You heard, did you not, that China this week docked a Shenzhou capsule with a woman and two men on board to a small living habitat, a cramped space station named Tiangong 1 about the same size as the Shenzhou? The station's name by the way means "Heavenly Palace." While this cramped cylinder is no palace China has ambitions to build a larger, Skylab-class space station by about 2020. The first Tiangong crew won't stay long. They are due back in a week and a half.This mission is a somewhat longer replay of a docking and crew return last year. China is practicing for something a lot bigger.
One of the punchier stories is in Time Magazine, where veteran newsman and science writer Michael D. Lemonick got the news up under a fine hed, "Beijing, We Have a Space Program." It's more essay than news account, and thus gets some latitude in my mind to overdo this one mission's significance in service of a larger point. It's written not for space fans who keenly follow this and anything else hurled up up and away. He first reminds general readers that the post-shuttle US has at the moment no way to get astronauts anywhere close to space, and then smacks us down with "our manned space program is not just limping along, it's trailing behind even a comparative space race newbie."
Whoof. One might quarrel that the current hiatus, once ended, will immediately leapfrog the US past China and probably even Russia. This will come with either a NASA in-house capacity to get people up there or with a privately-designed and managed vehicle from the likes of SpaceX, Boeing, Orbital Sciences, or some other entrepreneurial outfit. But that'll take another few years. Lemonick's assertion has a stark, narrow truth to it. It gets right to the part and the trend it reflects that will make most Americans will feel the worst. Lemonick also acknowledges that the US space program overall remains by far the tops, but that many of its most glamorous missions are getting long in the tooth – such as Hubble and the Saturn-orbiting Cassini mission.
His piece came across the eyeballs two days ago. It pinged around in my head since then. It provides reason for a round up of a few other news accounts and analyses of this development.
- Space Daily – Morris Jones: What's New for Shenzhou 10 ; An Australia-based reporter provides a detailed account of this mission in context of China's program. He also has insights into the continuing difficulty covering that program including gaining entry to the launch center – and notes that it will be another two years or so before China's next such mission with a different space stationette as its target. Diangong-1 is due for delivery to its destruction in the atmosphere in the meantime.
- AP- Christopher Bodeen: China marks decade of human spaceflight with 3-person mission to prototype space station; Sharp angle here – the challenge facing China in bringing to its people some intimacy with what its astronauts (do they still call them taikonauts?). The three up there now apparently will make some broadcasts aimed at school children, it says here. Bodeen mentions Canada's Chris Hadfield with his David Bowie-esque video as a marker for China to aspire to. A source also makes a sharp point about America's stand-offish attitude toward China's program.
- BBC – Jonathan Amos: Shenzhou-10 / China launches next manned space mission ; A succinct rundown of the main facts of the mission as it got underway. Also, a good graphic of the main hardware. A BBC followup which one guesses is also from Amos: Shenzhou-10: Chinese capsule docks with space laboratory ;
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