The International Space Station is no longer the only place where humans can live in orbit.
On November 29, 2022, the
Shenzhou 15 mission launched from China’s Gobi Desert carrying three taikonauts – the Chinese word for astronauts. Six hours later, they reached their destination, China’s recently completed space station, called Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace” in Mandarin.
The three taikonauts replaced the existing crew that helped wrap up construction. With this successful mission, China has become just the third nation to operate a permanent space station.
China’s space station is an achievement that solidifies the country’s position alongside the US and Russia as one of the world’s top three space powers. As scholars of
space law and
space policy who lead the Indiana University Ostrom Workshop’s
Space Governance Program, we have been following the development of the Chinese space station with interest.
Unlike the collaborative, US-led International Space Station, Tiangong is entirely built and run by China. The successful opening of the station is the beginning of some exciting science.
But the station also highlights the country’s policy of self-reliance and is an important step for China toward achieving larger space ambitions in a changing landscape of power dynamics in space.
Capabilities of a Chinese station
These include one core module where a maximum of six taikonauts can live and two experiment modules for a total of 3,884 cubic feet (110 cubic meters) of space, about one-fifth the size of the International Space Station.
The station also has an
external robotic arm, which can support activities and
experiments outside the station, and three docking ports for resupply vehicles and manned spacecraft.
Like China’s aircraft carriers and other spacecraft, Tiangong is
based on a Soviet-era design – it is pretty much a copy of the Soviet Mir space station from the 1980s. But the Tiangong station has been heavily modernized and improved.
The Chinese space station is slated to stay in orbit for 15 years, with plans to
send two six-month crewed missions and two cargo missions to it annually. The science experiments have already begun, with a planned study involving
monkey reproduction commencing in the station’s biological test cabinets. Whether the monkeys will cooperate is an entirely different matter.
Although the new station is small compared to the
16 modules of the International Space Station, Tiangong and the science done aboard will help
support China’s future space missions. In December 2023, China is planning to launch a new space telescope called Xuntian.
This telescope will map stars and supermassive black holes among other projects with a resolution about the same as the Hubble Space Telescope but with a
wider view. The telescope will periodically
dock with the station for maintenance.
China also has
plans to launch multiple missions to Mars and nearby comets and asteroids with the goal of bringing samples back to Earth. And perhaps most notably, China has announced plans to build a
joint Moon base with Russia – though no timeline for this mission has been set.
Astropolitics
A new era in space is unfolding. The Tiangong station is beginning its life just as the International Space Station, after more than 30 years in orbit, is set to be
decommissioned by 2030.
The International Space Station is the classic example of collaborative ideals in space – even at the height of the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union came together to develop and launch the beginnings of the space station in the early 1990s. By comparison, China and the US have not been so jovial in their orbital dealings.
In the 1990s, when China was still launching US satellites into orbit, concerns emerged that China was
accidentally acquiring – or stealing – US technology. These concerns in part led to the
Wolf Amendment, passed by Congress in 2011, which prohibits NASA from collaborating with China in any capacity.
China’s space program was not mature enough to be part of the construction of the International Space Station in the 1990s and early 2000s. By the time China had the ability to contribute to the International Space Station, the Wolf Amendment prevented it from doing so.
China has also recently opened its joint Moon mission with Russia to other nations. This was partly driven by
cooling Chinese-Russian relations but also due to the fact that because of the war in Ukraine, Sweden, France and the European Space Agency canceled planned missions with Russia.
As tensions on Earth rise between China, Russia and the West, and some of that jockeying
spills over into space, it remains to be seen how the decommissioning of the International Space Station and operation of the Tiangong station will influence the China-US relationship.
An event like the famous handshake between US astronauts and Russian cosmonauts while orbiting Earth in 1975 is a long way off, but collaboration between the US and China could do much to cool tensions on and above the Earth.
Mr.BadGuy
Publisher
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