China in space

September 11, 2008

Since this article was published, India too has been active in space too. On November 14 (Nehru's birthday), it landed a probe on the moon, painted in the national colours of green, white and orange. Some nationalistic motive is suspected.

The Beijing Paralympics come to an end on Wednesday, but the Chinese regime will not allow itself to disappear from the world’s headlines -- or leave itself without a focal point for heightened patriotism. Beijing will this month draw attention on another endeavour, which, like the Olympics, features high ideals, nationalist posturing and a huge price tag -- manned spaceflight. Some time before October, China plans the launch of its Shenzhou VII probe, with three astronauts aboard and plans for a spacewalk. This follows China’s first manned launch of 2003, and the launch of a second, two-person probe in 2005. If all goes well, the space agency has a familiar checklist of space station, and then moon mission, planned for the coming decades. One important question lingers, however. Why bother? 

After all, while China claims to be the third nation to put a person in orbit, many more nationalities than Russians, Americans and Chinese have made the trip to space. Other nations have simply decided, for pragmatic budgetary reasons, not to develop a launch vehicle of their own at enormous cost (safety margins and technical demands are vastly more complex with a person atop each rocket) but rather to concentrate on unmanned missions, and send their astronauts up with other countries’ space programmes. The result might be unglamorous, but it represents much better value for money. Facing immense challenges over infrastructure and service provision at home, and with an economic downturn looming, it could be argued that the still-developing nation ought to adopt a similarly value-based approach.

The traditional counter is that space research pays dividends for earth-based technology, improving the exporter’s comparative advantage and helping to push it up the value chain. However, rocket science is not, as it were, rocket science -- getting objects into orbit is difficult, but not groundbreaking, and far greater scientific dividends can be won by cooperation in space, as the Japanese have been able to achieve with no apparent cost to innovation in their economy.

The answer, of course, is that the launch has as much to do with national pride as economic calculation (it is for this reason that India, too, has ambitions for space). A space shot -- and soon a moon shot -- is a demonstration of how far the regime has come. The demonstration is aimed both to international partners as China seeks a greater world role, and to the Chinese population, as the regime seeks to cement its legitimacy.  For now, those gains are worth the money.