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China's space program: Boon or
boondoggle?
By Antoaneta Bezlova
BEIJING - With China's first manned flight in
space looming large, the state propaganda machine has
begun drumming up support for Beijing's secretive space
program, lauding its scientific and patriotic
significance and downplaying its budget.
While
details of China's costly space program are a closely
guarded secret, this week state media declared that the
country had managed to spend less on it than the United
States, the second country after the Soviet Union to put
a man in space.
"For the whole manned space
industry, we have only spent US$2.3 billion, while the
United States spent $8 billion on just one rocket," the
China Youth Daily newspaper quoted Zhang Qingwei,
president of China Aerospace Science and Technology
Corp, as saying on Monday.
Zhang's company is
the main manufacturer of China's space capsule Shenzhou
IV, the country's fourth unmanned spacecraft, which
landed on Sunday in the province of Inner Mongolia after
a week in orbit. The mission of the Shenzhou (Divine
Vessel) was described by the English-language China
Daily as the "final dress rehearsal" before China
follows the former Soviet Union and the United States to
become the third nation in the world independently to
launch a human into space.
"Our country is now
fully capable of sending manned craft into space," read
a headline in the Beijing Youth Daily, touching a nerve
with the Chinese people who have dreamed for years of
the day their country would reach up and explore the
stars.
While it would be an enormous boost to
national pride and the fulfillment of a longtime
ambition, sending an astronaut into space would be an
extraordinarily expensive undertaking for a country
still struggling to lift millions of poor people -
estimates range from 42 million to 106 million - out of
poverty.
Detractors who rarely dare criticize
China's prestigious space program in public say it is in
fact dominated by the military and drains state funds
that could have been better used in other scientific
fields than manned space flights. To them, aiming for a
manned space program harks back to the Mao Zedong era
(1949-76) when China tried to compete with space powers
for military reasons.
Mao launched the space
program as well as a project to develop nuclear weapons
in the belief that military supremacy was the only way
China could compete with its ideological enemies. While
millions were dying of hunger during the great famine of
1959-61, China's fledgling space program received
generous funding. This period culminated in the launch
of the satellite named East is Red Number One aboard the
Long March rocket in 1971, at the height of the Cultural
Revolution.
The pragmatic policies of Deng
Xiaoping, Mao Zedong's successor, directed China's space
projects toward more direct scientific applications such
as improving telecommunications and weather-forecasting
satellites.
In 2001, China announced a civil
space development program, which outlined a blueprint
for the country's galactic conquest in the immediate
five-year period and beyond. The schedule announced is a
bold one: it envisages a Chinese lunar outpost by 2005,
a moon base in 2010 and an experimental factory and farm
by 2020.
Both the blueprint and its timetable
appear to be pure rhetoric intended to keep the flame of
national pride in China's space industry burning. But
significantly, a scholar closely involved with China's
space program described a similar scenario of space
walks, space docking and manned space station - all to
be achieved within a very similar timeframe.
In
the book Academicians Envisioning the 21st
Century, Ouyang Ziyuan, a scientist at the Chinese
Academy of Social Sciences, argued that a moon base for
China would be a great leap forward in national
security, scientific progress and national unity.
Economic spinoffs were also cited - the moon could
provide raw materials for exploration while its low
gravity could be a viable launching pad for galactic
travel, the book added.
Last weekend, a senior
space administration official confirmed that after the
successful launch of Shenzhou IV, China was going ahead
with its manned space mission and its moon-exploration
project.
"The Lunar Exploration Program is in
the study phase and is awaiting government approval,"
Guo Baozhu, vice administrator of the Chinese National
Space Academy, told the Space Summit that opened on
Saturday at the Indian Science Congress in Bangalore.
Still, China has a long way to go before it can
shoot for the moon.
The second half of this year
might only see the country's first "taikonaut" in space.
In 2001, however, China sent up a dog, a monkey, a
rabbit, and snails on its Shenzhou rocket. Last year, it
put a dummy on board a flight. And over the past decade,
it has trained 14 astronauts, who will soon be ready to
hoist a Chinese flag on the moon.
President
Jiang Zemin, who is due to retire at the annual session
of China's national parliament in March, has an
engineering background and sees China's space program as
a symbol of the country's march toward modernization. It
is unclear whether in March Jiang will also relinquish
his powerful post as commander-in-chief of the military,
but before he does so he would like to make manned space
flights a part of his legacy.
In building its
space programs, China is also concerned that space could
become an expensive battleground in future conflicts.
Beijing has time and again criticized Washington's plans
to build systems to shield the United States from
missile attacks.
Last summer, Beijing announced
it was planning to develop a spacecraft that could serve
as a platform for space warfare.
Officials with
the China Aerospace Corp told the Beijing Youth Daily
that it would take two to three decades for China to
realize its plan, but that this timeframe would be
shaped by the country's national defense needs.
(Inter Press Service)
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