<i>Irene Klotz</i> International relations are in play with the opening of China’s new space station.
China on June 17 launched a three-man crew to begin setup of the Tiangong space station in low Earth orbit. Credit: CNSA
Irene Klotz
There was a time when the idea of Americans and Russians training and flying together in space was shocking and absurd. But by the time cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev took a seat aboard the U.S. shuttle Discovery in February 1994, plans were well underway for a superpower space marriage that endures today despite cultural, moral, technical, economic and national security issues.
Russia steps up as key partner
Decisions loom for U.S.
China’s emergence in low Earth orbit (LEO) is challenging international relations again, with Russia already committing to partner with China for a base on the Moon in the mid-2030s. With or without Russia, China already has followed through on 30 years of blueprints for ambitious space projects, including missions on the surface of the Moon and Mars.
Most recently, China has begun building a 66-ton, three-module station in LEO that includes two docking ports, two types of robotic arms and a third smaller arm for fine-scale operations. The small arm can be mounted on one of the larger systems for a working radius of up to nearly 50 ft., Zhou Jianping, chief designer for China’s human space program, said in a translated interview with China Global Television Network.
The station, called Tiangong, which means “heavenly palace,” also includes an electric propulsion system—a first for a crewed spacecraft. Assembly began in April with the launch of the 22.5-ton core module Tianhe (“harmony of heavens”). That was followed in May with a cargo ship carrying fuel, food and spacesuits for the first crew, who reached the outpost on June 17.
Taikonauts Nie Haisheng, Liu Boming and Tang Hongbo will set up the Tiangong core module, test life-support and other systems and conduct two spacewalks during a planned three-month stay in orbit, setting a new endurance record for the Chinese space program.
Before the end of 2022, China plans to conduct a total of 11 missions to Tiangong to complete station assembly, including three crew rotations. With the addition of two research laboratories, scheduled to launch next year, Tiangong will be roughly the size of Russia’s defunct Mir space station and about one-fifth the mass of the International Space Station (ISS), a project of 15 nations that is led by the U.S. and Russia. China’s station orbits about 240 mi. above Earth and is inclined 41.5 deg. relative to the equator. The ISS orbit is about 265 mi. in altitude, with a 51.6 deg. inclination.
China intends to open Tiangong to the international research and business community. China’s two module prototypes, which flew in 2011-18 and in 2016-19, respectively, hosted experiments from Russia, Germany, France, Belgium, Italy, the European Space Agency (ESA) and the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs.
In addition to long-term and expanding agreements with Russia, the China Manned Space Agency says it has bilateral cooperation and exchanges with France, Italy and Pakistan, among other countries, for experiments on the new station focusing on fundamental physics, space medicine and astronomy (see list below). Russia remains China’s primary space partner.
Absent from the entourage is the U.S., which in 2011 passed legislation prohibiting NASA from using government funds to engage in direct, bilateral cooperation with the government of China and China-backed organizations without authorization from the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the U.S. Congress.
Former U.S. Rep. Frank Wolf (R-Va.) inserted the clause into the 2011 U.S. federal budget to hinder China’s access to U.S. technology and to protest violations of human rights by the Chinese government. “It boils down to a moral issue,” he said at the time.
“The amendment has been very positive,” Wolf tells Aviation Week. “I think it’s been validated how important it was. I wouldn’t change anything.”
Wolf remains deeply concerned about China’s detention and heavy-handed control of its Muslim Uyghur and other ethnic minority populations, the destruction of Tibetan culture and the loss of freedoms in Hong Kong. “Until China changes, why would you want to do business with people who are taking . . . Muslims off of trains, handcuffed and blindfolded, literally the way the Nazis did?” Wolf says.
Prior to the amendment’s passage, then-President Barack Obama sent then-NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden to China to assess the feasibility of inviting the Chinese to be part of the ISS. By then, China had competed its third crewed flight, which included a spacewalk, and was preparing to launch its first prototype station module.
“The three principles President Obama set for us were transparency, reciprocity and mutual benefit,” Bolden tells Aviation Week. “We made that very clear to the Chinese in every meeting and every conversation we had.
“It was a very successful trip. In our report, which we presented to Congressman Wolf, to the intelligence organizations and to the president, we said that not only was it potentially a good idea [to collaborate with China] but that it was definitely something we should do,” Bolden says.
“Wolf believed we could isolate the Chinese, make them understand our position on human rights and change their ways. I vehemently disagreed,” he continues. “I thought engagement was the only solution to that problem—let the Chinese people see how we live and what we do, and in time, they would come around. As it turns out, neither one of us is getting the result we wanted.”
The Wolf Amendment likely strengthened China’s resolve to develop technologies for space exploration themselves. “Initially, it probably set them back a little bit, but ultimately they just poured more resources into trying to become self-sufficient,” says Blaine Curcio, founder of Orbital Gateway Consulting in Hong Kong.
The fruition of China’s government space programs coincides with a boom in the country’s commercial space sector. China deregulated the industry in 2014 to encourage private investment in launch services, small satellite manufacturing and other companies. “Starting from zero, you’ve seen probably 150 commercial space companies coming into existence, and they’ve raised about $7 billion over the last seven years,” Curcio says.
With a 15-year design life, China’s space station most likely will outlive the ISS, whose U.S.-financed, Russian-built core module reached orbit on Nov. 20, 1998. NASA is allocating funds to help seed development of commercial LEO platforms that can host its astronauts and microgravity research experiments in the post-ISS era, along with U.S. National Laboratory and commercial payloads and crews. The ISS partners, including Russia, have approved plans to keep the station operational through at least 2024. The Biden administration is pushing to keep the ISS in orbit to 2030 or beyond.
