Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
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Illustration: Liu Rui/GT
Chinese experts battered the latest round of attacks from NASA chief Bill Nelson, saying his smearing remarks against China's space development are yet another ridiculous and pathetic attempt to hype the "China threat" theory to get more funding, which only exposes the US' own hegemonic and colonial ambitions.
In an interview with POLITICO, Nelson said the race to the moon between the US and China is getting tighter and the next two years could determine who gains the upper hand.
He warned that Beijing could try to "dominate" the locations they step foot on the lunar surface or even try to "keep the US out," while citing the Nansha Islands as an "example" to prove his point.
The remarks angered Chinese researchers and commentators who have repeatedly made clear that China's exploration of the moon is dedicated to the advancement of humanity.
"Being a former astronaut himself, it is pathetic that he would play the trick of a thief crying 'stop thief,'" Song Zhongping, a space analyst and TV commentator, told the Global Times on Tuesday.
It is an established fact written into the United Nations Outer Space Treaty and others that the moon does not belong to any country in the world, while the Nansha Islands are indisputably part of China's territory. Comparing these two shows that Nelson does not even understand international law or the Outer Space Treaty, Song noted.
Nelson's attempt in a way reflects the mentality that the US wants to colonize the moon and consolidate its own hegemony in space, analysts said, evident in the new space version of an "Enclosure Movement" of the Artemis program, which gathered "like-minded" partners such as Canada, Japan and Europe but excludes China and Russia.
Nelson's remarks failed even to convince its own scholars. Victoria Samson, Washington director of the Secure World Foundation, said she is dubious about the "moon brawl," noting that China, like the US, is a party to the Outer Space Treaty, which bars nations from making territorial claims on any celestial body, including the moon, POLITICO reported.
It will be difficult for any nation to maintain a long-term human presence in deep space, she said, which makes the claims more unrealistic.
Nelson's remarks followed US congressional approval to fund NASA with $24.5 billion in fiscal 2023, about half a billion dollars less than US President Joe Biden had requested.
While still expressing "confidence" that the next moon mission could happen as planned to send a crew into the moon's orbit by 2024, he admitted that the agency is "under intense pressure" because it has been forced, as a cost-saving measure, to reuse all the avionics inside the Artemis I capsule for Artemis II.
Huang Zhicheng, a Chinese expert in aerospace science and technology, told the Global Times on Tuesday that NASA, with a lot on its plate including the operation of the International Space Station, the Artemis program and deep-space exploration projects, is hyping the "China threat" theory to get more money, as the just-concluded Space Launch System is already years behind schedule and billions of dollars over budget.
There is still a huge gap in the budget and many problems to solve for the US' manned moon landing to succeed, Huang said.
Specifically, Boeing that is undertaking the rocket launch tasks for the Artemis program has a chaotic management and it is hard to get the tasks done on time. For another thing, the moon lander being developed by SpaceX is yet to achieve its designated progress, and if the lander cannot be completed successfully this year, it may further delay the entire project, Huang noted.
Publicly attacking China's space program has become routine for NASA in the past few months. In December, the NASA chief accused China of being "one of the very few nations" that would not be partners with the US and that it is being "very secretive" in terms of space programs. In September, Nelson accused China of lacking needed transparency over issues. In July, the NASA chief blatantly claimed that China is "trying to occupy the moon." In May, he said that China stole the US' space technology.
"These accusations fired by NASA are unfounded and unjustified," Song said. "China has always had a cooperative and open attitude in the space sector."
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Chinese aerospace experts on Thursday slammed NASA's Administrator Bill Nelson for his "ridiculous" and "outrageous" remarks
after the senior official alleged that China is "good at stealing" American designs in a "space race."
Accusing China of "occupying the moon" exposes the America’s ambitions to monopolize space
A NASA helicopter flies past the agency's Space Launch System rocket on August 29, 2022. NASA called off the test flight on Monday of its largest-ever Moon rocket, citing engine problem. Photo: AFP
System (SLS) rocket carrying the Orion capsule remained on the ground at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida on Monday, disappointing people who gathered at the center and those who tuned in live to watch US' rekindling of lunar surface landing project since the Apollo program some half a century ago.
"The launch of Artemis I is no longer happening today as teams work through an issue with an engine bleed. Teams will continue to gather data, and we will keep you posted on the timing of the next launch attempt," NASA posted on Twitter. According to the New York Times, NASA has another window in early September, but it also depends on whether bugs are fixed.
