China's Tianhe Successfully Entered Earth’s Orbit; How Competitive is the Chinese Space Program?

The Chinese Space Station's core module successfully arrived at Earth's orbit on April 28 to construct China's space station.

Tianhe - which means "Harmony of the Heavens" or "Heavenly Harmony" - took off atop a heavy-lift Long March 5B rocket from the Wenchang Spacecraft Launch Site on Hainan 11:23 p.m. EDT.

The 54-foot (16.6-meter) module is the first space station module to launch. Later, two much smaller components will join it in low Earth orbit, creating a T-shaped space station that China hopes to finish by the end of 2022.

(Photo : Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)
(FILE PHOTO) China launches Long March 2F rocket to bring its first space lab, the Tiangong-1, to space.

"The successful launch of the Tianhe core module indicates that the construction of our country's space station has entered the stage of full implementation and laid a solid foundation for subsequent missions," President Xi Jinping said.

"The construction of a space station and the establishment of a national space laboratory... is an important leading project for building a powerful country in science and technology and aerospace."

South China Morning Post said the 22-tonne component would serve as the core of the Tiangong, or "Heavenly Palace", where astronauts will spend most of their time.

A Chinese cargo spacecraft is also scheduled to visit the module next month, Space.com reported. In addition, three astronauts are scheduled to arrive in June if all goes well.

China to Finish Constructing 100-tonne Space Station in 2022

The space station will be completed next year and will weigh about 100 tonnes. That will be around a quarter the scale of the International Space Station (ISS), which a group of 16 nations designed.

However, at 15 years old, the ISS is showing its age. Astronauts have had to devote more effort to locating and patching holes in the space station. Russia declared on Monday that it would abandon the mission in 2025.

At the end of the decade, the Tiangong is scheduled to be the last space station in near-Earth orbit.

According to Chinese space officials, the engineers used cutting-edge space technologies explicitly designed for the Tiangong. The modern materials, robots, and artificial intelligence, they added, could be used in a broader range of industrial applications.

How Competitive is China's Programme?

China's program has progressed in a slow, measured fashion on a carefully planned timetable. Al Jazeera said the Asian country is largely preventing the mistakes seen in the US and Russian attempts during the heady early days of spaceflight. But unfortunately, a recent setback occurred in 2017. A Long March 5 rocket failed during the construction of the Long March 5B. It's the version that China will use to launch the Tianhe module into space. But engineers quickly addressed the problem.

Critics say that China's space program has successfully replicated the US and Russian successes without breaking any new ground. However, in the coming years, the country's growing technological prowess could end such speculation. To spur creativity and apply new technology such as reusable rockets, the nation may need more private sector participation, as the United States has done with SpaceX and Blue Origin.

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Long Term Space Goal

Over the last decade, China has launched two conceptual modules in readiness for a permanent station. One of them, Tiangong-1, or "Heavenly Palace-1," was lost and burned up after an uncontrollable loss of orbit. Tiangong-2, its replacement, was successfully de-orbited in 2018.

As China's space program gained traction in the early 1990s, it started planning for a space station. However, authorities denied access to the International Space Station due to US concerns about the Chinese program's secrecy and tight military relations.

"They said we were not up to the standard. They said we were thieves," a senior Chinese space scientist involved in the negotiations in the 1990s said. "We could not swallow the humiliation, so we decided to build our own station."