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Opinion | Why China’s ambitions in space should not be underestimated
- While China was excluded from the International Space Station, it is building its own, has constructed the world’s largest radio telescope and expects to launch a powerful space telescope next year
- Its accomplishments will benefit science in general and remind the US not to be complacent
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China’s space programme may lag behind the US in accomplishments to date, but it is not to be underestimated. For example, the US-led International Space Station is bigger and has been in orbit much longer, but it is getting creaky and harder to maintain.
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Then, there is the political fallout, since the project has from the start depended on close US-Russia cooperation.
For a decade, the US has relied on Russia to ferry its astronauts back and forth from space. The US module depends on the Russian wing to make necessary course corrections. In 2020, the oxygen-supply system in the Russian module failed, but it was supported by oxygen generation from the US side.
China was famously excluded from the International Space Station in 2011 due to narrow-minded political concerns in the US Congress, codified as the Wolf Amendment, but it has done a remarkable job of dealing with the political necessity of going it alone.
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President Xi Jinping wants China to build world-class rocket launch sites
President Xi Jinping wants China to build world-class rocket launch sites
Chinese scientists conducted yet another successful manned space launch on June 5, using a powerful Long March 2F rocket to carry three astronauts in the Shenzhou 14 capsule from a launch centre in the Gobi Desert to the Tiangong space station in near-Earth space. This is the third crewed space mission to the station in the past year.
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