Before the postponement was decided, NASA repeatedly stopped and restarted the fueling of SLS with nearly 1 million gallons of super-cold hydrogen and oxygen due to the leak in Kennedy Space Center, US media said.
The postponed launch came after China's state-owned space giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC) announced about a week earlier that China's new-generation manned rocket, which is currently under development, will possess the capability to send taikonauts to the moon by around 2030.
Qian Hang, a senior Chinese expert on aerospace science, told the Global Times that the success of the Apollo Program (1961-1972) helped the US to outcompete Soviet Union, but it also cost the US countless economic and technological resources. Therefore, after the lunar landing, the US shifted its focus from the moon to the space shuttle, space station project, Mars exploration and other projects.
In recent years, many countries, including China and India, have developed rapidly in the space industry, putting pressure on the US. Especially after China made a breakthrough with its Chang'e-5 unmanned lunar mission, which brought back lunar soil samples.
Hours before the scheduled launch, Chinese Foreign Ministry Spokesperson Zhao Lijian stressed on Monday that the outer space is not an arena for countries to wrestle, but an important field for win-win cooperation. And the exploration and peaceful use of outer space is the common cause of mankind and should be pursued for the benefit of all mankind.
Zhao's remarks were viewed as a response to NASA's Administrator Bill Nelson who has recently expressed "concerns" about the "space race" that China would arrive first and claim the moon's territory. If NASA's following missions are carried out as scheduled, US astronauts could land on the moon again as soon as 2025, five years earlier than China's plan.
China has always been committed to the peaceful use of outer space and has conducted extensive cooperation with other countries to safeguard outer space security, Zhao said, noting that China hopes all countries will continue to work together to promote the peaceful use of outer space and make greater contribution to the building of a community with a shared future for mankind.
Beachgoers wait for the launch of the Artemis I unmanned lunar rocket, in Florida. Photos: AFP
Arduous task
According to NASA, the Orion will reach a retrograde orbit around the moon, traveling 2.1 million kilometers in 42 days. The mission will test the heat shield function of Orion capsule, and carry some small satellites to be placed in moon's orbit.
If everything about the Artemis I mission goes on well, the second scheduled flight, the Artemis II is expected to launch SLS megarocket around the moon as early as 2024, testing key systems of the Orion spacecraft with humans on board.
The Artemis III launch date is set for 2025 if the previous programs go as plan. Besides, space experts said optimistic progress on new spacesuit development and human landing systems are also necessary.
However, according to evaluation from NASA's inspector general office, due to anticipated delay of the spacesuit development, NASA's hopeful timeline is "not only unlikely, but even impossible."
Besides, the Lunar Gateway, a human-tended space station orbiting the moon that provides necessary support for long-term human return to lunar surface and a staging point for deep space exploration, has dragged the two Artemis missions to an "unsustainable crawl," due to its building cost, according to the Hill.
Citing NASA's Inspector General, CNBC reported that the space agency is projected to spend $93 billion on the Artemis up to the fiscal year 2025. And the cost of a single SLS launch is about $4.1 billion, which NASA inspector general Paul Martin expressed his concern and described it as "unsustainable."
Wang Yanan, chief editor of Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Monday that "return to the moon" will not be an easy task for the US despite its advancement in science and technology.
With so much money invested in Mars exploration and the International Space Station missions, it is doubtful that there will be sufficient and timely resources to achieve America's challenging goals of returning to moon in 2025, Wang said.
To cope with difficulties, the US has involved commercial space efforts. US media said that Elon Musk's SpaceX, which has participated in Artemis III mission's landing site selection, plans to build a vehicle that will land US astronauts on the lunar surface. Besides, NASA also had its astronauts visiting SpaceX facilities for hardware tests.
Involving commercial efforts showed NASA's forward-looking vision, but whether NASA has a set of efficient management mechanism of regulating these enterprises is uncertain. For NASA, it may be about engineering and technical maturity and reliability, but companies may be more concerned about share price and financing, Wang said.
'Space race'
In an interview with NBC's "Meet the Press" on Sunday, NASA's Administrator Bill Nelson said that China's space ambitions have provided motivation for Artemis, according to the New York Times. Nelson said he doesn't want Chinese astronauts to arrive first and claim the territory and resources, describing that there's a "space race" between the two countries.
In an interview with a German newspaper in July, Nelson smeared China for "trying to take over the moon" and saying China's mentality is like "it's ours now and you stay out."
