China's new-found footing off-world is changing the rules of today's space race – find out how the rest of the world is rethinking its strategies
ON 14 December 2013, the top trending topics on China's biggest social networks were a popular TV show and a football match. If it hadn't been for a concerted push from China's state-controlled media, the casual observer might never have noticed that China had just become the third country in the world to land on the moon.
The news was not greeted with sweeping enthusiasm. After all, landing the Yutu robotic rover, aka Jade Rabbit, on Earth's closest neighbour was a feat human explorers had bagged many decades before. "We're now only 50 years behind Russia and USA," quipped one commenter on Weibo, China's version of Twitter. "Our country's designers have some catching up to do," wrote another, before worrying that the joke would lead to police detention.
But if China itself seemed a little bored, that was nothing compared with the collective yawn echoing around the world. Apart from failing the novelty test, the mission was accomplished using knock-off equipment, and Yutu was dismissed as a tragic "me too" exercise by a country lagging decades behind the world's leading space powers.
This common reaction missed the point. Jade Rabbit's successful launch, landing and exploration is evidence of China's meteoric rise in the space stakes, and one that will only accelerate. "It is a classic example of the tortoise and the hare," says Dean Cheng of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank based in Washington DC. From the sophisticated communications network that guided the rover to its destination, to emerging satellite technology that is the envy of other nations, to its plans for a new international space station, China is a force other space superpowers ignore at their peril. The ripples are reaching out to affect everything from your phone's settings to the first future footprints on Mars.
To get an idea of China's burgeoning space programme, look no further than its satellites. Starting in 1970, China launched low-quality transponders and rudimentary spy satellites capable of only the most basic tasks at an entirely unimpressive rate of one per year. By 2012, the country had surpassed the US with 19 launches in a single year. China had also sent its first taikonaut into space, conducted its first space walk and completed its first rendezvous and docking with a small space laboratory. "The manned program they are building is progressing a lot faster than the US did with theirs in the sixties," says Richard Holdaway, Director of the Rutherford Appleton Laboratory Space division, one of the UK's closest collaborators on the Chinese space programme. "They are catching up at an astonishing rate."
"In 15 years they have gone from bit player to leading player," says Jonathan McDowell of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And they have done so on a shoestring. China's space budget is less than one-tenth of the US one, according to a recent estimate by the Space Foundation, a non-profit organisation based in Colorado Springs.
So what accounts for the rapid acceleration? A common, and not entirely charitable, answer is that other nations have already solved many of the challenges. "When it was just the US and the Soviets, there were basic questions of survival – like what would astronauts breathe, how much oxygen, how much nitrogen – that no one knew the answer to," says Cheng. "Today China can benefit from much of that having been worked out and made publicly available."
His words reflect a familiar attitude that China's technological progress has been built largely on the ideas of others – whether given freely or not. "We get hacked from people in China every day," Holdaway says. "Most systems are pretty robust but some stuff gets through." Indeed, the received wisdom is that China has acquired so much intellectual property from external and sometimes unwilling sources that they may not be capable of innovation. "They are still in a developmental stage using essentially Russian technology and knock-offs," says Robert Bigelow, the founder of Bigelow Aerospace, a space technology company in Las Vegas.
However, on closer inspection this picture seems incomplete. Granted, as Bigelow points out, China's Shenzhou space capsule looks nearly identical to Russia's Soyuz capsule. And beneath Chinese spacesuits, taikonauts often wear an inner pressure suit made in Russia. And yes, Jade Rabbit looks like an updated version of Lunokhod 2, a Soviet rover that landed on the moon in 1973.
Long march
Many of these similarities stem from a deal that took place in the mid-1990s, when China purchased much of Russia's human spaceflight technology, including Soyuz capsules, spacesuits, life support, and docking systems. However, China has made vast improvements to the original designs. For example, the Shenzhou capsule is roughly 30 per cent larger, with solar panels, advanced avionics and electronics. "China has developed what the next generation would have been," says Leroy Chiao, a former US astronaut.
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