Chinese astronauts, back in space for the first time in four years, have achieved China’s first manned docking with a space lab in orbit, a coupling infused with such emotion and expectation that it sounded, from the language on television, positively human. Adding to the excitement is the fact that this mission includes China’s first female astronaut, Liu Yang, a seasoned pilot in the Chinese Air Force. She had been rising through the Chinese space program for several years, but her presence on this mission was kept a secret until the last minute. (In China, commentators took note of the contrast between her pathbreaking flight and the recent news regarding another prominent woman, a twenty-three-year-old in rural Shaanxi who was subjected to a forced abortion.)
The first woman in space and the first manned-docking procedure combined for an event that has been heralded by the state press with the kind of rapturous embrace—tears, flags, tears while gazing upon flags—last mustered for the Olympics. When the patriotic editor Hu Xijin picked up on some snickers from Chinese readers, he suggested that the only reason a person would not be excited is if they were depressed or otherwise wrong in the head.
The docking procedure itself was complex, and it was so breathlessly anticipated that Chinese reports made a point of managing expectations. Americans have tried it three hundred times, and botched it twice, since 1966. The Russians failed at it fifteen times.
Official China has seized on the space program as the steel-and-fire incarnation of its scientific ambitions, and the Shenzhou-9 mission, as this one is known, is the latest step in a thirty-year plan to build a space station by 2020 or thereabouts, and put a Chinese person on the moon in the decade after that—all part of an undertaking known as Project 921. (First rule of China journalism: stories are better when they involve a Strangelovian project and numeral. I once got a whole piece out of that.)
There are arguments for space programs, of course: They rally national pride, attract talent to science, and throw off inventions with valuable new military and civilian uses. But watching China hurl one object after another into orbit, one can’t help but wonder if it says less about China’s dynamism in technology than about the obstacles it faces in becoming a true world leader. As the Wall Street Journal notes today,
Over the last decade, China has moved with purpose, putting its first person into space, completing an inaugural spacewalk, and launching two lunar orbiters. But it is not doing anything rash; the pace, four missions in four years, is a stately one. “China’s careful, sustainable approach cannot be compared to some early Soviet ‘firsts,’ which took safety shortcuts in order to achieve politically-timed space spectaculars,” according to Andrew Erickson, of the U.S. Naval War College. “By working on its own terms, on its own time, Beijing is building for the future.” The caution also reflects the risk that when a project becomes so closely identified with national pride, its success or failure becomes doubly significant.
For the moment, the project is ensuring one thing in particular: budget lines in Washington. The U.S. defense industry now generates considerable attention with the argument that China’s space program shows its growing ability to deny the use of space by other powers, and to track U.S. ships from above using imaging and communications technology. It is developing its own G.P.S. network, so it doesn’t need ours, and, in 2007, it tested a missile that was able to shoot down one of its own weather satellites.
If all goes well, the Shenzhou-9 will touch down back on earth later this month in Inner Mongolia.
Photograph by ChinaFotoPress/Getty Images.
