China’s Space Program Boosted by First Docking
The docking of the Shenzhou 8 capsule with the Tiangong 1 module was broadcast live on national television. Prime Minister Wen Jiabao watched from the control center in Beijing, and thousands of ordinary citizens expressed their pride through Internet postings in what many referred to as the country’s first “space kiss,” remarking how far China had come since its more impoverished days. In the coming year, officials plan to repeat the unmanned exercise with astronauts as part of its mission to reach the moon and to launch its own space station by 2020. If all goes according to plan, China’s floating laboratory would become airborne around the same time the aging International Space Station goes into retirement.
American and Russian aerospace engineers perfected space docking in the 1960s, but Wu Ping, a spokeswoman for China’s manned space program, said that Chinese scientists had come to this moment largely on their own, having domestically produced hundreds of components and instruments. “This makes China one of the few countries in the world that can independently research and develop docking mechanisms,” Ms. Wu said at a news conference on Thursday, describing the achievement as “a historic breakthrough for our country and a huge technical leap forward.” Some Western scientists, however, said the successful mission provided stark evidence that the 20-year-old sanctions that limit cooperation between American and Chinese aeronautical engineers had failed.
The policy, imposed by Congress shortly after Beijing’s violent suppression of pro-democracy protesters in 1989, restricts scientific exchanges and blocks exports of space technology. Chinese scientists are barred from American space conferences, and China is not among the 16 countries whose astronauts are allowed to use the International Space Station. In the two decades since it was frozen out of the world’s elite space club, China has relied on its own aerospace engineers, aided by lavish government financing, to chase its space exploration dreams. In 2003 came the first successful human space flight, and in recent years Chinese scientists have mastered the manufacture and launch of communication satellites, many of which are sold to nations in the developing world. In 2008, Chinese astronauts took their first spacewalk, and last year China sent up a second lunar probe.
Gregory Kulacki, China project manager at the Union of Concerned Scientists, an organization based in Cambridge, Mass., says the Congressional ban on cooperation with China spurs suspicion on both sides of the Pacific and fuels a costly, unnecessary space race. “When we deny them visas, it breeds hostility among young Chinese scientists,” he said, adding, “the lack of cooperation could lead to miscalculations and escalated conflicts in times of crises.”
It is believed by many that although cooperation has its benefits, especially in an era of trillion-dollar deficits, that is outweighed by the risk of China’s troubled human rights record and a growing number of cases involving technology theft from American companies. One tremendous benefit would be the prohibitive cost of NASA’s dreamed mission to Mars better shared by other nations, as John P. Holdren, the White House science adviser, has said in the past.