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It’s 2050. The Moon has been colonised by China, with its Lunar Palace base growing potatoes, wheat and carrots – though residents also need to get used to eating mealworms for protein. Everything is grown and recycled in the robot-built base’s white, tubular buildings.
Such are China’s space ambitions. Later this year, with the Chang’e 4 mission (named for a Moon goddess) China will attempt to land a rover on the dark side of the Moon, something that’s never been done before, setting up an experimental lunar base to trial growing potatoes for food, followed by Chang’e 5, which will use robots to build a permanent base ahead of a manned mission. By 2020, it plans to land on Mars. By 2022, its version of the International Space Station will be in place. China is also working on building a space-based solar power array.
More immediately, China is replacing its entire launcher fleet. The new edition, which will replace a fleet based on designs from the 1970s, will not only use cleaner, safer fuels, but in the future will include a recoverable launcher, Long March 8, akin to what Elon Musk’s SpaceX has developed. To rival space nations, namely the US, these aspirations signal China is becoming even more of an economic, technological and military threat. And as humanity looks to a future amongst the stars, you would be foolhardy to think we’ll just be speaking English or possibly Russian. The first words spoken on Mars could just as easily be in Mandarin.
In the past decades, China’s space race has been against itself. But, in many respects, it has now caught up with Russia and is closing on the US. In the coming decades, the scale of China’s vast space ambitions will become abundantly clear. There have been setbacks, of course. China was hit by a spate of rocket failures last year and, in 2016, its key Long March 5 crashed into the ocean after a few minutes. Then, in April of this year, Tiangong-1 crash-landed. Known in English as Heavenly Palace, the prototype space station lost its transmission link to China and slipped back into the Earth’s atmosphere, watched by millions around the world amid fears its debris would cause death and destruction. Instead, China’s prototype space station came to comparatively serene end over the South Pacific, almost entirely burning up before scattering a few bits and pieces 100 kilometres northwest of Tahiti.
The catastrophe-predicting headlines were not, apparently, caused by the fear of being crushed under a hail of space debris, but down to human “envy”, according to one Chinese tabloid at the time: “It’s normal for spacecraft to re-enter the atmosphere, yet Tiangong-1 received so much attention, partly because some Western countries are trying to hype and sling mud at China’s fast-growing aerospace industry.”
Falling to pieces just outside Tahiti may not conform to our idea of a successful modern space programme, but uninvited to the party, China is holding its own. In recent years China has completed construction of the world’s largest single-dish radio telescope, meaning if aliens drop us a line, it’s the Chinese who will likely pick up the phone first. China has also placed a relay satellite, Queqiao (Magpie Bridge) behind the Moon to let it communicate when it heads to the dark side to set up a Moon base, and sent its own rover, Jade Rabbit, to hop around the lunar surface for two years. It's on pace to launch more rockets than the US this year, has plans to head to Mars, and has already started construction of its own space station Tiangong-1, perfectly timed for the looming retirement of the International Space Station (ISS). “In a way, the lockout by foreign nations has helped China achieve innovation,” said Tiangong-1 chief designer Yang Hong in an interview with state television.
This may sound like the space race redux, but it’s more complicated than a battle between China and the US – more than anything, it’s a reminder that space exploration and space sciences are a global effort, even though nations may otherwise remain military rivals. “China is following its own motivations and interests rather than pacing its programme in competition with anybody else,” says John Logsdon, founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “In my view, China is determining for itself what it wants to do, not in any formal competition with the quite uncertain plans of anybody else.”
China isn’t playing tit-for-tat with its space projects; it lays them out years in advance, rather than reacting to other nations, a helpful side effect of a centrally planned economy versus the constant meddling (and oversight) of the US Congress. We know its plans — or at least those its leadership are willing to share — thanks to regularly released roadmaps. “At least as far as human spaceflight is concerned, China set out in 1992 a long-range plan and executed it on schedule," Logsdon says. That was replaced in 2016 with another long-range plan, which is also — so far — on schedule. Can China keep to its plan? “They have so far,” says Logsdon. “And the past is the best indication of the future.”
