — a vast, mainly agricultural country which, according to the International Monetary Fund, still ranks only around 100th in the world with a per capita income of about £1,818 a year — doing in space? The answer is: just about everything. While Nasa is retiring its accident-prone space shuttles and fighting for funds, the Chinese space programme is notable for its vaulting ambitions and seemingly fathomless budgets, itself reminiscent of the Kennedy era’s projection of power.

The planners’ primary target is the moon. On October 24, 2007, a Chinese journalist, who spoke on condition of anonymity, was among 2,000 viewers admitted to the once top-secret Xichang rocket base to watch the launch of the first lunar probe, Chang’e-1, named after a moon goddess of ancient legend. Local people told him of how the military and police had been conducting sweeps with dogs through nearby villages to clear around 12,000 inhabitants out before the blastoff.

At 6.20pm, the ground shook, the booster ascended and a tail of white exhaust signalled the detachment of the nose cone. “Everybody jumped and cheered,” the journalist said. “When I asked them if it was worth China spending so much money on space when we have so many people living in poverty they said, ‘Yes, of course! It makes us stand tall in the world!’”

Chang’e-1 reached the moon on a 16-month mission and sent photographs back mapping the surface. On March 1 this year, engineers on the ground fired its boosters, sending it crashing into the lunar surface in a controlled descent. A second Chang’e craft will be launched next year to survey the moon from a low orbit as a precursor to a landing mission.

“By 2013, China will send a landing craft and rover vehicle to the moon,” says Ye Peijian, a designer of the moon probes. The craft, Chang’e-3, will have variable thrusters to achieve a vertical landing at the Sinus Iridum, or Bay of Rainbows, near the equator of the moon. The six-wheeled lunar rover will leave the main craft and work for three months. Ye and his team plan to send a spacecraft to the moon by 2017 capable of recovering soil samples and sending them back to Earth. But the Chinese scientific establishment is readying itself to go far beyond that. Its space strategists are thinking of establishing a human base on the lunar surface by 2030 and sending men to land on Mars by 2050. Right now the finishing touches are being put to the first Chinese Mars probe, Yinghuo-1. This is a microsatellite poised on the tip of a Russian rocket destined for Phobos, one of the Martian moons. The 110-kilogram Chinese craft is due to orbit the Red Planet in 2010 after a journey lasting 10 months. It is carrying cameras, a magnetic field sensor and an ion detector. Its task is to search for clues as to why water vanished from Mars by studying oxygen molecules and solar winds. The scientists want to aim for Jupiter by 2030.

A rare glimpse of the costs and the budgetary arguments was given by Ye, who revealed that the cost of the Chang’e-1 project was a mere £120m — a fraction of the sums that Nasa is used to. In fact, Chinese leaders see a plain cost-benefit analysis in the space programme because so much of the technology is “dual use”, for civilian and military purposes.

Such strategic thinking lies behind their commitment to the next big manned project. It is a rival to the international space station that will give China its own platform in space. Details of the plans trickled out at an academic conference in August this year, where a designer, Gu Yidong, said two or three space laboratories may be launched between 2010 and 2015.

The first will be the largest spacecraft China has yet built. It is named Tiangong — “heavenly palace” — and will go into orbit to provide practice in docking and manoeuvring by manned and unmanned craft. No fewer than five missions are envisaged to test the technology. It is one of these that the first woman astronaut will join, probably in 2012.

Apart from such high-profile projects, the Chinese space industry is developing at a phenomenal pace. It plans to launch up to 16 satellites this year to perform tasks ranging from crop-yield estimates to secret military surveillance. Scientists are perfecting the first Chinese space telescope, known as the Hard X-ray Modulation Telescope, which will explore black holes in a four-year orbital mission from 2012 at a bargain price of about £88m. “Though the global financial crisis is taking a toll on the world economy, it has no impact on China’s space programmes,” said Zhang Jianqi, a senior space official.

That is exactly what has Pentagon strategists worried. While Chinese leaders and propaganda organs mouth the slogans of world peace and exploration on behalf of mankind, there are different signals from their own bureaucracy. For example, the “heavenly palace” space laboratory project is actually being managed by the general armaments department of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). The media has given prominence to a researcher at the Academy of Military Sciences, Wang Fa’an, who says the PLA must set up its own space forces to protect China’s extraterrestrial interest.

The Pentagon warns that the PLA intends to develop weapons capable of destroying the American satellites on which the US military’s much vaunted “smart” weapons depend. “The goal of a space shock-and-awe strike is to deter the enemy,” writes Colonel Yuan Zelu in a book for PLA officer cadets cited by the Pentagon. “The objectives must be few and precise… important information sources, command and control centres, communications hubs and other objectives. This will shake the structure of the opponent’s operational system of organisation and will create a huge psychological impact.”

The alarm call for American planners came in January 2007, when a Chinese missile destroyed an old Chinese weather satellite, exploding it into a million fragments of space debris. China had also bought ultra-high frequency satellite communications jammers from Ukraine and used them to develop its own systems to interfere with transmissions. The Pentagon concluded that while China did not have a dedicated military space effort, its spectrum of ballistic missile and satellite development amounted to “a multidimensional programme” to dominate a future space battlefield.

Such “dual use” pervades the entire Chinese aerospace and high-technology universe, making it impossible for western analysts to break down military versus civilian budgets or decipher the chain of responsibility inside its giant state-controlled entities. “I could not draw you a flow chart, but I could assure you that the Central Military Commission will be at the core of the process,” said that helpful defence attaché in Beijing.

Patriotism and power politics make for a heady mix when combined with the national prestige of China’s dash for the stars. One netizen on an officially censored and approved Chinese website wrote: “White Anglo Caucasoid-dominated US is again performing its anti-China ranting by circulating misleading reports… this is just a disgusting attempt to isolate China from the world before launching an onslaught on China.” There is more chauvinist rhetoric, as the netizen claims that the “racist US” is looking for excuses to invade China in cahoots with India.

In space, as on Earth, Chinese leaders are conscious of strategic rivalry with their neighbours India and Japan. Both have limited but sophisticated unmanned space programmes of their own that cannot match the Chinese effort but which worry military planners and make prickly patriots sit up and take notice. China fought a border war with India in 1962, and a conflict between the two Asian giants over the Tibetan plateau remains a potential flashpoint. There was a telling lack of coverage in the Chinese media when it was announced in September that an Indian moon probe, Chandrayaan-1, had detected water on the lunar surface.

Despite all those celestial names for their spacecraft, the Chinese are vexed by the lack of expressions for the lunar landscape in their magnificent language. Inevitably, a party committee has turned its mind to the task, inviting scholars to devise Chinese names for 18 lunar features such as crater, mare and oceanus, first given Latin or English labels by the International Astronomical Union in 1935. So far their efforts have not been crowned with success. Four scholarly versions of the word for crater have been shunned by the public, who simply use the crudest word keng — “hole”. In this, as in every other aspect of China’s reach for the heavens, the scholars will sigh, bend their heads to the task, and persevere until they reach their goal.