Experts said Nelson's inflammatory remarks are full of smears against China, which is actually not as fast as the US in scheduled time for landing on the moon. CASC disclosed on August 21 that China's new-generation manned rocket, which is currently under development, will possess the capability to send taikonauts to the moon by around 2030.
The SLS-level megarocket is still under development in China, but in the US, one is now standing on the launchpad, a senior Chinese expert on aerospace science and technology based in Beijing, told the Global Times on condition of anonymity.
The malicious speculation and smearing of China from Nelson are totally ill-intentioned, the expert said, "Since the dawn of the age of human exploration of space, no country has ever claimed some of the resources of outer space, especially when there's regulation from UN framework convention on cooperation in outer space."
By using such colonialist rhetoric to smear China, the US wants to pressure countries interested in cooperating with China in space, and force some countries to take sides on the issue of space exploration, the expert told the Global Times on Monday.
China has its own pace and has no interest in competing with the US to land on the moon faster, the Beijing-based expert said. "China hopes to make lunar exploration a long-term and internationally cooperative project. China's larger goal is to benefit more people rather than to compete for resources like the US."
In January, China and Russia revealed a plan to jointly build a moon base by 2027, media reported. Dubbed the International Lunar Research Station, it will be a complex of research facilities for moon exploration, observation and experiment.
Some other developing countries do not have the technical capacity and economic resources to build an outer space exploration program from scratch, but the cooperation between China and Russia will give more developing countries the opportunity to participate, he said.
China's top space contractor CASC reveals new launch vehicle able to send Chinese to Moon by around 2030
Long March-5 Y5 carrier rocket commissioned for the Chang'e-5 lunar mission has started fuel injection and is set to launch the probe on Nov 24, 2020, between 4 to 5 am at the Wenchang Space Launch Center in South China's Hainan Province. Photo: VCG
China's new-generation manned rocket, which is currently under development, will possess the capability to send taikonauts to the Moon by around 2030, Global Times has learned from China's state-owned space giant China Aerospace Science and Technology Corporation (CASC).
A CASC spokesperson made the remarks to the media after the Long March 2D carrier rocket smoothly sent the remote sensing Yaogan-35 04 group of satellites on early Saturday morning, which saw the country's Long March rocket series breaking its own record with 103 consecutive successful space launch missions.
According to the CASC spokesperson, the country's super heavy-lift launch vehicle, which is also under development, will receive further strengthening to become capable of sending payloads of 50 tons to the Earth-Moon transfer orbit on completion, in order to support future lunar activity.
CASC is also working on a series of reusable space launch and transport systems, which will greatly boost the country's space shuttle capability, lowering costs and empowering future development in this domain, the spokesperson said, per a statement the CASC provided to the Global Times.
Meanwhile, the US is busy preparing for the launch of the massive Space Launch System (SLS) rocket, which is set to take place on the morning of August 29 [US local time] from the US Kennedy Space Center for the Artemis I mission - the first test of NASA's deep space exploration systems.
The Artemis I, according to the US space center, will be the first in a series of missions to demonstrate NASA's ability to extend human existence to the Moon and beyond.
The US series' first crewed flight, the Artemis III, will see boots on the lunar surface no earlier than 2026, more than half a century since NASA successfully sent humans to the moon in December 1972 in the Apollo 17 mission.
The US website space.com pointed out in an article on Friday that the 2026 mission is still "highly uncertain," given that the mission is relatively far away, but NASA does have some early-stage planning for the later 2020s.
The timeline for these missions depends a great deal on how much funding the agency receives from US Congress, along with the technical progress of the Artemis program, the report said.
Even if NASA could pull off the ambitious plan, it would already be a two-year delay as the US space agency has abandoned its original goal of sending humans to the moon by 2024.
Drawing a comparison between the lunar manned landing plans of China and the US, Chinese space experts pointed out that the US' practice of setting specific year deadlines is very rare in the industry, given the complex nature of deep space exploration, while China focuses more on technology readiness in a rather broad time frame, going forward steadily and surely.
China's crewed moon landing is more in line with scientific principles, but NASA might grow more hostile against China in the space domain given the huge pressure it is facing to maintain its global leadership in moon exploration, Wang Ya'nan, chief editor of the Beijing-based Aerospace Knowledge magazine, told the Global Times on Sunday, when asked if there would be a new space race between space powers around 2030.
NASA chief Bill Nelson warned in July of a new "space race" with China, in a groundless accusation that China wants to "occupy the moon," citing the lunar research base that China and Russia are co-building, which he is "very concerned about."
