Despite the fall of Tiangong-1, China’s space power intact

China’s first space laboratory, Tiangong-1, has mostly burnt up as it re-entered the Earth’s atmosphere over the Pacific Ocean recently. This marks the end to the first Chinese space habitat built in its quest to becoming a leading space power concurrent to its rising stature in the world order. 

Tiangong-1 helped China to validate the scientific and engineering skills required for manned space exploration. This space lab is a key component of China’s response to its isolation from the International Space Station (ISS) and its march towards establishing a full-fledged space station by 2022.

The Tiangong-1 (meaning Heavenly Palace) space lab was launched in 2011 to test rendezvous, docking, crew survivability, tracking and communication techniques needed for building a larger space station. It weighed about 8.5 tonnes, providing workspace for three taikonauts (Chinese astronauts). 

Taingong-1 was accessed using the Shenzhou spaceship and a total of six taikonauts including two women visited it. China lost communication with Tiangong-1 in 2016 after a malfunction, disallowing the engineers to perform periodic boosts to keep the space lab in orbit, which started deteriorating.

This led to the launch of Tiangong-2 in 2016. China expects to launch the core module of its space station by 2020 with construction to be completed by 2022. It is doubtful if the International Space Station (ISS) will function in its current form after 2024 as funding constraints increase leaving the Chinese space station possibly the sole human outpost in space. China’s space scientists are also planning to expand the programme by including human lunar exploration missions starting sometime in 2040s.

China has come to this position indigenously, thus giving it a sense of pride. Its leaders have ensured that the human missions received full coverage and the taikonauts paraded. Similarly, they have been sent to schools trying to inculcate a sense of nationalism using the space programme. 

China has looked at space through this lens since the Cold War, when the Space Age began. Mao Zedong viewed the nuclear, space and missile technologies as key for China to reacquire its lost position in the global order. 

Moreover, the resentment that China is not part of the ISS project has accentuated its drive to build an indigenous manned space programme. The ISS, a joint space station project of 15 countries, was initiated in the 1990s. All 
major spacefaring countries (except India) and technologically advanced countries are part of the programme, but China could not be a part of this owing to the federal law promulgated by the US Congress to restrain it from accessing sensitive information.

As a result, China has initiated its own project on human space exploration starting with manned spaceflights in 1999. The next logical step of space flights is long duration stay in space, and Tiangong-1 is the first module built towards this purpose, although more as a test bed. The follow-on Tiangong-2 is complex and its expanded engineering skills will be tested. In any case, China remains number three in space power order behind the Soviet Union/Russia and the US. However, the Space Dream, a component of the China Dream, compels the country to perform technologically challenging missions to move up. This explains China’s push for landing on the far side of the moon.

Nevertheless, China does not demonstrate a rush in manned missions as witnessed during the Cold War. The US and the then Soviet Union were in a space race for performing complex missions, which led to laxity in safety. 
The amount of flammable material inside Apollo-1 training module or the political pressure to launch the Challenger despite a no-go from the engineers supports this fact. While the Cold War superpowers were able to absorb the losses, it is evident that China is not in such a position. Moreover, China has observed that it need not race for the third position as none of the other space powers are aiming for it. Thus, China’s engineers have designed a graded programme, with each mission notching up towards the space station. 

In this approach, Tiangong-1 served as a transition platform from standalone Shenzhou manned space flights to taikonauts living on a space station. Tiangong-1 also saw China’s political clout and economic prowess burgeon. Xi Jinping has become China’s President for life and his ‘Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era’ has been incorporated into the Constitution. Xi declared that becoming an aerospace power has always been China’s dream. Mao vowed to build satellites to equal Cold War superpowers, while successive leaders continued to support the programme. In fact, the launch vehicles are named after the ‘Long March,’ a yearlong retreat by the Communist Party during the Civil War that eventually led it to claim power. 

Even before the Tiangong-1 re-entered the atmosphere, China has orbited its follow-on mission, thus ensuring continuity of the project. The significance of Tiangong-1 lays in China’s political thrust for becoming a space power by allowing its engineers to scale up advanced projects. 

The author is a Junior Fellow in the Nuclear and Space Policy Initiative of the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Views are personal