China gets closer to space goals but threat to US ‘more of a theory than a reality’

Name: China successfully launches Shenzhou-12 manned space station mission
Uploaded: 2021-06-18T22:00:00.000Z
Duration: 1 min 20 s
Description: China successfully launches Shenzhou-12 manned space station mission

Country has made rapid technological advances and this week sent a crew of astronauts to its first space station

But it still lags behind established powers like America and analyst says it may take years to catch up

Reading Time:3 minutes

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Astronauts (from left) Tang Hongbo, Liu Boming and Nie Haisheng head to a bus before boarding the Shenzhou-12 at a launch centre in the Gobi Desert on Thursday. They are to spend three months at China’s new space station. Photo: AFP

Liu Zhen

Published: 6:00am, 19 Jun 2021Updated: 6:28am, 19 Jun 2021

China’s space ambitions are starting to take shape after it sent three astronauts into orbit to complete work on its first space station. It marks a new phase in the country’s space race with rival the United States, but analysts say China still has a way to go to catch up.

The Chinese astronauts will spend three months on the Tianhe module – the first part of the Tiangong space station – after they blasted off from the Gobi Desert in the Shenzhou-12 spacecraft on Thursday.

It was China’s first crewed space flight in nearly five years, and the latest development in a space programme that has made rapid technological advances and seen the country become a more significant player.

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China successfully launches Shenzhou-12 manned space station mission

China is also edging closer to the United States, which sent astronauts into orbit last year for the first time since Nasa retired the entire space shuttle fleet in 2011, leaving the US reliant on the Russian space agency to get its astronauts to the International Space Station.

The Chinese crew sent into orbit this week will live aboard the Tianhe, a module just 16.6 metres long by 4.2 metres wide (54.5 feet by 13.8 feet).

Their mission will involve testing equipment and technology that is new not just to China’s space programme but to the world. Some of it – like the ion thrusters which power the module – has never been used before in a crewed space flight.

Fundamental to China’s space ambitions is its series of Long March and other rockets that have been used to send a rover to the far side of the Moon in a historic landing in 2019, for its rover mission to Mars that launched last year, and for the new space station.

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