It is very likely that in order to meet the goals of the Artemis mission, given its tight timeline, NASA will further open management access of the International Space Station (ISS) to commercial space players such as SpaceX after 2024, as Russia has warned of its intention to pull out from the ISS by that year, and shift focus and resources to its lunar plans, Wang noted.
Space observers also pointed out that as NASA is trying hard to relive its Apollo glories, China is working on innovative plans to carry out its own crewed moon landing missions.
Even without the new-generation manned rocket and super-heavy lift launch vehicle, leading Chinese rocket scientist Long Lehao revealed in August 2021, China could use two rocket launches to send two taikonauts to the moon by around 2030.
Long, an academician of the Chinese Academy of Engineering and chief designer of the Long March rockets, said during a speech that China was planning to use new variants of the Long March-5 launch vehicle - the strongest member of the Long March rocket family - to carry out the manned space launch missions.
Long referred to the new variant as Long March-5 DY, which stands for "dengyue," meaning "lunar landing" in Chinese.
Two rockets carrying a lunar lander and a next-generation manned spaceship will be launched for the mission, and the two parts of the spacecraft will rendezvous and dock in near-lunar orbit, before executing the landing process. The two taikonauts are expected to work on the moon's surface for some six hours, according to Long. However, there is no mention of a specific landing site.
The new manned spaceship will then take off from the moon and carry out another docking with the orbiting module before heading back to Earth.
US space agency NASA has been forced to put on hold the
launch of the inaugural mission of its ambitious Artemis program for
the second time within a week, after the launch team failed to resolve a
liquid hydrogen leak ...
The core of the Kylin computer operating system has been guarded as a national secret and its use in the country’s space programme has only just been officially confirmed.
Its main codes were written by Chinese military researchers, according to developer China Electronics Corporation (CEC), but it also includes elements of Unix-like software FREEBSD, parts from Linux, and a user interface similar to Windows.
It is a hybrid, like the mythical qilin dragon beast it is named after.
Speaking to state media, members of the Kylin development team revealed the role the operating system played in these missions, coordinating communication between artificial intelligence software, human controllers on the ground and all the hardware on board the spacecraft.
Until about a decade ago, China, like most other countries, relied on Linux and Windows to drive its space programmes, according to a paper published in domestic journal Space Industry Management last year.
From 2008, China’s space authorities started to replace Western software and hardware in satellites and spacecraft.
The process sped up after Edward Snowden’s revelations in 2013 about US hacking activities.
Kylin was one of the results – along with the Zhanxing, or Warring Star, system developed by the Chinese military’s space force, according to the paper.
Dan Jianqun, a lead scientist with CEC’S Kylin project, said China had no other choice but to develop its operating system.
“Using other people’s systems, to quote President Xi (Jinping), is like building a house on other people’s land.
“It can be large and beautiful, but it can also be destroyed overnight,” he said in an interview on state television.
The transition from western to home-made software was full of challenges, according to some of the software engineers involved.
Liu Jun, a software engineer on the Kylin team, said space missions required not only high security, but reliability and performance.
The Kylin OS system is used in China’s space programme. Photo: CCTV
Liu said Kylin was initially developed for computers on the ground.
To go to space, processing times on certain tasks had to be cut to less than a third, he told the state television.
“It was as difficult as compressing a packet of biscuits into a few grams without losing any nutrition,” Liu said.
The space mission sometimes also required the operating system to execute a specific task without being distracted by lower priorities, and many codes were written to meet these needs, said Liu.
Kylin’s first tests were demanding. No one had landed on the far side of the moon. And no country had put a rover on Mars without failure.
Liu Hongyu, another Kylin engineer, said the team was under extreme stress when these missions reached a critical stage. “We were just praying. When the spacecraft landed, the whole building rocked with applause,” he said. Kylin is now the most widely used operating system in the Chinese government and military, according to previous state media reports. When its first version was released in 2006, the system came under a lot of criticism for its poor user experience and its lack of compatible software.
But Kylin worked well with domestically developed computer chips such as the Loongson CPU. As the Chinese government began replacing Intel chips and Windows systems in the military, government, banks and other sensitive sectors, the Kylin user base grew rapidly.
But some challenges remained. One issue was hardware adaptability. China still used a lot of scientific equipment from the West and many devices were not compatible with Kylin. In addition, most software on the Kylin system is displayed in Chinese.
Any foreign astronauts planning to take up China’s offer to visit its space station will need to learn some Chinese or they will be confused by the characters on the screen of every Kylin device, including the tablets. – South China Morning Post
