the middle kingdom and outer space
China's space program.
In Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two, the Americans and Russians are caught off guard by the Chinese, who while ostensibly building an Earth-orbiting space station in fact build a spacecraft capable of travelling to Jupiter to investigate the mysterious events that took place in the novel 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The actual 2001 has come and gone, and did not include manned trips to Jupiter, regular passenger service to orbiting space stations, or the science fiction ubiquitous videophone. Instead, the American space program is in a period of extended stagnation, flying shuttles designed thirty years ago to a modest approximation of a space station that was meant to be much more vast and completed years sooner. The Russians are much worse off, relying on gimmicks like multimillion dollar tourist flights for financing, their long obsolete space station de-orbited and their own space shuttles rotting in various locations around the world. Clarke could not have predicted, writing in the late 1960s, that the end of the 20th century would revolve around the exploration of cyberspace rather than outer space. A new space era may soon be forthcoming, but it will not involve the two earliest parties, the American and Soviet governments. Instead, private citizens will be making their own way into space. Pioneers like inventor Brian Walker and Burt Rutan's Scaled Composites LLC may be the true descendants of the Soyuz and Apollo missions of the 1960s.
Whatever the success of private space travel in the near future may hold, one nation is still committed to developing a working space program. The Chinese are well on their way to making some of the predictions in 2010 a reality. They are preparing Shenzhou 4 for launch this month. The test flight of the unmanned craft will enable China to become the third nation to have an independent human space launch capability. As many as a dozen Shenzhou pilots are rumored to be in training for a manned launch in 2003 and the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation is expediting the creation of a new family of launch vehicles for flight by 2005. While manned interplanetary travel seems unlikely for the Chinese within eight years, that's probably for the best. The Chinese ship in Clarke's 2010 was destroyed almost immediately after arriving at its destination by aliens.
01.09.2002 © ljr