Two ships that have been docked in the Yangtze River near Nanjing for virtually the last 6 months are now back at sea, putting China’s ambitious plans for a space station back on track.
The cargo ships that are critical to China maintaining her ambitious schedule for the readiness of its space station have been lying idle in the Yangtze River instead of transporting rocket components to their launch site. Having hardly moved since April, the delays are pushing back China’s hopes for not just the space station, but also plans for landing on the moon and Mars.
The Nanjinger monitored the 9,000 ton Yuan Wang 21 and her sister ship, Yuan Wang 22, moored in the Yangtze River virtually under the Jiangyin bridge in Changzhou, approximately 150 kilometres downstream from Nanjing, from April until September.
More recently, that all changed. Both vessels are now sailing south in the East China Sea, having picked up their cargo in Tianjin, on their way to the Wenchang Satellite Launch Centre on the southern island of Hainan.
It was at a press conference in Beijing on 29 January of this year that Yang Baohua, vice president of China’s main space contractor, the China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC), announced that the Long March 5 heavy-lift rocket was being prepared for a third flight this July.
That the month came and went with both ships still in the Yangtze was something of a double blow after the the failure of the Long March 5’s second launch in 2017.
News of the two ships approaching the half way point on their voyage from Tianjin to Hainan will be another in a series of reliefs at the prospect of getting the space program up and running again. This third flight was initially to have been followed by one that would send the Chang’e-5 lunar sample return mission into a trans-lunar injection at the end of this year. Its success would pave the way for an exciting fifth launch that would be China’s first independent mission to Mars. The timing for such is critical; Earth and Mars only line up favourably once every 26 months. The next comes between late July and early August, 2020.
In addition, for China’s modular space station to become a reality, test launches of the delivery rocket are required. As the rocket is a variant of the Long March 5, success for this third mission is essential.
While the space station shall be built by the Chinese alone, there remain plenty opportunity for international cooperation within. Back in June in Vienna, concurrently with the 62nd session of the Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space, nine international experiments won a place on the Chinese station, according to the weekly journal of science, Nature Research.
There were a total of 42 applicants to the initiative created by the United Nations Office for Outer Space Affairs and the China Manned Space Agency.
As such, a multitude of countries shall be represented in orbit around the Earth with the Chinese, namely Belgium, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Kenya, the Netherlands, Norway, Mexico, Poland, Peru, Russian Federation, Saudi Arabia, Spain and Switzerland.
Wang Qun, China’s ambassador to the United Nations in Vienna, said at the time, “The cooperation takes into account the special needs of developing countries, which were encouraged to submit joint project applications with developed countries”.
The winning experiments cover the fields of astronomy, biotechnology, microgravity combustion, microgravity fluid physics, space life science, space medicine and other space technologies.
