China took its first step toward building a space station on Thursday when it launched an experimental module ahead of National Day celebrations.
Tiangong-1, or “Heavenly Palace,” took off on schedule shortly after 9:15pm from the Gobi in China’s northwest, propelled by a Long March 2F rocket, ahead of China’s National Day today.
The unmanned 8.5 tonne module will test a number of space operations as a preliminary step towards building a space station by 2020.
Photo: AFP
Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao (溫家寶) was at the launch center for the take-off, while President Hu Jintao (胡錦濤) watched from a space flight control center in Beijing, the state Xinhua news agency said.
Ten minutes after launching, the Tiangong-1 separated successfully from its carrier rocket at a height of around 200km before opening its two solar panels, Xinhua said.
China sees its ambitious space program as a symbol of its global stature and state newspapers devoted several pages to the launch, hailing it as a “milestone” for the country.
US experts, quoted by Chinese state media, were more reserved in their reaction to the launch.
“Tiangong-1 is the next step in China’s slow-paced but steady effort to achieve human spaceflight capability,” said John Logsdon, a space policy expert at George Washington University.
“By itself it is not a major step forward, but is important to China’s demonstrating rendezvous and docking technologies,” he said.
Tiangong-1, which has a two-year lifespan in space, will receive the unmanned Shenzhou VIII spacecraft later this year in what would be the first Chinese docking in space.
If that succeeds, the module will then dock with two other spacecraft — Shenzhou IX and X — next year, both of which will have at least one astronaut on board.
The technology for docking in space is hard to master because the two vessels, placed in the same orbit and revolving around Earth at about 28,000kph, must come together progressively to avoid destroying each other.
French researcher Isabelle Sourbes-Verger said that a correctly functioning docking system would put China “in a potential position to one day access the International Space Station (ISS).”
However, she cautioned that this was not likely to happen in the next five years.
China aims to finish its space station, where astronauts can live autonomously for several months as they do on the ISS or the former Russian Mir, by 2020.
Meanwhile, a video showing the Tiangong-1 launch, which was supposed to be a patriotic tribute to China’s technological prowess, inadvertently glorified the country’s biggest rival.
A video animation put together by state TV to mark the highly publicized launch is set to the music of America the Beautiful, a patriotic song about the US.
Internet users who recognized the tune were surprised at the choice of music for the launch — a proud moment for the Asian nation.
“At the time, I was eating in a hotel with foreigners from an American company and Chinese clients and we were watching the live broadcast,” posted one user on Sina’s Weibo, China’s answer to Twitter. “All the Chinese there wanted to disappear.”
It was unclear whether the choice of song — which includes the line “America! America! God shed His grace on thee” — was a mistake.
The video, which features only the music to the song, can be accessed on CCTV’s English-language Web site.
CCTV employees reached by telephone passed queries from department to department, without providing any comment.
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