Thanks to the publicly released roadmap, we know at least some of what China has planned in space. What we don’t know is why. Is China launching rockets to boost its military might? Of course, space is inherently military: astronauts are often fighter pilots; rockets are effectively the same technology as missiles; and you can’t fight in a modern war without satellite targeting. “China has seen the US make space capabilities central to its ability to fight and win wars,” says Logsdon. “And if there were a large scale conflict, the US thinks that China is its most likely opponent, and the Chinese feed into that by developing the capabilities to counter US military in space.”
Another possible motivation is interplanetary colonisation. “The universe is an ocean, the Moon is the Diaoyu Islands, Mars is Huangyan Island,” said Ye Peijian, the 73-year-old head of China’s lunar exploration programme, referencing islands at the centre of ongoing territorial disputes. “If we don’t go there now even though we’re capable of doing so, then we will be blamed by our descendants,” Ye continued. “If others go there, then they will take over, and you won’t be able to go even if you want to. This is reason enough.”
Prestige is another factor, especially for a nation that historically dominated astronomy but is now seen as the world’s factory. “Like the US historically and some in Europe, the Chinese leadership believes that space accomplishments are a very visible measurement of the nation’s capability and standing in the world,” says Logsdon.
As part of that, China is building its own space hardware. “As recently as two decades ago, China was seen as taking and repurposing other countries space technologies for their own needs, not being able to make their own,” says Bleddyn Bowen, a lecturer in international relations at the University of Leicester. “Today, they’re able to create a lot of their own indigenous technology. They’re not just taking old Soviet technology and adapting it.”
That prestige isn’t only to be found sending rovers to Mars, but in scientific discovery. While previous space programmes have been dominated by the military, with its latest plans China is finally handing budget to the space sciences, after decades as the “poor relation”, says Brian Harvey, the author of China in Space. “It was something that was talked about before,” he says, “but never actually happened.”
Now, instead of being the world’s factory, it wants to become its research and development hub. As Harvey puts it, China wants us to turn on the evening news and learn of yet another astonishing scientific discovery — with reporting not from Oxbridge or MIT or Stanford, but from a correspondent in Beijing. That’s included a goal to publish more scientific papers than any other country, a goal China has already met, according to statistics from the US National Science Foundation.
But China’s space programme isn’t solely about putting the US in its place. “The Chinese are very conscious of being portrayed as wanting to catch up with and overtake the rest of the world,” says Harvey. “I think they simply want recognition. The Chinese would have loved to have been on board the ISS, would love to have been one of the participants, and they held up taking their own decision on building their own space station until it became totally evident to them that the Americans were never going to let them on the ISS.”
In other words, they wanted to take part. “In China, they use the phrase, ‘A place to put one’s mat’, in reference to how they eat sitting on the ground,” Harvey says. “We would call it, ‘A seat at the table’.”
But there need not be any single motivation and intent can’t always be inferred by output. “That’s a minefield,” warns Bowen. “You can say China is being aggressive because it builds a new aircraft carrier, but America has 11. You can do the same to any country, and make a complete caricature of its supposed intentions, but capabilities will never tell you how a country will react in a crisis.” The world’s largest single-dish radio telescope is useful solely in the name of science, but China desperately wants a Nobel prize winner, so prestige is on the line; the first quantum comms satellite is a leap forward in science, but it’s also a show of military might. The potatoes they’re growing on Chang’e 4? They’re to eat – or fuel for colonisation. Take your pick.
Tsien Hsue Shen is considered the father of China’s space programme. Born in Hangzhou, he won a scholarship to the US, where he studied at MIT and CalTech, graduating in 1939, publishing a series of papers on rockets and predicting a future of rocket-powered space travel. When the US entered World War Two, Tsien built aircraft motors and helped draw up plans for a missile programme; he co-founded Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which more recently sent the Curiosity rover to Mars. Post war, he headed to Germany to help assess and understand Nazi missile research, before returning to academia at CalTech. His ideas about space tourism were celebrated in articles in The New York Times and Popular Science.
And then McCarthy’s witch hunt hit the US. Chinese born Tsien was jailed as a communist; logarithmic tables were confused with secret codes. After four years, in 1955, he was deported to China in exchange for US prisoners captured in the Korean War. He was met with a hero’s welcome.