“I hope that Congress will see the challenge to U.S. interests potentially posed by China’s advances in space and the close connection between its space program and the People’s Liberation Army,” says Larry Wortzel, senior fellow in Asian security at the American Foreign Policy Council. “The likely cooperation between China and Russia in space means that the U.S. needs to improve its own space awareness and defenses.”
Beyond LEO, the U.S. and China have parallel plans to lead international coalitions to the Moon and eventually stage human missions to Mars. “Throughout history, we’ve had great success using space and science as a unifying force, as demonstrated by our cooperation with Russia on the International Space Station,” NASA Administrator Bill Nelson tells Aviation Week.
“NASA and the U.S. continue to welcome partnership between nations around the world, especially those who share the same values of transparency, release of scientific data and planning for the safe disposal of orbital debris. I look forward to China meeting these standards in the future,” he says. Nelson told Congress on June 23 that he supports keeping the Wolf Amendment in place.
So far, NASA’s direct contact with China has focused on a few scientific areas of cooperation, including space geodesy and, most recently, the exchange of ephemeris data for spacecraft in orbit at Mars for conjunction analysis and collision avoidance. “We’re failing at looking for every opportunity to find good things we can do with people with whom we don’t get along,” Bolden says. “Every good thing you can do takes away one bad thing that can happen.”
Toward that goal, Jeff Manber, CEO of Nanoracks, in 2017 flew an experiment from the Beijing Institute of Technology to the ISS, a project approved by Bolden and the Obama administration and in full disclosure to Congress.
“The world we live in is not black and white,” says Manber. “There are many levels and justifications for undertaking an activity that may seem unpalatable at first. . . . Especially in international affairs, the sole criteria cannot be imposition of your moral judgment. There are very few examples where standing on the sidelines permits the American voice to be heard and American values to be recognized.”
Construction of Tiangong marks the beginning of the third part of China’s human space program, which was approved by the government in 1992. The prior phases successfully concluded with six crewed spaceflights and two experimental station modules. China is expected to release details of its latest five-year plan in December.
Some Early Experiments Slated To Fly on Tiangong:
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POLAR-2: Gamma-Ray Burst Polarimetry
Purpose: Make gamma-ray polarization measurements, including extremely weak transits from gravitational waves, building on a previous investigation on China’s Tiangong 2 space lab.
Sponsors: The University of Geneva, Switzerland; National Center for Nuclear Research, Poland; Max Plank Institute for Extra-terrestrial Physics, Germany; Institute of High Energy Physics of Chinese Academy of Sciences.
Spectroscopic Investigation of Nebular Gas
Purpose: Map the sky using an ultraviolet long-slit spectrograph, with particular focus on the extended nebulae in the Milky Way galaxy, star formation in nearby galaxies and the cosmic web.
Sponsors: Indian Institute of Astrophysics; Institute of Astronomy of the Russian Academy of Sciences.
Behavior of Partially Miscible Fluid in Microgravity
Purpose: Study the concentration diffusion phenomenon during local mixing of unmixed liquid caused by temperature change under microgravity, including droplet migration, accumulation and thermal diffusion caused by Marangoni effect in local mixing area. The data is expected to inform the industrial process of foundation and the complex interface process.
Sponsors: Indian Institute of Technology; Universite Libre de Bruxelles, Belgium.
Flame Instabilities Affected by Vortices and Acoustic Waves
Purpose: Investigate the instabilities of edge flames in the absence of gravity as well as the potential control and effects from external flow oscillations. The research looks at the most fundamental problems of flame stabilization in a convective flow, which is related to aircraft and rocket engine combustion as well as fire safety problems in space.
Sponsors: Tsinghua University, China; University of Tokyo, Japan.
Tumors in Space
Purpose: Test hypotheses that gravitational force and galactic cosmic radiation cause a unique mutational signature in the DNA of 3D-printed human organoids derived from intraindividual healthy and colorectal cancer tissue. The results could have a major scientific impact on the understanding of cancer etiology and offer new perspectives on prevention and treatment of cancer, including on crew health on long-term deep-space missions.
Sponsors: Norwegian University of Science and Technology; International Space University, France; Vrije University Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Belgium Nuclear Research Center.
Effect of Microgravity on the Growth and Biofilm Production of Disease-Causing Bacteria
Purpose: Study differences between the growth and biofilm production of bacterial colonies grown on Earth and those aboard the space station. The project is designed to contribute to understanding about how disease-causing bacteria behave in an altered and reduced gravitational environment.
Sponsors: The Mars Society Chapters of Peru and Spain.
Mid-Infrared Platform for Earth Observation
Purpose: Monitor the land and the atmosphere of Earth with two infrared cameras. The data could provide better knowledge of humidity flows and improve forecasting of heavy precipitation and hurricanes.
Sponsors: National Institute of Astrophysics, Optics and Electronics and Benemerita Universidad Autonoma de Puebla, both of Mexico.
Development of Multi-Junction Gallium-Arsenide Solar Cells for Space Applications
Purpose: Design and manufacture high-efficiency solar cells.
Sponsors: National Center for Nanotechnology and Advanced Materials and the King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, both of Saudi Arabia.
High-Performance Micro Two-Phase Cooling System for Space Applications
Purpose: Research and test next-generation cooling systems that replace ordinary liquid-cooling loops with a two-phase system that uses an organic, nontoxic cooling agent.
Sponsors: Sapienza University of Rome and In Quattro, Italy; Machakos University, Kenya.
Source: United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs