Nobody Seems To Know What China Is Doing On Its New Space Station
China space capabilities continue to grow and amaze, but no one really seems to know much about what is really going on inside the Tiangong Station.
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China successfully launched three of its home-grown astronauts to its new Tiangong Space Station, but beyond a couple of smiling images of the taikonauts, no official information on what China is doing in space is available. China has hit the gas in the past couple of years and achieved some impressive space accomplishments. The Chinese Mars rover, its own lunar rover, and the initial construction and orbit of its space station have sent a clear message of its capabilities.
China began building the Tiangong station in the early 90s but in 2011 when the Wolf Amendment passed in the US Congress it made collaboration between China and the US in space very complicated. That’s when the country began accelerating its space program. While the US does not have a law that explicitly bans China from participating in the International Space Station the Wolf Amendment requires all activities to jump through FBI and US Congress legal hoops and approval, making it almost impossible for cooperation to exist, an issue NASA has urged Congress to address.
China’s spacecraft Shenzhou-13 successfully docked at the country’s space station carrying three new astronauts for a six-month stay and the longest duration mission of the program. The news was picked up rapidly by the international press but no report spanned more than a couple of lines due to the lack of information on the mission. Beyond communicating that the military pilot Wang Yaping became the first woman to visit the space station and explaining that the mission would focus on researching the system’s capacity for a longer duration of human occupation, not much more information was made available.
What’s The Big Secret?
The secrecy of China’s space press communication and space program, its close ties with the military, and the new space race in which the US, Russia, and China are recruiting allies from around the world, has been fueling all sorts of illogical conspiracy theories about the real purpose of China’s space station. While the press silence is a sign of concern, and not of international space leadership, it is highly unlikely that the Chinese Space Station is doing anything other than civil space science and civil space exploration.
Piecing together bits of information from International Space Station experts around the world and the little information coming out from China, we know that the astronauts will be taking on two or three spacewalks, and also building and preparing the station for the future modules that will expand its size and capabilities. Next year, scientific modules Mengtian and Wentian will dock in the station and are likely to host 18 scientific projects shortlisted from 42 applications from 27 countries that were presented under the United Nations-China Cooperation Space Station CSS initiative.
China’s space capabilities continue to amaze the world, and its station is months from being complete. Let’s just hope that political tensions in space are well-managed and that China’s Space Agency gets as good at writing press releases and communicating as they are at launching sophisticated missions. After all, nobody seems to know what China is doing, or will be doing on its new space station, and that is a real waste.
Link Source : https://screenrant.com/china-space-station-mission-astronauts/