A Chinese citizen co-founded the JPL, but these days no Chinese officials are allowed on a Nasa site thanks to the US embargo. Congress has an entire office dedicated to monitoring the security implications of everything China does. Cameron Hunter, a researcher at the University of Bristol, says the US argues that “space rockets are just military rockets spray painted another colour”. There’s truth to that, he admits, but says it’s often inferred that China is going to the Moon for more than science — it isn't just there to bring back Moon rocks. “There’s this nefarious implication.”
That attitude doesn’t just make for awkward diplomacy: it’s problematic when all satellites could be turned to spying. “The US is inclined to interpret pretty well any space actions by China in military terms and will often refer to the Chinese space programme as being military led,” Harvey says. “This can be on the basis of as little as seeing a few soldiers around the cosmodrome — it’s a bit like presuming that because the American Apollo spacecraft were taken out of the Pacific by the US Navy that the programme was run by the US Navy. The argument has as much integrity as that.”
One area that does “freak out” American politicians is China’s efforts to develop anti-satellite technologies, says Hunter. Alongside “soft options” like jamming and blinding, there’s what Hunter dubs the “more dramatic" kinetic version which was demonstrated more than a decade ago by China shooting down their own satellite. “It was pretty bad, there was a lot of debris.”
While such shows of military might mean China is all but banned from the ISS, it still has friends, working – where allowed – with other space nations, including Russia, the UK and the EU. “You can build walls around your cooperation and still be military competitors,” notes Logsdon
Cooperation between China and the UK, for example, is lead by the Science and Technology Facilities Council and includes a wide range of universities and companies working across space sciences and known colloquially as “the joint laboratory”. Every other year, for the past 13 years, academics from both countries have visited each other to decide how to work together.
“We are very clear on the areas folks in the UK and China can collaborate on and where we can’t collaborate,” says Anu Ojha, the director of the UK’s National Space Centre and National Space Academy programme, pointing to International Traffic in Arms Regulations compliance, export controls and the risks of dual-use technology. “Those are fundamental parameters that shape everything that we even think about approaching in terms of collaboration.” But Ojha admits it’s sometimes awkward to tell Chinese researchers that they won’t be able to work together. “We worry they’ll be offended when we say there are areas we can collaborate or not, but they are very pragmatic,” he says. “The desire for collaboration is genuine. We do not stray into any controversial areas, we are realistic about areas of concern.” In the future, when that Chinese space station is ready to go, there’s no reason why European astronauts wouldn’t visit, he says.
In fact, the Chinese are actively encouraging it, saying astronauts from any nation are welcome. “The China Space Station (CSS) belongs not only to China, but also to the world,” Shi Zhongjun, China’s ambassador to the UN, said earlier this year. “It will be a home that is inclusive and open to cooperation with all countries, a home of peace and good will, and a home of cooperation for mutual benefit. Through the CSS, we would like to build up a model of sincere mutually beneficial cooperation among countries in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space.”
And while we’re accustomed to headlines about SpaceX, China also has a growing private space industry – there’s even a company called ExPace. “We hear a lot in Europe and the US about the new space revolution, these disruptive small startup companies that are having an order of magnitude impact in terms of capabilities,” says Ojha. “China recognises that their big state run entities can be a little bit bureaucratic and have inertia. So China has in the last couple of years freed up its new space sector.” That’s led to China’s first private rocket launch, by Beijing’s OneSpace Technology. “The development we see in the last ten years societally and technologically has been matched by developments in their innovation culture,” says Ojha.
Rows of potatoes, carrots, string beans and onions line shelves in Yuegong-1 (Lunar Palace). Overhead, red lights give the plants the nutrients they need to survive – because if they don’t, the four researchers on board the 500m3 Earth-based mock lunar lab will go hungry. There is another source of food: mealworms, to provide protein. Once roasted, they can be ground up to make flour; reportedly, they make terrible noodles. While Western astronauts have been criticised for not being keen on a mealworm-based diet, the Chinese researchers took some winning over, too. “It did take them some time to adapt,” one project researcher told local media. “None of them had ever tried them as food before. Worms may look disgusting at first glance, but they are actually the cleanest and healthiest food source.”
The aim of Yuegong-1 was to build an entirely self-sustaining base, with its own water and air purification, waste management and agriculture, to better understand how to build real outposts on the Moon and Mars. The mealworms, for example, were fed vegetable waste. Only three such locked-down systems have been built, though these are based on Russian plans. “They’re borrowing off Soviet designs from the 1980s,” Harvey says, though with modern twists such as 3D printing.
Such labs are of course a work of fiction: real Moon labs won’t be so easy to build, and if the mealworm crop fails, there’s no safety net. But Yuegong-1 reveals a hint of what a real lunar base could look like, and it’s not wholly dissimilar to The Martian.
For a glimpse at what space could look like for the Chinese, there’s science fiction. The past few years have marked an astonishing rise to prominence for Chinese science-fiction authors, picking up awards such as the Nebula and Hugo. The latter was won in 2015 by a translation of Cixin Liu’s The Three Body Problem, famously beloved of Barack Obama and picked up by Amazon for $1 million for a television series, and again by Hao Jingfang in 2018.
Mingwei Song, an associate professor at Wellesley College, doesn’t think there’s any essential difference between Western and Chinese sci-fi, but the latter naturally better reflects Chinese history without falling into orientalism and exoticism, he says. “It’s fundamentally a global genre,” he adds, particularly with regards to the “new wave” of Chinese sci-fi, which has “learned a lot from Western science fiction and has a lot of Western motifs and literary styles”.
The idea of space in Chinese sci-fi wasn’t a major theme until the 1980s, says author Stanley Chan. “It covers all the sub-genres which appear in the Western sci-fi: third encounter, alien invasion, interstellar immigration, deep space exploration,” he explains. Pointing to Zheng Wenguang’s Flying to Sagittarius, where the protagonists conquer unknown worlds, he says early Chinese space sci-fi carried “the optimism spirit of revolution”. After the millennium, though, such stories evolved, with Wang Jinkang’s Escape from Mother Universe considering intelligent design rather than mere action plots, and Han Song’s The Gravestone of Universe taking Lovecraftian twists.
Read more: The almighty tussle over whether we should talk to aliens or not
Space, according to sci-fi writers, became a mirror for our own troubled times. “For some writers there is a sense of hope that is invested in the discourse, when they talk about space they talk about hope,” Song says. “And then there are also writers who in their stories depict space with with a more complicated approach. There’s the shadow of history. Space is not a brave new world, space is somehow like a mirror to our own reality and contemporary issues. It’s a more serious, critical engagement with the political and social issues, rather than just talking about the space programme.”
In Liu’s epic, humans receive the usual “You are not alone” message from aliens – but in this case, it’s a warning not a welcome, and war ensues. And Liu has said he doesn’t see the arrival of an alien race as good for the human race; those considering his work have noted that ties neatly with the challenges faced by China when colonial powers arrived.
In Bao Shu’s short story Songs of Ancient Earth – included in a collection of short stories recently released by Song – a spaceship finds a red star, hundreds of light-years from Earth, which has been hit by global wars and environmental catastrophe dubbed the Great Collapse. Like any Western sci-fi, details about ships and lightspeed travel are interwoven with a near-future history warning readers of the threats faced in our own times, from “degenerate lifestyles” to AI overcoming our own species. But it also considers Chinese history, weaving the socialist song The Internationale into its revenge story. “Space is not somewhere you simply get to and expand, space is profoundly related to the current situation, even the feelings of the people,” says Song.
Space is, after all, not only about technology but people and their motivations. If astronauts won’t eat mealworms, it doesn’t matter if they’re ideal Moon-based protein; if governments obsess over war, they’ll build ever more dangerous weapons. And if rivals ban you from playing the game, you’re forced to build your own pitch. What remains to be seen is what China intends to do with its nascent space powers: colonisation, via its exploration missions; defend or attack, via its growing satellite and launch infrastructure; or collaborate, with its promise of an open-to-all space station. In space, China finally has a place to put its mat. And whatever the future of the humanity’s journey into the cosmos looks like, it’s almost certain that China will finally have a say.
This article is part of our WIRED on Space series. From the global fight over how we handle first contact with aliens to the endless search for dark matter and the inside story of China's top-secret space ambitions, we're taking an in-depth look at humanity's future amongst the stars.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
